Götterdämmerung Redux!

Back in 2021, I was intrigued by what I called the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, which they implemented following their narrow congressional victories in 2020, along with the hinky Biden electoral victory for the presidency. I called it that, because it reminded me of the lighthearted comment some people made over the Mayan calendar prediction that the world would end on December 21, 2012, that if thry knew it would end on a date certain, they'd run up their credit cards over the prior month knowing they'd never have to pay them back. At the time, I noted

[Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

Something like what I predicted seems to be taking place now. Speaker Pelosi, having retired (at least as Speaker, but she kept her seat) following a narrow loss of her House majority in 2022, is invoking, of all things, the end of the world as we know it:

When asked about the possibility of another Trump presidency, Pelosi commanded the reporter “Don’t even think of that.”

“Don’t think of the world being on fire,” she continued, adding “It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

“If he were to be president, it would be a criminal enterprise in the White House,” she added, without a hint of irony.

However, as I've noted, Speaker Emeritus Pelosi has close family and political connections with California Gov Gavin Newsom, who appears to be making contingency plans to run for president should Joe Biden ultimately decide not to run, and as I've said, Ms Pelosi continues to be a major figure in the Democrat party, and Newsom would not be doing this without her tacit endorsement. But the inescapable fact is that the Democrats ran up the credit card balances expecting the world to end, it didn't, and now they have to figure out how to pay the bills.

The Speaker Emeritus's hysteria comes at a time when the incumbent party ought to be expressing quiet confidence about the next election, which is over a year away. But indications are that the effort to defeat Trump by piling on indictments is backfiring:

World's least surprising news: 'The public's attention to former President Trump's legal drama has declined with each subsequent indictment.' From @axios https://t.co/Fi0xANKUU9

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 8, 2023

This brings me to an estimate I've made that the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party. Paul Gottfried at American Grestness had a similar take last month:

If the DNC, Democratic congressmen and the MSM were eager to dump Biden, they would have done so by now. . . . If Biden suddenly fell behind in hypothetical races against Republican presidential contenders, then the powerbrokers might decide to pursue a different course. But this has not yet happened.

. . . Joe does have an advantage over other Democratic contenders, and that advantage is precisely his cognitively weakened, morally compromised state. Like John Fetterman, Biden is ridiculously easy for the Left to manipulate. He can also be easily blackmailed. Enough of the public already knows that Biden runs a crime family, and if he falls out of line, the media and his more immediate handlers may stop hiding this fact. Despite his cognitive limits, Joe is sufficiently sentient to understand his own vulnerability. He will therefore continue obeying his political masters, who have stood behind him while keeping his enemies in check.

Nevertheless, it's been leaked that Obama is worried, and Speaker Emeritus Pelosi is now contemplating the end of the world. Trump, meanwhile, is using the indictments and the media coverage to suck out all the air in the room from the other Republican candidates, and in fact he's using the attention he gets from rallies and social media posts to troll Biden, Pelosi, the judges, and the prosecutors, which so far appears to be working well for him, notwithstanding the likes of Jonathan Turley are clutching their pearls at the spectacle.

But if the public is beginning to see the indictments as a joke, the only effective response is to treat them as precisely that. And now his attorneys are joining the fun:

Washington, D.C., District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan requested the federal prosecutors and the Trump team to agree on a day this week, but Trump's leading attorneys, John Lauro and Todd Blanche, cannot appear on Trump's behalf before early next week, Smith's filing Tuesday showed.

Smith told Chutkan that his team is ready for a hearing Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday , but was told by Trump's team that Lauro and Blanche are unavailable together before Monday or Tuesday of next week.

. . . Prosecutors with Smith's team quickly countered with their own filing, accusing Trump of objecting to their proposal because he wants to be able to use the government's evidence to "try the case in the media rather than in the courtroom."

Whatever the prosecutors and the judge try to do, Trump and his attorneys will do everything they can to make monkeys out of them, because they have nothing to lose. This is the William Kunstler-Chicago Seven defense to a political trial; it worked then, and it will work now.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, the House Republicans are seizing the opportunity to challenge the received narrative over the 2020 election. We can only wait and see how this plays out, but so far, I think my Götterdämmerung model is proving itself.