Introduction
As we look at the electoral impasse that has developed, I see three basic ways out of it, but the unfortunate consequence of each of those exits will be the dissolution of the American republic as a republic. Not as a nation, but as a constitutional republic. There is (on paper) a possible way to thread the needle that would not be a grotesque insult to our constitutional forms of government (e.g. the election thrown into the House, or the Supreme Court making a definitive determination), but the odds of those results being placidly accepted by the losing side of the electorate, whichever it is, are slim.
There is also a better than even chance that I am going to outrage pretty much everybody with this one — both those who believe that Trump is being stolen from, and those who believe that Trump is the one doing stealing. So watch me go.
Here are the main options that lie before us. Trump remains in office and outrage ensues, Trump leaves office and outrage ensues, or Trump simply moves across the street and outrage ensues. At the tail end of each one of these scenarios, there will be an opportunity for us to turn around and say farewell to the America we once had — either that, or perhaps farewell to the America we thought we had. If Trump stays, say farewell to America. If Trump goes, say farewell to America. If Trump splits the difference, say farewell to America.
As I discuss what prospects lie before us as a nation, it will become apparent what I believe to be the facts on the ground when it comes to the disputed matter of massive voter fraud — which is that I do believe that it happened. I will explain in passing why I believe that, but for the larger point I am making — the farewell to America part — it doesn’t really matter. I hope to make that point plain as well.
If Trump Stays
Those who demand evidence of voter fraud are using that word evidence in an equivocal way. There is a difference between evidence that massive voter fraud occurred, which I believe is actually undeniable, and evidence that would be sufficient to send Murphy to jail for having perpetrated said voter fraud. Those are entirely different issues, and so long as we are toggling back and forth between them, the only result will be a continuation of our ongoing confusion. People are talking as though our inability to convict Murphy is the same thing as confessing that there was nothing unusual here. But if one of your guests is found dead in the parlor with a knife in his back, the fact is suggestive, and you don’t need to know whodunnit to know that somebody dunnit.
Take a hard look at what absolutely everyone knows. Joe Biden campaigned exactly like a man would do if he knew that he didn’t have to campaign at all. And with that sleepy little putt putt campaign of his, he outperformed Obama at the very top of his messianic rock star game. He surpassed Obama’s 2008 total by about 10 million votangelos — you know, those little orange genetically modified seedless jobs. And he did it from his basement, with his eyes half shut. And while it is true I may have been born at night, it wasn’t last night.
So given the extent of the chicanery and/or shenanigans and/or monkeyshines, it remains a real possibility that something will be revealed, such that Joe Biden’s electoral vote count will drop below 270. If that happens, then the election could be thrown into the House. If that happens, and if Trump is then elected, then at least half the country will believe that Trump pulled some strings and got the election “reversed.” Now throwing out bogus votes is only reversing the cheating, not reversing the election, but try explaining that to the average antifa rioter who has his eye on a new pair of sneakers.
In short, if Donald Trump remains in office as a result of various court decisions, and a decision by the House, he will then be the president of a country that is absolutely ungovernable. The hard left will demand (and will get) what amounts to virtual secession by multiple blue states.
So say good bye to America that way.
If Trump Goes
But I am willing to play fair with my hypotheticals. Suppose I am debating someone who concedes that there is no way on God’s green earth that Biden generated the kind of personal enthusiasm that allowed him to beat Obama’s record by 10 million votes. No, say they, that margin was created by the Donald himself. Those votes were the voice of rage, and hate, and distaste. That was not pro-Biden energy, they say. It was anti-Trump energy. Be it so.
I trust that many of you recall how Trump objected when he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz. Remember there had been some talk about Ben Carson dropping out, which the Cruz camp repeated, and which might have affected some of the voting, and the whole thing left Trump very aggrieved. His tweets were not subtle: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” When a call goes against Trump, he is the kind of man who will dispute it just because. But way too many analysts, the sort whose detestation of Trump skews their ability to think, take it thus far, and then stop.
They point to the fact that Trump is, in other words, the kind of man who is capable of believing that the other side cheated, and demanding a do-over, simply because the other side won. So yes, he has that in him. But on the other hand, if such a man with such a disposition was ACTUALLY robbed of a second presidential term by cheaters and scoundrels and villains, he is also the kind of man who would prefer to burn down the world rather than concede. Go quietly? What planet are you on?
But let us suppose, since we are gaming this whole thing out, and we are trying to create an actual second option here, that Sidney Powell’s biblical and apocalyptic kraken turn out to be a wicker basket full of gerbils. Let us say that her evidence is so duddy that three quarters of the conservative die-hards who desperately wanted her evidence to be true true true all shrug their shoulders and give up. They acknowledge that it is game over, and let us suppose that so many people do this that Trump decides to move along.
I say this knowing that we could have a good half ton of accumulated evidence of voter fraud on the fifty-yard line of a football stadium, with that stadium filled to the upper levels with interested spectators, and Sidney Powell could be standing on the forty-yard line with a laser pointer that was industriously playing over the evidence, pointing out highlights, and the kind of media reporting we would get on it is think pieces from The New York Times wondering why Sidney Powell hadn’t been disbarred yet.
And it should also be said that if she in any way over-promised and under-delivers, and we don’t even get any baby kraken, then she should be disbarred. And she could be disbarred, and I would still believe that there was massive voter fraud, see above, because that’s the kind of year it has been. Work with me here.
But back to the point. The fact that we have a corrupt media that would treat real evidence with utter disinterest (and we do have that kind of media) is not the same thing as actually having real evidence. The media would ignore real evidence, true enough. So say that the real evidence comes up short (with coming up short defined as the kind of evidence that the media could ignore), and and everybody knows they could ignore it, right and left, and so Trump concedes the election.
Even if my supposition of massive cheating is incorrect as a matter of fact, it remains true that the whole set-up that looks like cheating is disturbingly probable, and it would continue to look disturbingly probable to tens of millions of people, even budgeting for a Sidney Powell flame out. If my perception is correct and Biden’s people dumped millions of votes into the system — the kind of ghostly voters who had a singular disinterest in down ballot races — we all know that we have the kind of corrupt media who would show the same kind of journalistic interest in said story that they showed, for example, in Hunter Biden’s laptop.
I also grant that there are many thousands of Trump die-hards out there who would not accept conclusive evidence that Trump lost fair and square from honest brokers of honest news. This reference to honest brokers of news might cause some observers to reel backwards, with hand on forehead. “Gee! where did you find them?” But this is the land of hypotheticals, so work with me, all right?
So if Trump attempted to retire gracefully into the sunset (which I regard as unlikely in the extreme), the fact remains that we have the same set up as option #1, only this time the disgruntled group would be the Trump voters, who would have their own ways of making the country ungovernable for Biden. So say good bye to America that way.
And that leads to the next prospect, which is Trump conceding/not conceding.
If Trump Moves Across the Street
It is in the highest degree likely that Trump honestly believes what a reasonable person can honestly believe, which is that there was massive cheating in this election, and that there is massive pressure being put on all the respectable types to overlook the obvious, lest they be deemed numbered among the kooks. But at a bare minimum, Trump believes it, and he will behave like a bear with a sore head.
So let us start with Trump conceding the election with a singular ill grace and moving out of the White House. If that happens, it will mean that Biden, the weakest of candidates, will come into power with no mandate to speak of, and a pretty greasy cloud of dark gray suspicion over his win.
Anybody here think that Trump is going to head on back to Queens to pursue real estate deals? Anybody’s money on option #2?
Ah, no. If he leaves office, he will set up a shadow government, and he will offer continuous color commentary on everything Joe Biden says or does, and he will do it from his offices at Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Not only so, but the deranged left is so consumed with hatred for that man that they will be unable to stop themselves from responding to this Trump catnip, and Trump will not be able to stop taunting them. They will go absolutely bonkers, and do please remember that the Justice Department will soon be crawling with a bunch of commies just out of law school, their heads crammed full of the starry ideals that have slain millions already. And this means that there will be inexorable demands for Trump to be prosecuted for this thing, or that thing, or something, or anything.
So say good bye to America that way. This third way, incidentally, is the quick option. The first two are more likely to unfold a bit more slowly, but toward the same end. This one would go straight to the explosion.
Waiting for the Flashpoint
All of this is to say that the current political situation is untenable. It is, to steal a phrase from the environmentalists, not sustainable.
What I mean to say is that we are well into the cold war phase of this civil war. What got us to this point was our diseased political processes, and looking to politics to deliver us from it is like asking your liver cancer to heal you of your brain cancer. The sickness is the sickness, which means that the sickness is not the cure.
If Trump stays, the flashpoint will occur on the left. If Trump goes away for real,the flashpoint will occur on the right. If Trump goes away just a short distance, stopping there to heckle, and with the lefties doing their level best to prosecute him, the flashpoint will occur on the right, but will be close enough to encompass and include everybody.
There are some conservatives (bless their hearts) who think that we are still living in a classically liberal order with trusted institutions, the kind of institution that can speak into our current turmoil in a grandfatherly voice, and get us all to calm down. But we do not have a choice here between abnormal and normal. There is no normal. We have a choice between a dog’s breakfast and a pig’s breakfast, and there are no trusted institutions anymore. Here is an honest question for you. Can anyone actually name one public or private institution that still has the trust of the American people across every political and cultural spectrum? The FBI? Ha. The Congress? Are you kidding? The CDC? Snort. The NFL? Chortling commences. The media, Fox News included? Hardy hardy har har. I hate to break it to you guys, but pretty much everyone has disgraced themselves. America is a pack of corrupt sinners, and if you populate all your storied institutions with corrupt sinners, guess what happens?
It is hard to predict what sort of flashpoint it might be. Remember that this has been the year 2020, and so we have lots of candidates. Maybe it will be caused by the governor of Washington sending in a SWAT team to bust up a family’s Thanksgiving meal because somebody heard they bought a turkey that could serve 6 to 12 people. Maybe it could be the fact that a Reformed Baptist preacher somewhere decided to preach through Leviticus, and was hauled off on the threshold of chapter 18. Maybe it will be the economic consequences of the lock downs and unfunded stimulus checks all descending on Biden like the furies out of some Greek play. Maybe Christian colleges will be ordered to shut down because of their hate curricula and maybe some of them refuse. No telling what it might be. Could be anything.
Could be anything, as I just said. But it will be something. Something has to give. In normal times, elections relieve such pressure. This time the election just ratcheted the pressure up, and something still has to give.
Calling for Real Deliverance
The book of Judges can be viewed from two perspectives. One of them, the obvious one, is that it consists of a history of a series of downgrades and apostasies. And that is exactly right. You turn the page, and again the people are hunting out a new Baal to bow down to. Their spiritual stupidity appears to be incorrigible. They forget the Lord, again and again they do it. The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua (Judg. 2:7), but when he and his generation died, they began to serve the Baals (2:11) and the Ashtaroth (2:13). In short, they knew how to fall away (3:6).
But the book of Judges is also history of numerous revivals. When the people cried out to God in their distress, He raised up Othniel (3:9). Then the people veered off again, and got into trouble again. They cried out to God, and so He raised up Ehud (3:15). Then they did evil again, got into trouble again, cried out to the Lord again, and so He raised up Deborah (Judg. 4:3-4). And so on.
This is the cyclic pattern through out the entire book (Judg. 2:16-19). The people go off to worship other gods, get into deep trouble as a result, call on the Lord in repentance, and He raises up a judge who then gives them a respite.
Now it is easy for modern Christians to read through the book of Judges, shaking their heads in dismay over these repeated apostasies, and wondering at it. But these ancient Israelites were our superiors in at least one respect. At least they were willing to cry out to Yahweh for deliverance.
The Baalim served by modern evangelicalism are the gods of neutrality and nice, and our flaccid Ashtaroth pillars are of course erected in the name of our soft complementarianism. All of it reveals our continued acquiescence in the central idolatry of the modern era, which is the lie of neutrality and secularism. This particular fog bank has covered over virtually all our evangelical leadership, and so when we are oppressed by our Eglons and Bidens, we have no idea what we are even supposed to do. How we managed to get trapped in the book of Judges without any judges was quite a trick, but we did it somehow.
I will tell you what we need to learn, and learn quickly. There will be no salvation without a Savior. There will be no deliverance without a Deliverer. There will be no reformation without a Reformer. There will be no law without a Lawgiver. There will be no comfort without a Comforter. There will be no inalienable rights without a Creator.
American Christians must cry out for deliverance, and they must call upon Jehovah God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They must call on the one they have been too embarrassed to name. We must pray to the God of the Christians, the true God, the living God. I am not speaking here of the generic god of American civic religion, that mute god who has no son, and who could therefore never arrange for this non-existent son to be born at Bethlehem, or to die on a tree in such a way as to deliver us from our moral stupidity.
I said above that our diseased politics cannot save us. It is actually what we need to be saved from. And when this happens, our politics will be cleansed and forgiven, along with us. And it then those politics will be seen as a pitiful creature, in deep need of salvation, and not as any kind of savior at all.
America, you are the prodigal son, and this is the moment in the story when you are staring at the pig food, wondering why it is starting to look so appetizing. Enough already. Repent. Go back to your Father. Seek his forgiveness. He offers it freely, and He will forgive you. But if you are still too proud to come to Him in the name of Christ, forget it.
If God anoints a man, and raises him up, he will come speaking the truth. And I suspect that the country might be more ready for that than our evangelical sanhedrin is.