A bang, then a whimper: how the Trump era will likely end

This is my Facebook post which I'm recording here instead, as it was apparently blocked by the new political censors and filters:

Just 10 days out, my 2020 electoral prediction: a resounding Biden victory, but no landslide in the electoral college; Democrats take a narrow (51-53 seat) Senate majority and further cushion their advantage (~240 seats) in the House.

However, a huge caveat: a less than 3 percent margin of victory in critical swing states that Biden might carry - i.e. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Minnesota, Georgia - means that recounts will be necessary and no winner will be declared on Election Night.

Polls showing persistent low double-digit leads for Biden significantly understate Trump's support: the former VP is likely to take the national popular vote by no more than 6 to 7 points - which would still be an unequivocal repudiation of Trumpism.

The ultimate very high voter turnout - possibly exceeding 65 or even 70 percent - will itself be a powerful reaffirmation of the integrity of American democracy: if nothing else, at least tens of millions more American citizens than in living memory seem to be voting as though their lives depend on it.

Unfortunately for Republicans, such high turnout is to be feared: while they can be sure that enthusiasm for Trump and Trumpism is even greater than it was among their base in either '16 or the '18 midterm, the much higher overall numbers of voters - including first-time voters who were only recently registered - can only signify that Democrats have made even more headway convincing lukewarm and cynical younger and minority voters that casting their ballot isn't a matter of preference or convenience, but of life and death.

So if Biden wins nationally by over 5 percentage points (which could still turn out to be a conservative forecast), Trump's chances in the electoral college already look quite grim: the three swing states - Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania - that he won by a combined fewer than 80,000 popular votes in '16, but whose total 78 electoral votes handed him the White House, are now leaning blue. Losing even one of them - not to mention potentially Iowa, Ohio, and Arizona - would be a major blow, even if not many electoral votes were at stake (i.e. Iowa just 6, Arizona 11 and Wisconsin 10).

Biden's therefore already looking at a huge success on Election Night: he won't be able to declare victory, but will have 310 to 320 electoral votes nearly certainly in the bag (pending recounts). This will be a remarkable achievement for a guy turning 78 years old a mere 17 days later - older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the Oval Office in 1989.

Trump's still counting on what carried him four years ago: his insurgent anti-establishment credentials, his fighting spirit and killer instincts and energy. What's different now is that, while his base appreciates these qualities more than ever, the vast majority of moderates and independents probably find these to be liabilities and not assets as the Covid pandemic continues to rage. To put it bluntly: his zeal and toughness are practically worthless against an invisible microbe - except to invite getting infected with it over and over until immunity (both individual and herd) are achieved, possibly years down the line.

Of course, there's going to be plenty of drama if Biden's margin of victory is less than 2-3 points in swing states, especially in the contested Midwest: Trump will leverage all his residual powers of the executive branch - even as a lame duck in all but official acknowledgement - to contest the results within those states. The problem is, to the vast majority of Americans the vote will have been perceived as fair and square - and he will find himself clinging to power by hyping up, even more vehemently, his already stale narrative of "deep state" "witch hunts."

That, in turn, will seal his doom: instead of continuing to be president as the Coronavirus (almost definitely) worsens in both spread and lethality as the weather gets considerably colder after November 3, he'll find himself chomping at the bit to avoid leaving the White House on January 20. That's a good two and a half months of horrible melodrama just when the country needs genuine national leadership to navigate what will probably be the grimmest chapter to date of the Covid plague and its socioeconomic ill effects.

Will Trump mellow under such circumstances? Not a chance in Hell: quite the contrary, emboldened by an increasingly rabid white nationalist base, he'll double down and dig deeper into conspiracy-mongering resistance to the "deep state" and its accessories - even if it costs more lives and livelihoods - because by that point it'll be nothing less than an existential Apocalyptic "End of America" prospect staring him and his most devoted followers in the face. Their very defiance, however, will finally isolate them from sensible conservative Americans who've given them so much cover for so long: when the chips are finally down, the GOP itself will turn them in to the lions of historical judgment.

To conclude: Of course, a finally defeated Trump can only be assured to pardon himself before he leaves office - but even here, look out for some drama after the electoral college results of a Biden victory are certified in December, clearing the way for a Democratic 46th presidency a month later.

Because whether it's Biden pardoning him or Trump pardoning himself, that mere offer - not even the act itself - will be a vindication of the Left's charge that the president is a crook or even criminal.

Even Trump will have to realize by then that he's simply outgunned and outfunded - that the combined cartel of Silicon Valley and Wall Street will absolutely crush whatever lawsuits he can muster against the Clinton-Obama-Biden Swamp (including of course Jeffrey Epstein's associates) with countersuits against his own shell companies and illicit offshore bank accounts. He'll raise a huge fuss about all of it and publicly blackmail the "deep state" one last time (at least), but it'll peter out so quickly and so completely that, when all is said and done, his whole phony war with the Deep State (i.e. his desperate ploy to cover his own derriere) will be reduced to a minor memory in most Americans' cubbyholes of long-term brain storage.

For most sincere Republicans and conservatives, in just three months' time they should be counting their lucky stars that the Trump era didn't last any longer than it did - and that they got the only thing they could've ever expected from it, namely a retrenched judiciary system with a secure conservative Supreme Court majority for the coming generation. For me personally (as a lifelong Republican), I'm already very much at peace with this.

Coronavirus pandemic marks ascendancy of Chimerica (2010-2050)

There is now little doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic will upend the global order - ushering in the "breakout" second decade (2020-30) of the seventh capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050). By this fall's US presidential election, only one domestic and one foreign issue, respectively, will predominate American voters' minds: the novel Coronavirus and its origin country, China.

Though this moment in history has been a long time coming, its sheer suddenness is downright remarkable: it turns out that a virus was the missing link between the twilight of the Western world order and its transition to a bona fide Chinese one.

Without need to go into details, the most salient features of the current crisis speak for themselves: built upon the principles of individual autonomy and liberty, Western democracies are particularly vulnerable to a microbe that renders it imperative for a collective all-of-society effort to suppress its potentially lethal spread; particularly in nations like the United States, which are ethnically and culturally diverse, the many strands of authority - and rebellion against authority - render it difficult to impossible to implement a centralized response policy.

More tellingly, however, we are witnessing the virulent death of an entire worldview: that of "American exceptionalism" or, perhaps more expansively, "Anglo exceptionalism." This in essence holds that, by virtue of their being the bearers of God-given political and civil freedoms to the rest of humanity, the Anglo-American, "Atlanticist" civilization which reached its zenith in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, has a providential and predestined mission to prove the supremacy of personal and individual autonomy over collective and communal conformity and harmony.

The hard truth is now exposed: when individuals are lionized over the whole of society, the whole of society suffers so much that the individual is inadvertently an even greater victim. The stubborn early resistance to the very idea of lockdowns and quarantines in both the US and UK meant that both countries adopted these crucial mitigation measures far too late to avoid severe dislocation and disruption to their economies. Worse still, once these adverse economic consequences really sunk in, the imperative to undo them has proven - at least in the US case - to be so great and pressing that even an extremely risky (some would say reckless) effort to lift the pandemic mitigation effort has been deemed preferable to waiting out the virus longer.

In America's case, this is particularly striking: the reason that Republican and Republican-leaning states are so impatient to reopen their economies is that - to date - their predominantly Caucasian majority populations have been only lightly and unevenly touched by the novel Coronavirus disease. Owing to the mere fact that their communities are less intensively and immediately intertwined with the global economy, these conservative parts of the country consider it unfair that they've already sustained far more economic damage than direct harm from the virus itself - as though the virus would treat them any differently than regions it's already ravaged (i.e. New York) once it found their defenses lowered.

As the Communist regime in Beijing watches gleefully, America - and especially the once so arrogant Trump administration, which boasted of a trade war that supposedly brought China to its knees - finds herself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The economy will not recover for the simple fact that most people will not resume their normal pre-pandemic level of public activity even if the authorities deemed it perfectly safe to do so; workplaces and businesses cannot function above half capacity for quite some time, crimping any hoped for rebound in revenues and profits. Jobs will therefore not come back - nor will wages avoid longer-term cuts.

Against this backdrop, one can only expect the Trump administration to double down further: to the point of seeking penalties against businesses and workers that refuse to get back to a normal footing. But this will itself smack against the solid brick wall of a resurgence in both cases and deaths from even the partial economic relaunch that fails miserably in its objectives.

A repeating cycle of lockdowns and reopenings now looms for not just the US, but most Western democracies: they have not made a firm decision to eradicate the virus by any means necessary - and hence are condemning themselves to trying to cope with its devastating effects for a long, long time. The "magic bullet" of either a vaccine or universal treatment drug will also prove to be a mirage hope - there are no such panaceas in the ugly real world of completely new strains of highly infectious and mutable virus.

By contrast, China is already on the strong road to recovery - albeit with reduced growth expectations for the foreseeable future. It is far better equipped to handle any resurgence in Covid cases - and already has far fewer potential spreaders to begin with.

More tellingly, the Chinese economy is now restructuring and reorienting itself in a longer-term shift to prioritize public health and general social welfare over private profit and even heavy fixed-asset investment (i.e. infrastructure, real estate): something its Western, especially US, counterparts are incapable of even seriously attempting without even worse political gridlock.

So the ascendancy of Chimerica - as opposed to "Amerina" - is now assured. China is headed for accelerated value-chain climbing, currency internationalization alongside healthy deleveraging and interest rate stabilization, and slow but high-quality growth driven by consumption and innovation; the US by contrast is headed for asset deflation, real economic stagflation, and exploding debt. China will end up setting the terms for future trade and investment with the US - whatever Trump or his possible Democratic successor may say on the campaign trail.

The US Covid pandemic will pick up again by late this month - and probably experience a "secondary peak" by mid-June; while that may spur Trump to impose another lockdown, it will probably fail - even then - to compel him to actually see through a comprehensive mitigation and then containment strategy. The true "second wave" of the Coronavirus will almost certainly strike with a vengeance by the end of August into early September: and it will probably cause enough additional havoc to both the US economy and physical well-being to cost the White House reelection.

January 2020: the Fatima Century takes shape

January 2020 has sealed its mark as the month that the Fatima Century assumed definitive shape. Events involving the United States, Iran, China, and Russia are coming to a head in such a way that the trajectory of both Eurasian and American geopolitics for at least the next two generations is emerging with clarity. Namely, the seventh capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050), is observing the dawn of its breakout second decade (2020-2030); its impetus, in turn, is already being fueled by the gathering undercurrent of its successor, the eighth capitalist regime, Fatima (2050-2090).

The assassination by US President Donald Trump of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3 in Baghdad has marked a point of no return in Washington's confrontation with not only the Islamic Republic, but with the entire Shiite Muslim world. This clash will play out over the coming decade and more, yet even now, its outcome is already little in doubt: Iran and its powerful Eurasian friends will prevail, while the United States and its Western partners will be marginalized or even expelled from the region.

The true backdrop of the sudden and dramatic uptick in instability in all three of the most important countries of the Shiite Crescent - Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran itself - during the final two months of 2019 was the abrupt entry of China's game-changing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into the very heart of the Middle East. A $10 billion oil-for-reconstruction deal signed between Baghdad and Beijing last fall posed an existential threat to US influence in the entire region, as it opened the prospect of an unbroken economic corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean greased with Chinese cash, goods, and infrastructure. Almost overnight, the Trump administration found its dominant position in post-ISIS Iraq compromised; much worse, its plans to curb Iranian influence in the country and region also took a shocking blow.

For it was as though China, conscious of US hostility to its economic relations with Tehran - especially its oil imports, which it had sharply reduced from the theocratic regime since airtight sanctions were applied the previous spring - decided to flippantly skip over the American proscriptions by throwing a lifeline directly to Iran's Shiite expansionist efforts in Iraq, on through Syria, all the way to the golden shore of the eastern Mediterranean. That unbroken land bridge from Tehran to the Syrian coast - hugging the middle Euphrates valley - had first been cracked open in mid-2017, at General Soleimani's direction, in the fight against ISIS; now in late 2019, China was essentially endorsing it as a "Shiite economic belt" with ominous geostrategic implications for America and its allies in the region.

This proved too much for the Trump administration to swallow: the Iraqi insult had to bear a severe price for that country's Shiite-majority government, but not before an attempt was first made to knock out Hezbollah's grip on Lebanon. The reason that anti-government demonstrations popped up first in that small Levantine country - before moving on to Iraq and then finally Iran - is that the US and Israel, enlisting the financial firepower of Saudi Arabia and its sway especially over Lebanese and Iraqi finances, is that Hezbollah has always been correctly perceived as the tip and vanguard of the Shiite regional spear. If it could be broken, the entire Crescent would suffer disproportionately from the loss of its coordinating and animating principle for the rest of the coalition; much as the sabotage of a missile's warhead would render its entire body along with its launch and flight systems useless.

But the Lebanese protests failed - despite best covert efforts by American and Israeli intelligence and their operatives on the ground in Beirut, in conjunction with Saudi banking sanctions on the government which first forced it into overnight austerity measures that hammered the ordinary populace - to produce a unified and resilient "anti-Iranian" front and hence insurrection in the sectarian-mixed country. The unsurprising ouster of PM Saad Hariri only opened up a vacuum into which it was clear, in the end, that only the best-armed and most internally coherent faction - far and away, Hezbollah - would decisively rush into, once the chips were really down and the nation really plunged into total socioeconomic meltdown.

So next came Iraq: the administrations of Trump and his fervent regional ally, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, determined to threaten the functional strength and integrity of the Shiite-majority government of PM Adul Abdul-Mahdi - with the intent not to remove him or end his governing coalition, but simply to force it, with financial pressure applied by the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies, to revoke its new Chinese BRI contracts. But this also proved harder than expected: knowing that the US military presence in Iraq was already unwelcome among so much of the Shiite populace, Iraqi officials balked at Trump's blackmail, and in fact the escalating - though still yet secret to the world - standoff between Washington and Baghdad only hastened the latter's drive into Beijing's economic and financial orbit.

The Saudis, it turns out, were themselves rapidly becoming a Chinese client: in the runup to the massive December IPO of state oil firm Aramco, Beijing's quiet pledges of liquidity and valuation support were sufficient to shield Riyadh from American pressure to turn up the heat further on Iraq. Not only that, the Chinese overtures also seemed to have played a significant role brokering a progressively thawing truce between the Saudis and Iranians themselves, at least in their proxy war in Yemen. All this left the US in the unenviable position of having to apply financial and economic pressure on the Iranian-aligned government of Iraq more directly and singlehandedly - and even then, it had to capitalize quickly on the surge of austerity-fueled discontent with Abdul-Madhi's parliamentary coalition to force its point home. This directly set off the series of progressive deteriorations in US-Iraqi relations from November onward that finally culminated in the drone attack on Soleimani and his chief Iraqi lieutenant, Shiite militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, outside Baghdad international airport in early January.

For unlike in Lebanon, protests in Iraq found much more fertile ground for anti-Iranian actions and goals. Ever since the 2003 US invasion that removed Sunni Arab strongman Saddam Hussein, the country had been politically dominated by its nearly two-thirds Shiite majority - over which Tehran always exercised a disproportionate influence. In the wake of the defeat of ISIS' territorial caliphate in 2017-18, the return to the default post-Saddam Shiite clerical-led order had triggered an unprecedented new groundswell of discontent, especially among younger Iraqis - many of them secular Shiites themselves - who understandably had little faith left in their religiously inclined civic institutions and leadership. After all, these only seemed to reinforce and entrench a steep and incurable corruption of kleptocratic state administrators and their attendant patronage-based - as opposed to meritocratic - support and beneficiary networks. When this latent dissatisfaction was conveniently combined with the sudden inflationary effects of fiscal austerity, the tinderbox of "anti-Iranian" unrest ignited quite instantaneously and spontaneously both in Baghdad and in Shiite Arab strongholds of the south, such as Najaf and Basra.

The problem was that - perfectly in keeping with character - neither the US nor the Israelis seemed to have any contingencies in place besides a quick capitulation by Abdul-Mahdi's government to their core demands on China and the BRI. When the government's crackdown on protesters turned bloody in early-to-mid November, it was first seen as further pressure on the Shiite parliamentary coalition to make nice with the American overlords - restoring not only their job security but, far more tellingly, their financial perks for being compliant functionaries of the occupying Western powers. But the very fractiousness of said bloc - so fervently taken advantage of by Trump and Netanyahu - turned into an even bigger liability when their ideal scenario failed, which it did almost as rapidly as the upheaval began.

For the official Iraqi legislators were still practically a rump: real power and control on the ground remained in the hands of the clerical and even quasi-tribal hierarchies from whence they came. This meant that, once a violent repression of the so-called "Iraqi spring" began, there was no way to keep the bloodshed from spiraling out of control - that is, before it claimed many additional lives the Americans and Israelis actually needed, i.e. to install a new, pliable regime of secular liberals, once the existing Shiite theocratic government was removed. It was a bit of Western imperialist cognitive dissonance at its classic finest: try to take out a mirage adversary, arouse a real reprisal, and watch from the sidelines as one's own pawns get decimated. Even considering the illustrious history of "color revolutions", this Trumpist imitation set a new bar for sheer competence.

But no matter: if you can't cut off the serpent's tail or chop it in two at the midsection, why not just go for its venom-spewing head outright? That's what Trump and Netanyahu did next, when as November progressed, demonstrations against fuel hikes in Iran held the prospect of major civil disobedience against the Islamic republic itself. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei even personally warned the swelling ranks of protesters to, in effect, "not try anything." In other words: the regime knew what was really going on, and was prepared to take the kid gloves off to deal properly with it - even if the scale and severity of its response would shock public opinion at home and engender more than the usual "human rights" outcry from the West abroad.

When, ultimately, the Ayatollahs temporarily suspended internet connectivity in Iran and killed upwards of an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 protesters, they apparently gave the Trump administration a face-saving exit: he was allowed to tweet about Tehran's awful treatment of its own people without any reprisal from the regime that would expose the leading covert US role in stirring up the unrest. When this olive branch only invited further backhanded bullying by the White House, however, the Iranians publicly identified and arrested dozens of suspected spies coordinating the anti-government demonstrations on behalf of the CIA and Mossad, primarily via illicit Western social media tools.

By early December, then, not only had the US-Israeli campaign to destabilize and ultimately dismember the Shiite Crescent utterly failed, it had produced a horrific, exact opposite intended effect: strangled by US dollar sanctions or the threat of them, the governments of Beirut, Baghdad, and Tehran turned to Communist China and the BRI scheme for help. Though this offer from Beijing had been on the table for some time, only now did the Iraqis and Lebanese - without whom the Iranians (and by extension, Chinese) literally had no way to connect Central Asia to the Mediterranean - consider it a necessity. They had been loath to upset the Americans by drawing into the Chinese orbit, but now that Trump had forced their hand by his own arrogance and imperiousness, those earlier reservations were moot.

This understandably enraged the volatile US president even more. As 2019 drew to a close, his private attitude towards the Shiite world grew from one of mere hostility to outright violent aggression. He thus became easy prey for his friend Bibi Netanyahu's more extreme proposals: in hindsight, these included a major increase of the US military presence and activities in Iraq that were to be arrayed not to help liquidate the remnants of ISIS, but to contain and harass the pro-Iranian Shiite militias which were the integral link in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' "land bridge" via Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. This was the red line for Iran and its proxies that directly led up to the eruption of hostile exchanges in the last days of December, when on the 27th the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) rocketed a US base near Kirkuk, killing one American contractor; resulting in a massive reprisal airstrike on both Iraqi and Syrian Shiite militias that killed 25 of the former; triggering the PMU assault on the US Embassy in Baghdad just before New Years' - which, in turn, finally led to the drone strike on Soleimani and Al-Muhandis in the wee hours of January 3.

It appears that Soleimani and his IRGC did make - and pay for - a strategic miscalculation: they were wrong to think that the US military presence in Iraq could be confronted head-on, i.e. that their Shiite but Arab brethren in Lower Mesopotamia were as yet ready to see the exit of American coalition forces which were still an insurance policy against ISIS. This for sure meant Soleimani's demise: as Trump himself has admitted the general was already marked for termination, with only the pretext of loss of American life missing until the Kirkuk attack. But the broader geopolitical - that is, regional and even global - blunder was far and away Trump's and not Iran's: in one fell swoop, he gave his principal adversary, China, just the added pretext in Tehran and enhanced legitimacy in Baghdad that, over time, would render the loss of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis small potatoes.

Indeed, it's worth emphasizing from here on out just how badly the Trump administration is misrepresenting the actual state of play in the Mideast: few American representatives and policymakers - forget the general public - have any idea that their country's escalating mutual vitriol with Iran is actually about China. In the whirlwind of aftershocks of Soleimani's assassination - culminating in a retaliatory Iranian missile strike on a US airbase in Iraq, along with an accidental downing of a Ukrainian jetliner over Tehran - it would be hard not to get lost tallying the same old opposing scores, i.e. hardliners versus reformers within Iran, or Iran versus its "Great Satan" adversary. And it definitely is a temptation to reduce Trump's - and America's - conundrum with the Islamic republic to the mere imperative to secure a better nuclear deal than the 2015 JCPOA accord.

No, the world is already moving on. As economic and hence geopolitical power continues its irrevocable shift from West to East, it will dawn on even an increasingly provincial and inward-looking United States - Trump or not - that a catastrophe of monumental proportions is already unfolding for not just the liberal democratic world, but the very security of Western Judeo-Christian civilization itself. There's just no turning back now: the autocratic Eurasian nexus of China, Russia, and Iran will not permit the Anglo-Zionist imperium to emerge unscathed from the blunder of a "clash of civilizations" - one made only the worse by the complete ignorance of the very nature of this struggle that its instigators, Washington and Jerusalem, have unwittingly (even largely unknowingly) committed to.

There is no great "Arab spring 2.0" coming in Iraq - no more than there's some "Persian spring" sweeping Iran. It's now the Twelver Shiism of the Imams - of the children of Ali and Fatima and their son, Hussein - against the Protestant European offshoots of the Roman Catholic Church, alongside the latter-day reincarnation of the Jewish Nation of Israel. Sunni Islam will remain largely an observer but also act as mediator for its Shia brethren; just as Orthodox Russia may perform such a role for its Anglo-Zionist cousins. But China - the great "Middle Kingdom" - now holds all the real winning cards: the Celestial Emperor in Beijing will not so much choose the winner of the gathering clash as opportunistically ride its crest to commanding Eurasian heights only once before seen in history, with the Mongol Empire of the Great Khans.

A mere three decades after "history ended", it's already returning with a vehemence and vengeance that will shock even its apparent beneficiaries. The world in the early 2030s will be virtually unrecognizable from the one today: it will mark the dawn of a Chinese hegemony even more remarkable for its sheer unrivaled scope as was that of America's short-lived "unipolar moment" four decades earlier. For America herself will no longer even register so powerfully as the unified, Anglophone, federal constitutional republic it's been since 1776: its structure will remain, but with its Northwest European cultural core so relatively diminished that the entire hemisphere's Latin, i.e. Central and Southern components will have overtaken it in vitality. That, too, will mark the onset of the Age of Fatima.