If you are one of them, you may have been misinformed. Here's a handy-dandy flowchart that should help clarify the issue:
All snark aside, it's distressing that so many of my fellow citizens believe that Mr. Trump is not what he actually is, namely, their president - or maybe they just think Trump is so radically unrepresentative of everything they believe, that he's not their leader - not "their" anything - in any meaningful sense. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that's how they see it.
But maybe that's naive of me, because here's a Guardian columnist writing in The New York Times:
Mr. Trump isn’t my president. I don’t mean it emotionally; I mean it literally. It’s not sloganeering; it’s observable truth.
Mr. Trump has no intention of representing me, my family, the people I care about, or the majority of Americans, from the imperiled to the comfortable. It is a stretch to call him anyone’s president but his own.
Wait, literally? Hmm. And what's this about Trump not being anyone's president now? Not even the 63 million people who voted for him? My head, it hurts. But there's more:
Those who believe that straight, white men have a mandate to burn the rest of us as fuel, to sell us for parts, to mow us down and climb up the pile, never truly conceded that war. They have been biding their time, and this is their last great gambit. But I live in the America that won — the America with art and empathy and a free press and fierce protest. Not my president, not now, not ever.
Ok, but-- wait WHAT? Read that first sentence again - WTF does that even think it means?
For the record, the writer also claims:
“Not my president” was a favorite refrain of the Tea Party, a fundamental buttress of the racist delegitimization of Barack Obama, an incantation that, in retrospect, recalled some of the first stirrings of Mr. Trump’s rise to power.
Is that true though, or is she just making shit up? I don't remember that phrase being a favorite refrain of anyone. But my memory is notoriously terrible, so I did a Google News search for "Obama" and "not my president," date range 2008-2015, and came up with... a quote from Sean Hannity, a quote from Mark Levin, and that's pretty much it. Also, I did a Google Image search for the same terms, and found a bunch of internet memes to that effect. No photos of anyone holding signs with the phrase, and zero evidence that it was ever a favorite of the Tea Party, let alone a "fundamental buttress" of anything. (I welcome correction on this.)
But I digress. It would be unfair to take one pundit's incontinent rantings as representative of the majority of non-Trump voters. And most Hillary voters of my acquaintance do not seem to think that Trump is literally not their president. Which is a start.
But the underlying problem, which is that a vast portion of the electorate is deeply hostile to Trump and feels he does not represent them in any way, is a huge one, and it raises a number of salient questions, among them: Whatcha gonna do about it? No, I'm not being snarky again. I want an answer.
Protesters on the streets of our major conurbations are chanting: "Hey ho, hey ho, Donald Trump has got to go." What exactly do they mean by that? Maybe they want the POTUS to resign? I'm sure the new occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be happy to consider that, as soon as he gets done apologizing to Rosie O'Donnell.
So if he doesn't resign, how exactly is he going to "go"? Impeachment? You can bet there are already plans in the works for that.
I don't see a third option that isn't horrible to contemplate.
Which brings me to John Robb.
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| John Robb |
Robb, author of Brave New War, is a deep thinker on warfare, terrorism, and the emerging chaos that is being created by runaway globalization and technological change - its dangers as well as opportunities. Presciently, back in February 2016 he described Trump's presidential campaign as an "open source insurgency" and explained why it could take the White House.
After that, Robb kind of shut up about Trump for a while. Then, after the election, he wrote this:
This year, an open source insurgency formed in the US and it took control of the White House. I didn't write much about it this fall because it hit too close to home. I knew what would happen.
What is an open source insurgency? An open source insurgency is how a very large and very diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent. ...
Open source insurgencies and protests can arise spontaneously and they are very hard to stop once they get going since they are impervious to most forms of repressive counter-attack and political subversion. For example, the open source movement propelling Trump forward made him impervious to attacks on his character. It also eliminated any need for "ground game" or standard political organization and obviated any need for information disclosure and detailed policy papers.
Other examples of open source insurgencies include post-war Iraq and the Arab Spring which toppled governments in North Africa and the Middle East.
The trouble with open source insurgencies is that they work, so they get replicated. Again and again. Theoretically.
One implication is that Trump could be swept from office by the same type of insurgency that he rode to power:
This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election -- a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US. A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office.
Unfortunately, an open source insurgency that forces a sitting President from office without the benefit of an election could result in the same outcome as Egypt (or worse Syria).
Which brings us back to this:
And this:
And this:
So here's Robb again on January 21, the day that hordes of women took to the streets in the name of "resistance" (to what?), "self-determination," and a laundry list of progressive causes that I didn't get around to reading in full, though in fairness I'm pretty sure most of the protesters didn't either:
The massive, anti-Trump women's march swept every major US city makes it [i.e. a Tahrir Square moment in America] possible.
Of course, the people who went to this march don't agree on all of the issues. In fact, I'm not sure they agreed on most issues. They did, however, all agree on one simple thing: Trump shouldn't be President.
This agreement and huge size of the protest is what I call the plausible promise of an open source protest. It demonstrates, to many of the people attending the protest and many on the sidelines, that removing Trump from office through protest may actually be possible.
Indeed. The Women's March on Washington manifesto devotes a bullet point to "LGBTQIA Rights." How many of the protesters even know what that "I" and "A" stand for? (Intersex and Asexual, fwiw.) But it hardly matters, that's not why they're marching; they're marching because they want Trump gone. Outta here. Skedaddle.
It's probably wise that Robb doesn't go into detail about how this particular goal might be actualized. I have some ideas, which I'll share later. But the point is that, like it or not, we may be staring down the barrel of an endless series of disruptive political movements in America. Trump let that particular genie out of the bottle, and it's almost certainly not going back in. The danger is that its next manifestation may make Trump's rude tweets and lewd wisecracks seems positively genteel.
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