Donald Trump continues to surpass Joe Biden in the popularity rankings among the electorate. The latest Quinnipiac poll confirms the lead of the revanchist who did not get his second term as president, although the superiority is minimal: 48% vs. 46%.
One might wonder what links the gap in voter support for the two sparring rivals, which has already become stable, albeit within the statistical margin of error, with the release of the provocatively titled film Civil War, edited by A24 Studios.
The scenes of the potential blockbuster, renamed in the Russian box office as «The Fall of an Empire», will not leave indifferent neither ardent nor latent supporters of both Democrats and Republicans.
The U.S., according to the story, is split precisely along party lines. Passionate defenders of conservative values and hormone-driven woke-ideological non-binary liberals are taking up arms. Blue separatists in California and red separatists in Texas are sending their National Guard units to Washington to plant their flag over the White House.
The most rational explanation for why this cinematic anti-utopia has now emerged was offered by political scientist Malek Dudakov, an Americanist:
«It’s just such an anti-Trump ‘agitation’. Because it talks about the war of the states against a populist president who violates the constitution. Even the director of this movie Alex Garland does not hide that he was motivated to launch such a scenario by the events of 2020, the confrontation between Biden and Trump».
The key message of the expert: citizens, already tired of culture wars, including with monuments, manifestations of black racism on the part of African Americans (BLM), aggressively imposed gender identity to destroy the institution of the family, and so on, must be frightened by this movie and accustomed to the idea that a repeat of the feud of 1861–1865 is real:
“It is rather about ‘warming up’ Americans to fight back against a possible future Trump administration if he wins the election in November 2024”.
It is illustrative in this context that the Washington Post, a newspaper that caters to Democrats in megaphone propaganda style, posed the question in its headline, «Can the Supreme Court really disqualify Trump?» When the Colorado Supreme Court denied Trump the right to participate in the primaries in the territory under its jurisdiction, well-known Judge Michael Luttig considered the reasoning behind the decision to be impeccable. The Colorado judges cited the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits those «engaged in insurrection or rebellion» from holding the state’s highest office.
The «storming» of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when angry Trump supporters rushed into the U.S. Congressional building to express outrage that Democrats had stolen victory from them by using mail-in ballot fraud.
Michael Luttig was adamant that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the legality of the Colorado people’s refusal to allow Trump into the pre-election process, but he miscalculated. The high court justices ruled that challenger Donald Trump was wrongly excluded from the Colorado primary. The main argument: only the U.S. Congress has the authority to decide whether or not someone participates in a federal presidential election.
The justices were unanimous, even though three of them openly sympathize with the Democratic Party. But they recognized in the Colorado judges’ interference with the federal agenda a real danger of local self-rule, fraught with the potential to fuel separatism.
Has the Obama-Clinton-Biden clan accepted the inability to remove a belligerent ex-president by legal means? Barely. A February 23 Atlantic magazine article titled «How Democrats can disqualify Trump if the Supreme Court won’t” is symbolic. Here’s what the article’s author, Russell Berman, predicts:
«Democrats have a strong chance of winning a majority in the U.S. Congress in November, even if Trump regains the presidency on the same day. If that happens, they may have enough votes to prevent him from taking office».
The fact is that the final decision on who becomes president is made by the U.S. Congress in January following the election year. A joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate is held. In doing so, «if at least one member of the House of Representatives and one member of the Senate file a written objection, the houses shall be divided for debate and vote on the objection». Key point:
«If one or more objections are taken into account and, as a result, no candidate receives the required majority of 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives shall vote to elect a new president».
And if by this point, as the Atlantic’s author dreams, the Democrats controlling the Senate will have a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, then even with an unambiguous triumph Trump will not have a new residence in the White House.
However, as attorney Jason Murray, quoted in the magazine, reasonably notes, in this case:
«Democrats will have to choose between endorsing the winner, considered by many of them to be an unfit candidate, and ignoring the will of the voters who elected him».
The strategy for blocking access for Trump to the White House looks like it will be built on two tactics, each carrying bunches of anger and the seeds of civil conflict. The first option: the refusal of the two houses of the U.S. Congress to approve the results of the election, which, in the context of extreme aggressiveness within the political class, that is, among the most active citizens with a firmly formalized civic position, will inevitably lead to a full-fledged constitutional crisis.
The Democrats have a second trump card up their sleeve. This is the provocation of street protests involving activists of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, associations of left-radical fanatics and teenage antifascists (Antifa), as well as groups with a semi-criminal nature and simply antisocial elements.
The official BLM website outlines 7 purely political demands, dating back to 2021 and unrelated to human rights issues. The first: «Condemn Trump and bar him from future political activity… Trump should also be barred from future elected office».
Who is funding BLM? There’s no clarity. But! As the New York Post found out, one of BLM’s leaders, Patrisse Cullors, was paid only $120,000 between 2013 and 2018, and she hasn’t been paid at all since 2019. Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2021, Cullors bought four homes worth nearly $3 million dollars. Her explanation that she has two book publishing contracts, a media production contract and public speaking fees didn’t sound convincing.
So, how manageable and controllable are BLM and other radical group activists to Democrats? A 2020 study by a group of Donald Trump’s opponents called Transition Integrity Project (TIP) outlines possible options for confrontation between the «blue» and «red». In these scenarios, according to www.heritage.org.
«Biden’s team has almost always called for and relied on mass protests to demonstrate public commitment to a ‘legitimate outcome’ in order to strengthen the resolve of the officials elected by Democrats».
On the other side of the barricades, Trump’s victory advocates — the
Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and the Clermont Institute — have characterized their opponents’ prognostic scenarios this way: It’s a
«a frank acknowledgement of the high likelihood that Biden’s team will encourage street demonstrations that could spiral out of control».
The Texas Trumpists also pointed out that street violence from the left during that year was almost inevitable and that there was «strategic coordination» with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
… Now, it’s time to guess. In the event that the Obama-Clinton-Biden clan loses twice — in November’s election and in January 2025 in attempts to disrupt the certification of their results — they will activate «Plan B». BLM militants, left-wing radicals unstoppable in their hatred of everyone and everything, homeless illegal migrants imported with money from Latin American drug cartels, and other marginalized people willing to engage in unpunished violence will take to the streets.
And then the constitutional paralysis of power will be supplemented by many signs of civil war, which is what the movie «Fall of an Empire» warns about (or teaches as an inevitability).