Thought for the day one day before Biden is sworn in: “If Trump hadn’t been so stupid; he could have pulled it off.” That is really scary because there will be others, more intelligent, less ego driven and much better suited, who will emerge from the swamp and we must be ready because just as they will rise, there will be those who are ready to follow them, even as there was a ready-made following for Donald Trump.
No matter how well the various major factions in this nation coalesce to form a bi-partisan citizenry that moves to raise the nation back up, there will always be groups that will never buy what thinking men are selling. There will always be a certain percentage of the nation that felt betrayed by their leaders and are too willful, too stupid and too racist to ever agree with the majority of clear thinking, functional citizens. Those are the people we must deal with in the coming years. Some of them got there because for too many years they believed in the American dream and followed failed leadership until they got to the point where a Donald Trump emerged from a garbage pile of unworthy candidates to tell them that he was different, that he could lead them out of the swamp, that he was one of them.
Sure they should have immediately recognized that a filthy rich con man and criminal was not one of them, but they were sick of being deceived by professional politicians and they wanted to believe that someone who looked like a successful businessman and TV personality could really help them. Sure they should have said; “wait a minute, this guy has no experience or background for this job and he has a serious record of criminal activity; how will he ever do it?” But they already knew that the leaders who had the experience had failed to help them when they needed it, so they made a bad choice. For some it was a choice they would make over and over because it was driven by racism and hatred, but for many others it was a choice that was simply made because they thought it would help them and their families to lead a better life. These are the ones who after making that bad choice in 2016 should never have made that same choice again, but they did.
Last November despite all the evidence against such a move, they voted for Trump again. Why?
Well, no one likes to admit they’re wrong. It’s just human nature to want to be right. So if you make a wrong choice, unless you have a lot of character or a really strong moral sense, there’s a good chance you will follow that same path again just because you don’t want to admit you were wrong the first time. And to my way of thinking, that is why this race was even close. From where I’m standing 84 million votes out of 155 million in an election that would normally be decided by fractions of a percentage is a landslide, but not if you don’t want to be wrong, not if it means losing your last shred of dignity. So you buy the big lie; “The election was rigged.” In a world of alternate truth, it has become the only thing that makes sense. Then you follow it to the nation’s capital and create an incident that humiliates our nation in front of the entire world, an incident that attacks the very basis of our democracy and you do it for a disgraced President who lied from before he was elected to the day he led you to participate in an attempted coup based on that and many other lies.
So what do you do now? Trump is gone. He may never run for office in this country again. Now that he has been separated from Twitter and Facebook, he has no serious propaganda platforms and is being pursued by all manner of law enforcement for the crimes he committed before and during his presidency. He will be lucky not to spend the rest of his years in a cell. The question is what about those who followed him? Do they finally recognize the reality of that for which they have been partially responsible and move to act reasonably going forward, or do they slide into the maniacal fantasies of another cult like QAnon or one of the quasi- militaristic hate groups like Bugaloo Boise or Proud Boys or the KKK.
If they retreat, if they back off and acknowledge reality there is a place for them in the new society but they must recognize those that have been lying to them. They don’t have to buy everything the Democrats are selling. All they have to do is sit back and wait until Biden produces.
Trump and his lackeys made a lot of promises and from where I’m standing they have delivered on none. Not unless you are already rich. Then they did make you richer. But if you’re not rich they have actually made you poorer.
He told the believers he was going to build a wall that would keep out brown people who were taking their jobs. He built 14 miles on a 1000-mile border and that didn’t keep anything out. Trump also told the world that Mexico would pay for the wall. So how many pesos has anyone seen? The first part was a lie because the brown people didn’t steal American jobs, automation did, and it allowed the rich to get richer while poor kids starved.
Next he said he was going to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with a great new system of healthcare for which, after four years, the GOP has never written a single sentence, mainly because they couldn’t come up with anything better than what we already had.
He told us that his trade policies would bring millions of jobs to our country but his tariffs cost us jobs and raised prices on goods that we needed to feed and clothe our families. He told us he would lower our taxes but the only taxes he lowered were those on major corporations and the rich. He said he was against war but he instigated sales of weapons to unstable governments all over the world, which destabilized already chaotic regions and led to thousands of deaths. He has lied about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to his relations with enemy governments, and his followers have just sucked it all up and continued to follow him. Now he has lied about the election that saved the nation from him and the result is an attack on our legally elected government.
Even Moscow Mitch McConnell, the creep who twisted our laws and traditions to stack the Supreme Court, couldn’t take any more and has stated publically that Trump lost the election and indicated that he may vote to convict on impeachment. McConnell is followed by a growing number of honest Republicans. Of course the most honest Republicans have already left the GOP and have formed the Lincoln Project. You want to believe real conservatives, believe them.
It’s time for this country to start to pull together to enable it to achieve the necessary goals in health, education, infrastructure, clean air, water and international cooperation that will be necessary to save the planet and give those inhabiting it a shot at a good life in the future. In order to do that, most of us have to stop doing stupid things and try to pull it together to make good decisions- for their own benefit and for that of mankind.