The demoralization psyops are running hot and heavy. The press “calls” the election for Biden at every opportunity (sure, their polling was some blend of malicious and incompetent, but now they’re totally confident of the outcome of a complex legal & political process that doesn’t end until January). Hey, did you hear Trump is considering resigning in shame? He’s got his retirement condo in Tel Aviv lined up – it’s over, MAGApedes!

None of this will happen, although no one knows what will. As long as Trump asks for help in extremis (specifically in convincing state legislatures to directly appoint valid electors) he will get it, and I believe he will win.

The situation is changing daily, and so a detailed analysis of why this should be the case would be shortly obsolete. The essence is that if it boils down to “who can make three or so state legislatures do something.” Trump has the ability to move more of his supporters with more force potential and an extremely clear mission than can possibly be countered by the resources at the disposal of the state governments at question. The power of nonviolent protest!

I am optimistic about this situation, because it is the only scenario that has the possibility to result in actual structural change. The joke is that the right wishes we could have Campaign Trump the whole term rather than six months every four years. Well, you got him, by necessity – frozen in time at the height of his popularity, wholly focused on winning, and contrasted with an incontinent puppet and a faux-American woke commissar who couldn’t even make it into, let alone out of, the Democratic primaries.

This is an opportunity laid out on a silver platter.

The increasingly obvious covid fiasco was entirely attributable to Trump not being in full control of his own government, which obliged him to rely on people whose priority was giving him the worst advice possible. I don’t believe that Trump has a decade-long grand strategy, but even relatively routine policy enactments with concrete payoffs to his base are routinely thwarted by people he doesn’t even know the names of, and certainly can’t corral into alignment with his priorities.

The solution to a government apparatus too large to control, when you have a relatively small loyal faction of warm bodies to control it, is to take what you need and burn down the rest – Maoism Lite. Once you’ve got the guy that makes sure arms sales flow appropriately and the guy who answers the phone, you can probably afford to dispense with the other 98% of, eg, the State Department that focuses on promoting gay marriage in Laos. Ideally you’d pull a Mao Classic and have them compete to dismember each other for your edification, but you can settle for having them resign due to Cheeto Hitler’s “coup” or forcing them out when they refuse to acquiesce to the result. The same goes for state officials engaging in outright sedition.

This is all contingent on Trump’s desire to not see himself and his family sued, subpoenaed, indicted, and railroaded into oblivion, and no amount of “acceleration” will take him out of the driver’s seat on this. It is possible that the fraud is so blatant, straightforward, or insufficient that it can be reversed administratively via recounts, or judicially on whichever basis they can make stick. However it is also possible that it cannot be – if these are intermixed, physically valid ballots, or time is simply too short to discard a sufficient number, it falls to the strategy I have described: state legislatures to directly assign the electors, and an internal purge to make it stick.

If at that time he disavows his supporters and cries “very unfair!”, no amount of action will change his mind.

However, until and unless that happens, moving from the judicial realm to pure politics is a live issue and a distinct possibility. State legislators by default will not be enthusiastic about being labeled by every major media outlet as traitors to Our Democracy and the Will of the People. They also have their own local political arrangements with their colleagues – probing deeply into the mechanisms of ballot fraud in Philadelphia, Detroit, or Milwaukee is downright uncollegial, and God knows what tacit agreements exist. Journalists asking them what they think and then editing the result into “uh, we’re not committing to anything” is mostly just more demoralization propaganda.

This decision calculus would need to be changed. Trumpist policies, as seen in the US House races (where every seriously contested race and a few that were supposed to be “safe” broke GOP) are popular. Traitors and cheats are not popular. The top priority is establishing the legitimacy of Trump’s victory and the illegitimacy of the fraud perpetrated in an attempt to erase it (which I am guessing will be an outcome of the judicial process, even if they cannot do anything about it without going full imperial judiciary). The second priority is conveying to legislators that you expect them to do something about it, and inaction will put their political future in immediate jeopardy.