Rainmaker

The Good News

The Donald Trump Electoral Unreality Show, which features him still trying to steal the presidency from Joe Biden, will come to an end come January 6. That’s the day that Congress will meet to count and accept the electoral college results submitted by the states. Those results will show Biden winning by 306-232 – and by a margin of over seven million votes, though of course the popular vote officially means nothing in America’s particularly peculiar version of democracy.

Could Congress reject the results? In theory, yes. In reality, no. For that rejection to take place, both houses would have to separately vote to do so. With the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives, that simply won’t happen.  

So though Trump may continue to call state leaders, claim electoral fraud, pursue court challenges (regarding which he’s won one minor battle out of 33 tries) and otherwise stamp his feet, Biden will be inaugurated on January 20. In that vital respect, Trump is toast.

The Craziness

So if Trump stands no chance, why is he still doing the democracy-decaying voodoo that he does so well?

It could be because he’s deluded. Maybe he simply can’t face up to his defeat.

As a variation on that theme, it could be because he has the world’s worst, hair dye-dripping lawyer reinforcing his unreality by telling him he has a chance of pulling out a win. And the most craven advisors “happy to scratch his itch,” enabling his delusions by either telling him he’s right or failing to tell him he’s wrong.

My own pet theory, consistent with those other possibilities, is that somewhere in the back of Trump’s reptilian brain he’s hoping Biden falls ill and dies. He could then conceivably argue that he somehow has a more legitimate claim on the presidency than does Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

But at this point, that point of view is as deluded as it is diabolical. As a matter of both politics and law, her stepping in should Biden pass away already seems assured.

Finally, even in unsuccessfully seeking to invalidate Biden’s election, Trump could be setting himself up to run again in 2024 or remain a kingmaker in the Republican Party. That at least has the scent of rational self-interest and strategy, though rationality and long-term strategizing are not Trump’s fortes – fortunately for us, for otherwise he might well have won re-election.

Crazy Like a Fox…or a Weasel

While these various factors conceivably could contribute to Trump’s conduct, they’re not the central reasons he’s acting this way. Rather, his actions flow from the one constant running through his career: the art of the scam. He’s crazy like a fox….or a weasel…or pick your animal that best defines the man.

Our Grifter-in-Chief is going out with a bang. More specifically, he’s going out with an Official Election Defense Fund, a nonexistent entity, which he’s exploited to raise more than $170 million since Election Day.

(We interrupt this blog post for a Trumpian koan: Can something be official if it does not exist?)

In fact, while he features the Fund in soliciting funds from small donors who think their money is helping him to retain the White House, their donations will be used for other purposes: 25 percent for the Republican Party’s operating expenses and 75 percent to a Trump-controlled political action committee that he can use very flexibly long after leaving office. That includes covering his travel and personal expenses, as well as the costs of holding events at Trump properties – in effect, paying himself in the process.

He gets away with this through the fine print in his appeals for donations and through lax laws that allow PACs such as Trump’s to flourish.

Only in America

There’s something so “only in America” about all this.

It’s not the greed. Trump is not fundamentally different from actual and would-be autocrats who rip off their countries’ citizens.

On that score, in fact, he’s small change compared to such one-time dictators as Indonesia’s Suharto ($15-35 billion embezzled), Nigeria’s Sani Abacha ($2-5 billion), the former Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic ($1 billion) or the kleptocrat with my favorite name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu wa za Banga, aka “the all-powerful warrior who, because of endurance and an inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake” ($4-5 billion).

Nor is he by any means alone among world figures in his banana republic approach to governance, though he’s leaving a one-of-a-kind-scar on the United States in that regard.

And Trump obviously is far from the first politician to pad his pockets through ostensible public service.

Rather, it’s the unique blend of carnival barker, cult leader, blustering politico and attorney-assisted pickpocket that makes Trump and his latest scam so sadly American. Rulers rob from their people all over the world. Few if any are able to get them to donate so much for something so illusory, all under cover of cleverly crafted legalisms that often mask American corruption.

Even in the final, barren days of his presidency, Trump offers the false hope of a rainmaker who fools desperate, drought-stricken people into paying for a downpour he knows he won’t deliver. As one popular pundit puts it:

Rainmaker, a little faith for hire

Rainmaker, the house is on fire

Rainmaker, take everything you have

Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad

They’ll hire a rainmaker