The Trump “Ghost Army” Returns. Just Not The One He’s Looking For

For those of you who are real old timers with me, who go all the way to the confused November 2016 days as we went through the seven stages of grief, WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF? know one of the major things I found in the combination of post election data mining and good old interviews.

It turns out that something I had written about a few months earlier actually turned out to be true. Look, Traitor is/was an ass clown. And even his base knew and knows it. Which is fine for the hard core MAGA base, hell, they live for being ass clowns. But Trump also had a lower middle and same moderate GOP base, and those voters had a problem.

They actually liked Trump, they love that weekly snarled You’re fired! that somehow came out like Pee Wee Herman doing his Trump impersonation. Maybe they even liked some of his populist non functional policy scams. But here’s the problem.

All that being said, they always knew that Trump was an ass clown. But unlike the MAGA case, these voters actually had normal, sane friends, co-workers fellow church members, car pool members, and bowling league members. And all of those people thought that Trump was a laughable obscenity. So they lied.

They lied to the pollsters especially. They knew who they were really voting for when they went in the booth, and they didn’t want the pollster or anybody else to thein they were some country bumpkin with a stalk of hay hanging off their ear, so they lied. And the polls were fatally flawed.

We know this to be true because I wrote about it again in 2020. This time I wrote that Trump’s ghost army had deserted him. Trump’s ghost army was originally that soft glob of mushy middle voters, soft GOP voters, disgruntled Democrats, Independents fed up with the whole f*cking thing. But they also didn’t want their friends and relatives to know that they had jumped off of the SS Sanity. But those were exactly the voters who jumped off of The Trump Train in 2018 and 2020. And sanity was restored.

And now in 2024, believe it or not, in January of 2024, They’re baaaaaack! But while they all may pretty much look like the 2016 version, they’ve gone through a weird kind of a mutation, and it’s a mutation that could only be possible in a political horror thriller involving Trump. I’ll explain.

One of the major news stories that is going to dominate the news this political season is that of politically motivated violence. It has already started, and it’s only getting worse. Cops, judges, FBI agents, poll and election workers, and even incumbents and candidates are being subjected to an anonymous terror campaign, and El Pendejo Presidente himself is the one engineering it. Everybody is scared sh*tless.

And I mean everybody. And that includes Trump’s newly reconstituted ghost army. But I don’t think that this is an army that His Lowness wants at his back. The last time an Emperor tried something like that, Brutus had a little surprise for Caesar.

MSNBC has a group of reporters embedded, not with candidates, but in critical locations in Iowa and New Hampshire. Several of them were embedded in the same places in 2020, and have contacts there. And they’re finding something truly amazing. Soft Trump supporters are scared sh*tless too.

Priscilla Barnes talked to one, a junior at Iowa, and a member of the Young Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020, when she met him. He has soured on Trump, now finding him too dangerous to be President. And he has paid for his newfound wisdom. He has been harassed and physically threatened, even had his sexual identity insulted and threatened with violence. Now he just shuts his mouth and professes his fealty to Hair Twitler.

Another one is an older woman in an Iowa nursing home. Previously a rabid Trump supporter, she has now stopped sipping the Kool-Ade. As a result she is the target of insults and threats from other residents, a lower speed of service from the staff than Trump loyalists, and she now eats along in the common room  And as a result, she now keeps her mouth shut and smiles a lot.

The third one is in the middle, in her late 40’s to early 50’s. Also a former Trombie, she now tries logic and common sense instead. And gets threats and recriminations instead. She even admitted to Barnes that she almost never even mentions Trump’s name, and took a real step outside of her comfort zone to appear on camera, terrified of the phone calls, texts, and e=mails to follow.

Make no mistake. These aren’t just a scattered few weak sisters, scaring themselves silly and jumping at shadows. There are millions of them out there, simply because FrankenTrump set his regime up this way. Those far right domestic terrorists are his Gestapo. He flashes their might to keep political enemies scared and off balance, but they’re also useful in keeping any of the wavering faithful in line. These are sick puppies who won’t mind taking the initiative, even against one of their own, if they think it will bring them approval from The Cheeto Prophet and their mates and bosses.

This is the Trump ghost army of 2016, but this time through the looking glass. And it’s incredibly dangerous for Trump/ In 2016, that ghost army lied to the pollsters, and even to their neighbors and friends, came out in secret to the ballot box, and put Trump over the top. And nobody could see it coming.

It’s the reverse this time. Trump is going to be locked into an incredibly tight life or death struggle for political and personal survival. Every vote will count, Refugees from Trumpmenistan, terrified of being outed, will look at their shoes, scrape their toes, and reply, Hell! Trump of course when interviewed by the pollsters, or more importantly, GOP and Trump aligned pollsters. The facade must be maintained, for their own personal safety, as well as their family.

But as bad as it is, Trump still can’t have his Gestapo drive voters to the polls and go into the booth with them. That will be in 2028 if he wins in 2024. Trump is within the margin of error in every swing state. If as little as 5% of Trump refugees either vote for Biden or just stay home, then the Mango Messiah is almost certain to crash and burn, he just doesn’t have that kind of buffer zone available to him, and it will only get closer the closer we get to election day. And while these Trump refugees may fear preemptive repercussions for opening their mouths now, after the election there is no way to prove how they voted. The Trump SS may scowl and bluster, but they’ve got nothing to go on.

This is why I’m confident in the security of our own democracy. In places like Brazil and Poland, far right governments got into power, but they overreached. I like lemon and sugar in my Earl gray, and I sure as hell like a little democracy in my ballot box. And so does everybody else blessed with fair elections.

Unlike Erdogan in Turkey and Orban in Hungary, these pocket Hitler’s started making autocratic threats and implementing far right autocratic policies before they took the time and trouble to neuter both the judiciary as well as the election processes. And as a result, all of those malleable peasants retaliated with their votes, while their votes still meant something.

And Trump is now trying to do the same damn thing. As Blade once put it, Some motherf*ckers are always trying to ice skate uphill. But unlike Poland and Brazil, in the United States Trump is going up against the varsity team. Sh*t, we invented the concept of the constitutional democratic republic. And we’ve spent the last 248 years fine tuning and improving it. Is it perfect? Hell no, not by a long shot. But it isn’t at deaths door either.

The first rule of Politics 101 is that you never try to take back something popular once you’ve given it. There’s a reason why Social Security and Medicare are called the 3rd rail of politics. You touch it and you die, it’s that simple. What does this mandarin orange moron think is going to happen when he tries to take away our fundamental birthright of self governance? Trump’s ice skates had better be pretty f*cking sharp for this hill.

I thank you for the privilege of your time.