Where is Trump's endgame as October looms?

I took a vacation from writing yesterday. I needed to think. For months I have been writing posts headed "Endgame" on the basis of many more months trying to accurately see the trump story as it really is. My premise remains the same. Trump is leading America toward a state of dictatorship. This is not liberal hissy fit stuff. This is a straight analysis of his assault on values and his actual impulses.

What I have missed and learned in the last day is something I already knew but chose to ignore. Trump's base is not the third of everyone who is mentally deficient in the eyes of the left and much of the media.

It is close to half of everyone. We are people, half of whom are willing to put up with Trump and even with our fractured politics. The alternative is worse in their view than the status quo.

OK with dictatorship?

Almost half the country is OK with what I regard as a creeping police state, ICE night raids and a Parris Island zeitgeist entering police and law enforcement culture. Almost half are fine with anything that builds the military and looks patriotic. Half of America is malleable even if Trump steps all over human rights, nods to dictators and sees his pussy-grabbing effusions as locker-room talk.

Bannon was right?

Yesterday I spent an hour with Steve Bannon. I watched his hour-long interview with Charlie Rose.

It was most refreshing. His hindsight about the election is correct, both why Hillary lost and why Trump won. Bannan skirts the tough spots, but in the main he is right. Trump won because his message connected and though he was Bernie-like in his populist critique, he was preferable to most. Besides Trump had an ace in the hole named Hillary, so Bernie was going nowhere.

Confusing the left?

What emerged on my day off was that the left and the media still do not get Trump and Bannon and their ilk. Bannon with a measure of bravado says that he knew from the git-go Trump would win.

After watching the video below, I had a new respect for the Trump phenomenon and a clear sense of how deluded it is to believe that most screaming about Trump has any capacity to change things.

At the same time, I believe that Bannon and Trump are simply wrong in their version of populism and their embrace of many mindless elements of Tea Party, alt-right thinking.

What kind of ending?

Where does this leave the endgame that I have predicted would be played out in the six weeks between now and November? We are still in for what will be bigger than Watergate by a factor of ten. The media and the left will continue to emphasize all the reasons Trump is a disaster and ignore why he still succeeds. And the alternative to Trump leaving will still be an American form of dictatorship because half the country is OK with that.