Banker: “One Million Will March on Washington if They Impeach Trump - They Will Be Armed”

via Soren K Group and Marketslant [4]

Because He’s TNT

Sometime contributor Bon Scott who happens to be not only a Trump supporter but more importantly a Constitutional expert and Big  “L” Libertarian had this to say in response the ‘Impeach Trump’ escalation.

10,000,000 people will march on Washington if they try to impeach Trump… they will be heavily armed. I will be one of them. No kidding

While our colleague seems given to hyperbole consider this. Last year as early as February he said:

“Trump can win. Ignore the polls. Polls are meaningless in an election with so many “shock events”. The truth is Donald Trump can win the election in a landslide. 

That was true. We quoted him in our October 2016 post HERE [5]

SKG contributor Vince Lanci echoed Bon’s words in this Aug post [6]:

On the flip side Trump fans should be happy.  If past calls are any indication Trump will indeed win in  landslide..

Bon also said in our July Post [7]

Trump will spend like a drunken sailor

That Story HERE [7]

This is also true in Trumps’s attempts if not in execution yet.

Can you argue With Bon?

The truth is, while our pseudonymous contributor is given to outrageously couched statements, he  has picked up  on something that is close to our hearts.  You can  see it in how polls are just wrong consistently. And to us that is explainable. The statistical world relies to heavily on  polls. Polls are merely “snapshots’ of moments.

What is not revealed in polls is the subjectivity of the person being polled!. We know the bias of pollsters. But what has been ignored for years is subjective probability. That concept relates to trends when humans are involved.

Do you think people are going to be honest with pollsters anymore? No, they say what you want to hear so they can move on. Voting is very private. And people  are taking back that privacy. On a broader scale, subjective or conditional probability includes drifts or trends.  Nassim Taleb is a key proponent of this, and we count him  as a genius in  taking his options  knowledge and applying it to many fields in need of improvement. We also  enjoy his lambasting those dogmatists that do not get it.  Jim Rickards is another subscriber to Bayesian  theorems.

What Is  Bayesian  Probability?

Simply put, is it a 50/50 chance the sun rises tomorrow? Statistically the answer is yes to an uneducated caveman seeing it for the first time. But how many times can that caveman stick with those stats when 5 years later the sun continues to rise?

Personal example: If it is 50/50 that a coin  lands on heads or tails, then how come I could at one time flip a coin and make it land on heads 10x in a row? Statisticians will say ” Luck, law of large numbers will fix that”. Sorry guys that is just not true.

Here is why. I practiced coin flipping at one point in my trading career to make it a skill. I measured how high it had to go, what side the coin had  to start on, and how hard I had to flip it. Was I cheating? No. What people see as randomness is actually a skill based event via intense practice. Had I let the coin land on the ground it would have been randomized. But I did not.

Pollsters Do Not Get it

This is the essence of the core ignorance of pollsters and statisticians. They ignore the human factor. And with that, they miss grass roots macro  trends like the populism that triggered Brexit. They do not see what our friend Bon does, that people are not numbers, and the more we rely on  models dogmatically,  the more likely we are to be surprised. Or as he would say : Dont be stupid! Trump is going to win in a landslide.

So while numbers are counted by Nate Silver, conditional/ subjectivity of the person polled is not factored in. This is the problem in modern  polling and stats.

In trading we used to Fade brokers to protect ourselves from this. We were taught statistically that it is 50/50 every order is buy/sell. But when  a  broker came in everyday at the same time for 2 months straight and bought from us, that concept meant shit. We used to say:  Crap, how high do I have to make this price so he would not buy from us? And the answer was essentially NONE. That broker was a buyer and would continue to be one until he began unwinding  his position.

Option Traders Don’t Get it

At the time I understood this as Bayesian probability and explained the rationale for “fading” markets to my boss and mentor. He disagreed. He did not get it. He was an extremely hard working savant who in the end became a bitter detractor despite my idol worship and his own immense  success. When you quit working for him, with only a couple exceptions, you were the enemy.  All this because the man, like the modern pollster could not grasp that whenever human behaviour is involved, probability has a subjective factor.

What are the Odds of a DC March if a Populist President is Impeached?

Can we afford to ignore “Bon”, our colleague who is quite sane, does not represent the lunatic fringe, and is intimately aware that while Trump may not be a beltway darling, he has governed through populism.

Witness how Trump castrated the media with his “Fake News” press conference. He literally made people reject the MSM info as false and further likely turned people off to even looking at it.

He effectively put them in a box where they could not sell their wares anymore.

This is no easy task. Winning elections via populism is easy game. But actually governing that way is not easy. We’d dare say,  it has not been done ever in a Republic.

So here we are. A populist-ly elected President who has thus far governed through populism. A president with a loyal following that is likely to not take an unconstitutional impeachment sitting down. Trump will not go quietly into the night. He will appeal to the public. He is a narcissist. And to his credit, narcissists are  all about winning popularity contests.

And against him are now the legal types who will use the Constitution to undermine it.

To Bon we joked:

“To get you and your pals to disburse, all we have to do is kill the wifi.”

To which he responded:

That isn’t enough. You may get some to go home with Beer bribes, but the core people mean business. They will not stand for this.

People vs. Elites

Do you want to bet against a DC march  if Trump is impeached? Do you want to be short Gold or long stocks if that happens?

A march would be an exponential increase in uncertainty. The people vs the Elites. And in the end with Elitist power at their disposal including manipulating the press, social media, revoking freedom of speech and rights to assemble and restricting gun ownership; it wont be enough. There will be the fallback to the use of force. People in power always lean on that when  needed. And while they may have learned marketing and manipulation tricks, at bottom, there is always metal hammer inside that velvet wrapper you see.

People are fed up. Impeach  at Your Own Risk

We personally own 2 guns. A Benelli shotgun for skeet, and a 357 magnum for target range shooting. As believers in gun control laws for non law abiding citizens, we will not be inclined to subscribe to giving up what protects us from  a deep state that does what it wants and when it loses, changes the rules. This is the potential beginning of  the libertarian left and right People aligning against the authoritarian left and right Elitists.

Impeachment Adds Uncertainty, Not Closure

So this will not end with impeachment. It will only stir more problems at grass roots levels. To tell 50% of the country that already distrusts its institutions that those  same institutions are collaborating to kill off their president may be a spark of revolt unlike anything seen  since the 1960s.

This is the cause that would unite libertarians, rednecks, NRA types, uneducated (but no less human and entitled to constitutional rights) and the silently suffering suburban middle class under one banner. People evolve at their own pace. Stop telling us what is best for us. That is not working out so well for you in the world. Don’t do it here.