Panic in DC

I think that tomorrow’s elections are going to cause a major panic in Trumpland. This is not because the results will, to normal people, be some sort of blue tsunami — for one thing it’s not even a national election of course, and there are, comparatively speaking, very few races — but because in the year that has passed since Trump won an actual voting plurality for the first time ever, the Trump cult as well as Trump himself have entered into a grandiose narcissistic fever dream, in which their enemies have been destroyed forever, and America, or at least Real America has embraced perpetual MAGA rule, in which elections are merely ongoing symbolic formalizations of this Triumph of the Shill.

When this doesn’t turn out to be the case — when politics as usual continue to happen — the comedown from this cultish delusional groupthink is going to be severe. This in large part is a function of Trump’s own personality, since he has the classic pathological narcissist’s constant fear of being exposed as the worthless piece of shit that his parents always thought he was. And Trump’s personality cult has infected the psychology of his entire political movement, which is to say that these are people who aren’t ready to deal with defeat, even a very partial and limited defeat of the sort they’re likely to suffer tomorrow. In the wake of this, I anticipate an all-out panic about the midterms, which will be here before we know it, along with many frantic attempts to make sure next year’s elections don’t result in the sort of catastrophic defeat — which is to say any defeat, period — that would puncture the fascist dream of eternal invincibility.