The Inimitable Rupert Chapman Speaks on Election Day

If Trump wins, he'll be replaced by Vance almost instantly. Then we've got Christian Nationalism on steroids.

We just had a discussion attached to my post on J. D. Vance and the likelihood that if Trump’s elected, the GOP will invoke the 25th Amendment the moment Trump has killed every indictment against him — and replace him with Vance.

The comments were spectacular with Beth Hibbard pointing out:

Yup. If you can read the tea leaves they spell Opus Dei and Leonard Leo.

And Robert J. Rei pointing out that

JD Vance's elevation to the VP candidacy is primarily the effort of Trump's two sons; also Vance is a member of the Teneo Network of which Leonard Leo is the Chairman.

Then our peerless leader, Rupert Chapman III, archaeologist, historian and curator emeritus of Levantine Antiquities at the British Museum quipped:

I'm sorely tempted to say, 'great minds think alike', but I won't because Helen (Rupert’s wife) would instantly retort. Helen has been muttering darkly about Trump needing to avoid windows in high buildings. I, on the other hand, have been contemplating the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt, who, for more than 200 years, spent their time plotting to kill one another, and frequently succeeding. Herod the Great was also a Hellenistic monarch, and his close friend, Augustus, said of him that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son, while Shakespeare was moved to remark, “Why, it out-Herods Herod.”

I would only add that if Trump wins, and he or his (very) immediate successors actually implement the tariffs and the mass deportations, I think that within six months there won't BE a United States. California, Oregon, and Washington on the West Coast, and New York and New England on the East will have no choice but to break away in self defense.

The United States began as a loose alliance of independent countries, thirteen of them. It didn't really become a single country until the men who had led it to independence created an operating system for it, in 1789. This was the first new country which had been created for thousands of years, and the Constitution was only the beta version of the operating system. The Articles of Confederation, which failed completely, was the alpha version.

What Trump and the miasma of loose conspirators and would be presidents-for-life who fly along with him—the reference is to the famous Avro Shackleton aircraft, affectionately known as “10,000 loose rivets flying in close formation”—want to do is not to upgrade that operating system, but to destroy it.

And just as when you destroy the operating system you no longer have a computer, only a box full of junk electronics, so without the Constitution, amended and upgraded as it should be in light of the last ten years, you no longer have a country, only the wreckage of what once was one. Not even a failed state.

So, I hope everyone who reads this will get out there and vote, because the fate of the country, and of most of the wider world, depends on our votes now, as it rarely has in the last 250 years.

And that is the best commentary on Election Day I can think of. If you haven’t already, please get out and vote today.

Let freedom ring.