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For a very long time on my Aftershow podcast, which aired for 15 years behind the paywall of Hugh Hewitt’s Hughniverse site, even before the Republican primaries got underway in earnest, I spent a lot of time looking at what America is going to look like after November 5th.
At the time, Joe Biden had one foot in his political grave, and the other on a banana peel, and was poised to get beat by whomever the Republicans nominated. Yet the rhetoric being used by politicians on both side and in regime media got dialed up to 11 on Spinal Tap’s guitar amplifier. My concern was that if Trump or a Republican won, half the country would absolutely freak out because the end of the American experiment was at hand. When it became clear Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, the intensity of the threat to democracy rhetoric greatly increased.
Even with the replacement on the Democratic side of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, temporarily drawing the race back into at least the perception of a winnable one by Democrats and media, the demonization of Donald Trump and Republicans by media and Never Trumpers ratcheted up further to an absurdly hyperbolic level. I speculated with Ed on several of our Week in Review podcasts in the VIP section that if you are someone on the left and you’ve been convinced down to your bones that Trump is a mortal threat to democracy itself, then it begs the question what won’t you do to stop Trump from taking the oath of office on January 20th? That was months before there were two assassination attempts on Trump’s life.
Now flash forward to this week. Donald Trump has shaved over half of Kamala Harris’ national polling lead in Real Clear Politics’ average, and has flipped Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan from blue to red in the Electoral College map, if you throw in leaning states. Trump’s probability odds of winning it all in Polymarket has reached an all-time high of 58% to Kamala’s 42% chance. Even left-leaning Nate Silver has seen the modest lead Kamala held in odds of winning evaporate. He now sees the race as a dead heat.
With all of that as a backdrop, what happens if Trump wins? Mark Halperin, who fell out of favor with MSNBC as one of their favored pundit sons after his own #MeToo problem, nevertheless has retained his contacts within the Democratic Party, and was among the first to accurately predict that Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats would shove Joe Biden to the curb and out of the race for re-election as president. Halperin was on Tucker Carlson’s podcast yesterday, and had this dire prediction.
The biggest mass mental health crisis in this country’s history. And that’s saying something when we’re just four years removed from the physical, mental, and emotional damage done to millions of Americans after what a year of COVID restrictions, masking, and vaccine mandates did to us and our children. This prediction is ominous indeed. But Halperin went further and described how that mental health crisis would manifest itself, at least in part.
And you only thought you had to worry about the Zombie apocalypse. Long-time political consultant and former Bill Clinton campaign guru James Carville is embracing denial fully, refusing to believe Democrats are going to lose, and terrified that Trump is going to arrest his political enemies.
What makes this cut so delicious is that within two hours of saying this, Joe Biden was in Philly at a dinner to benefit Kamala Harris.
