Official White House Photo Courtesy of D. Myles Cullen
Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump board Marine One on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020, en route to Nashville, Tenn.
No one should be surprised Donald Trump is spending the final of days of his presidency lost in his own fantasy world where he’s won re-election. It’s a fitting ending to all the other fantasies Trump’s deluded himself into believing celebrating himself as the greatest president who ever existed achieving the greatest accomplishments in American history on a daily basis.
Very little Trump has said in four years has ever been true. Now Trump absurdly denies what every rational American knows just happened. He tweets: “Biden did not win, he lost by a lot!” Just the opposite. Joe Biden won by a lot. He’s projected to defeat Trump by almost seven million votes, nearly as much as Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Republican President Herbert Hoover in 1932 after Hoover’s failed economic policies plunged the nation into the Great Depression.
The reason was pretty much the same. Trump’s incompetent, dysfunctional and malevolent presidency resulted in hundreds of thousands of American deaths destroying tens of millions of jobs because Trump was incapable of creating a coherent national strategy to protect Americans in a deadly health pandemic shattering the U.S. economy.
Ugly Forces of Hatred
Special recognition should go to Republicans in the House and Senate who watched silently while their party’s president not only failed the nation, but actually increased the death toll and economic devastation by discouraging simple health measures to save American lives and thousands of U.S. businesses, large and small. Many were afraid to try to halt Trump’s American wreckage because it would make themselves political targets of the ugly forces of hatred Trump unleashed within the Republican Party.
Although Biden was initially slow to attract support in the earliest Democratic primaries, he turned out to be the perfect candidate—perhaps the only candidate—to defeat those ugly forces supporting Trump. Biden ultimately won 306 electoral votes by flipping the “blue wall” of upper Midwestern states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania back to the Democrats and picking up the former strongly Republican states of Georgia and Arizona. Biden strengthened the Democratic bond between cities and their suburbs as suburbs become more racially diverse. That leaves Republicans dependent upon votes from rural areas where family farms are rapidly disappearing and dying small towns abandoned long ago by the wealthy corporations controlling the Republican Party.
|
|
Biden’s Sun Belt victories are important Democratic breakthroughs. Party control of the Senate will be decided by two closely fought Georgia Senate races going to runoff elections Jan. 5. It will be a battle royal because if Democrats win both, they’ll evenly divide the Senate 50-50 with Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate would break ties. Turnout will be lower, but Democrats already know they have enough voters in Georgia to win.
Even if Republican Leader Mitch McConnell retains narrow Senate control, it’s the worst possible time for Republican congressional gridlock to block serious action by President Biden to resolve the dire national health and economic crises. If the fastest rising surge of the deadly coronavirus so far is allowed to explode uncontrollably into an even more terrifying tsunami of rampant death and economic destruction, Republicans will richly deserve to become the first opposing party in modern history to be swept out of office in record numbers in the midterms following a presidential election.
Trump Losing in Court
So far Trump is 0-for-double-digits in lawsuits in states Biden won. His lawyers have been humiliated in court for filing frivolous lawsuits that would get them legally sanctioned if their client wasn’t the president of the United States. Not a single vote has been thrown out. Thousands of illegal votes Trump claimed would prove Nevada was “a cesspool of Fake Votes” turned out to be one disputed ballot. Lawyers filed 230 pages of sworn statements from Michigan Republican observers detailing shocking political crimes such as poll workers giving Republicans “mean looks” and suspicions because military ballots contained votes for Biden. Perhaps military voters resented Trump calling them “suckers” and “losers” for risking their lives in war and refusing to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin for offering bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers.
The most pointless discussion in political media is whether Trump will ever concede that Biden won the election. Who cares? He doesn’t decide who wins. The voters do. Trump is about to disappear from the front pages of newspapers and from news broadcasts faster than he ever imagined. Nobody cares what losers think. Trump has nothing of value to contribute to solving all the horrific national problems he’s leaving behind. He never has.
The sad spectacle is almost over. Trump will be just another madman raving incoherently on a bus somewhere like Milwaukee about Obama committing murder and Hillary eating children while other passengers stare straight ahead avoiding eye contact. In the kind words of Phil Ochs and Joan Baez: “There but for fortune go you and I.”
To read more Taking Liberties columns by Joel McNally, click here.
To read more news, click here.
