One of my favorite time sucks online is Quora. I tend to read and write political and legal questions and answers. The other day, someone posted this question: “Why is there even any path to reelection for this president?”
To which an exceptionally urbane, witty, articulate, and erudite supporter of the Liar-in-Chief, who I will call Mr. M, posted this reply, which I paraphrase: Because there are “enough of us in the right places to reelect him and “make you worthless c**ts cry again.” Mr. Morton spelled out his pejorative term.
I know it doesn’t help to engage, but I couldn’t help myself because it seemed to me that this crassness perfectly encapsulated the Orange Oval Office Orifice’s base’s baseness. And the impossible to overstate need to support Biden and say BIDON! So I posted the below reply, and thought I’d share. Admittedly, there’s nothing new here. It’s more a reminder of what we are up against, and a catalog of the nightmare we have lived the last three years. It’s also relevant to the sorry state of the federal response to COVID-19 (and indeed, I highlighted a recent KOS article listing many of those failures), and it’s cathartic. So, here it is for your reading pleasure and/or use as a cure for insomnia. (Feel free to reply with your “worst of Donnie” moment. Those might make for a great blog entry.)
I think there was a never a more unintendedly (sorry for the odd grammar) articulate and accurate response as the one given by Mr. M. He posits that there are enough people in the right places to reelect trump such that it will make those who oppose trump, whom Mr. M refers to as “worthless c**ts,” cry again. Let’s dissect that, shall we, in order to answer the “path to reelection” question.
Trump tapped into the basest of human instincts in order to whip up resentment and anger to get elected, largely in the part of the population - older, white folks, who have no need to feel either. They are the most protected, privileged class that the world has ever known, yet they sit around listening to FAUX news tell them that their lives are under attack from Mexicans and various other immigrants and gangs and liberals, etc., all who want to take away their right to listen to Christmas music or say Merry Christmas (the war on Christmas! — played every year on FOX news like clockwork), or outlaw their right to hate gay people (they are somehow affecting your marriage!), or, G-d forbid, take away their guns (which never happens - sensible gun regulations, allowed by the 2nd amendment which specifically talks about a “well regulated militia,” is designed to try to keep your kids from being shot down in school or you in your church, not to take away your precious guns of which the US has a national fetish unlike any other civilized society), or allow their daughters to regulate their own bodies, or some such nonsense. (The GOP Platform: G-d, Gays, Guns, and Abortion; and now, new and improved with, “we love Russia!” too.)
So, Mr. M. with his oh so refined response embodies the very essence of the trump voter - hatred and the desire to inflict pain on the other half of the population that disagrees with his “philosophy.”
Mr. M. also says “there are enough of us” to reelect trump. This gets at the fallacy of the electoral college - that a bloviating, pathologically lying, malignantly narcissistic, sexually assaulting, racist, xenophobic, criminal, con artist can get elected while losing the popular vote, by squeaking out a bare margin - 73,000 votes out of 129 million cast, in three swing states - MI, PA and WI. (Side note: please support the National Popular Vote project. www.nationalpopularvote.com.)
But look at what had to happen for that historically unfortunate result (us “c**ts” knew trump’s incompetence and vile personality would result in many deaths and his handling of COVID-19 unfortunately proves the point, not to mention his insane withdrawal from Syria, thus ceding the region to Russia and Putin, almost getting us into WWIII via his nonsense with Iran, pulling us out of the climate change agreement and dismantling climate regulations which hastens the destruction of humanity itself, all of which the next Democratic President will have to fix): you had to have the media’s unrelenting obsession with “emails” and Comey announcing a reopening of the FBI email investigation right before the election, the Wikileaks/Assange hack of the Dems, the Russian interference, a significant amount of voter suppression from right wing governors and state legislatures, etc., and all of that just barely got trump elected. Again - 73,000 votes made the difference out of 129 million cast. That was a perfect storm that is highly unlikely to recur.
So trump now has to run on his record and I highly doubt he will be reelected because his record has been rejected by the body politic at least since 2018. That is, the Dems had a blue wave in the mid-terms, have won most special elections since 2018, have had huge turnout for the most part for their primaries, managed to win in WI last week despite significant voter suppression in concert with the COVID-19 problem, and most importantly, trump has consistently played to his base alone, which has only shrunk given his incompetence and hatred that is on display each and every day. See, for example, all the Republican groups that now oppose him such as the Lincoln Project, THE LINCOLN PROJECT RELEASES NEW VIDEO: UNFIT | The Lincoln Project, Republicans Against Trump, Republicans against TRUMP, and Republicans for the Rule of Law. Republicans for the Rule of Law.
So are there “enough” Mr. M’s in the “right places” to reelect trump? The signs point in the other direction. (And as we all learned, we can’t trust polls, but trump’s handling, or rather, mishandling, of the corona disaster, has him under water in every major poll.)
Then there is Mr. M’s oh so civil use of the word “c**t” to make his point. If there is one unifying theme of trump world and so many who support him, it is sexism and misogyny. From the evidence that trump raped underage women at a party hosted by his friend Jeffrey Epstein (as averred in a lawsuit and for which there was a witness), to the fact that he raped his own wife (as she averred in their divorce filings), to his admittedly walking in on undressed contestants in the Miss Teen USA contest, to the Access Hollywood “grab’em by the pussy” tape, to his calling women horse-faced and whiny and all sorts of disgusting names and talking about Megan Kelly’s period, etc., trump is the very model of a modern major misogynist. That obviously appeals to the Mr. M’s of the world.
Last, Mr. M is “looking forward to the videos” of us “worthless c**ts crying.” That seems to be the most prized reason and rallying cry among the right wing to vote for trump - they know he is a vile, lying, hateful, piece of human filth who pretends to be religious (two Corinthians, anyone?), and patriotic (literally hugging the flag? he looks like a child), but they love to “own the libtards,” as trump’s own son likes to say. Apparently it’s more important to beat the “other side” than to elect competent leadership.
There is a virulent strain of anti-establishment, anti-government thinking on the right (they love to say, as Grover Norquist did, that they want government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub), and they viewed trump as the embodiment of that - a political outsider who they thought could accomplish wonderful things (a pony and a rainbow for everyone), due to his TV-produced, supposed business acumen, despite all evidence to the contrary. The man has bankrupted almost every business he ever had, defaults on contracts left and right, rips off his own charity, cheats on his taxes (and hides his returns at all costs because they prove his ties to Deutsche Bank, China, Russia, etc., and all his illegal tax scams, many that have been reported on by the “failing NY Times,” Washington Post, even the Wall St. Journal, and dozens of other news organizations), does business with criminals, was shunned by every bank except Deutsche which is, shall we say, less than an aboveboard business, could not negotiate his way out of a paper bag, and by all accounts actually has no business chops. He exists mostly by putting his name on others properties for licensing fees.
I will give him this - he is outstanding at self-promotion and conning people, because he plays on human greed and people thus go along with his bullying and ignorance and nonsense to use him to make money. Just as he is a useful idiot for Russia, he has been a useful idiot for so many in real estate who profit off his name. But what works in real estate obviously does not translate to being the leader of the free world.
Unless by “leader” you mean someone who dismantles our relationships with our allies that has kept the planet safe since WWII, and dismantles the US Government. He has literally hollowed it out - we have acting agency leaders all over the place who have not been vetted and approved by Congress, thousands of government jobs unfilled, trump is now doing his best to kill the USPS, etc.
In fact, nowhere is this anti-government philosophy, and its inherent failings, more obvious than in the current coronavirus crisis. Trump actively destroyed our ability to prevent and respond to such a pandemic since he set foot in the Oval. For example, from https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/3/1934015/-A-catalog-of-capital-incompetence-The-short-list-of-things-Donald-Trump-did-to-kill-America, he:
- Canceled the Predict Program, which seeks to anticipate pandemics, and one of the labs is in Wuhan itself. If this program was in place, it could have saved up untold human and economic losses.
- Ignored the military warning in Feb of a “black swan” (i.e., very rare) event - COVID-19, that could wreak havoc on lives and the economy.
- Dismissed the 2018 CDC warning that we were woefully unprepared for a pandemic, that the supply chain would fail, and deaths could exceed the 1918 Spanish Flu.
- In 2018, disbanded the entire US (NSC) global pandemic response team. This is just a small part of his disdain for government, thinking he needs no one but Jared to run the country , He’s insane, and our fellow countrymen and women are now dying because of it.
- He ignored the HINI playbook that the Obama team left for his team.
- He and his team ignored a pandemic simulation exercise (and I have read in other places that they failed it completely, i.e., completely uninformed and unprepared).
- Stopped the Annual DHS Pandemic review in 2017.
- Ignored the results of the Operation Crimson Contagion preparedness test, showing the government was woefully unprepared, just weeks before COVID-19 hit.
- And from Jan - until mid-March, he called COVID a democratic Hoax, not a big deal, said it would go away like a “miracle,” said we only had 15 cases that would be 5 in a day - now we have 279,000 with 7,000 dead. (Update: approx. 723,000 and 34,000 dead as of 4/19/2020.) It is way, way worse than it would have been with a competent administration. This could have been tamped down if they had acted early as everyone else said they needed to. They do not deserve any quarter from you or anyone else. Nor does the entire GOP senate that has enabled trump’s insanity.
So yes, Trump is making all the thousands of families who have lost loved ones to the virus, due to his incompetence and disinterest, cry. And if he is reelected, then the ever articulate, “c**t”-hating Mr. M. and his ilk, will indeed make the rest of us cry.
To my fellow Kossaks, please do everything you can to prevent that. BIDON!