Greetings from Post Electoral College America

If there's any Trump supporter reading this, please stop reading now!

(Well, it was worth a try; after all, these people did what they were told, namely to vote for Trump, despite common sense.)

It's just a little too early to muse on the demise of the United States of America as we knew it; we really don't know exactly what is going to happen next, after all.  The conservatives and the big business leadership got what they wanted: a businessman at the controls.  But things are not as simple as they seem.

The GOP (and the Libertarians) wanted to win the White House, Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and they're about to get what they wanted.  Now, the cheerleaders will turn to the coaches and the quarterback and say: OK, what do we do next?

The GOP strategy has been, in many ways, reactive.  In other words, they don't understand what is going on, but they have absolute faith that everything the Democrats do is bad, and they have to get rid of it.  (They just might re-brand the things and put them right back, but that's another story.)  The Fiscal Conservatives don't like high taxes; they don't like a budget deficit; they don't like Federal Spending.  These things are articles of faith; most of them being businessmen or industrialists, or flunkies of these things, simply cannot tolerate money going into the Treasury (even though a lot of it finds its way right back into the hands of Big Business anyway).  The Neoconservatives like to bully foreign nations into accepting American political leadership (hegemony, a word I have always hated), which in the present situation means being nasty in every possible way to ISIS (or ISIL, or whatever).  Most liberals are disgusted with bullying for its own sake, and have been for decades, but the GOP has not outgrown that phase.  The GOP also wants freely and cheaply available energy.  (The Energy companies would prefer to control the flow of energy, just to skim off the profits, but the rest of the GOP had cheap, clean energy available in vast quantities tomorrow, and it if could be used for transportation (e.g. in trucks and planes), they'd happily take it, even if the Koch brothers are unhappy.

So now, here is the opportunity to (A) roll back so much that the Democrats got done over four years, and (B) loosen all controls on business craziness, except those few controls that give the GOP darlings the tariffs that make them rich and influential.  (For instance, I can see how the highways might be privatized, so that everyone has to pay tolls to get anywhere, but the GOP pets get to take the tolls home!  Sounds like a good racket to me.)

Donald Trump is gradually becoming aware of the messiness of Government, which is why he has simply handed over the management of Government to the fellows who are probably most pushy about policy.  The Steve Bannons and the Rex What'is'names probably gave him no peace, and so he gives them the keys to the Land Rover and says: you drive; I want to take a nap, and maybe get off a few tweets.

Liberals have historically been protective of the poor, and women and minorities of all sorts, because, well, they have been those most in need of protection.  The ultra-rich, suffering with a lingering sense of persecution, has only the GOP to run to their aid.  But they are just a little too confident that they can make wealth out of thin air.  There is a belief that money just multiplies, like bacteria.  No; wealth is extracted from the rest of us.  At the moment, we're still not penniless enough for us to disappoint the businesses; though some of us are starving, we still postpone paying the rent to make sure Disney makes a killing.  As long as we have credit cards, we add to the wealth of Wal-Mart and those other guys.  Even if we owe the hospitals big money for the last time we got sick, we still pump gas into our cars, to make sure the Koch Brothers have a good Christmas!

But the fact is that the Capitalist Class needs the middle class and the working class.  We're the geese that have thus far laid the golden eggs.  Actually, more like plastic eggs, but still eggs.  Without buyers, the sellers have nothing.

So I'm advocating that we wait until it becomes clearer what can be done to obstruct the Trump machine; the strategy of delegitimizing Trump is sort of a marginal thing; the people who want Trump in the White House are not particularly upset that we're upset about him shooting his mouth off at the wrong time.

Some of the silly things they're saying that they will do, though, such as occupying both the White House and their big house in Manhattan, at Government expense, is going to annoy some people on their own side.  I don't know the relative size of the expense, but it has to worry the fiscal conservatives (but I must admit that the fiscal conservatives appear to have taken a holiday since Trump's great victory this November).

Arch, settling down to watch.