Forget the Excuses, Ignore the Noise, Bring the Pain
Donald J. Trump has to go. Thus, I have spent and will continue to spend all of my energy in this space and beyond to help make that happen. So far, if the polls are to be believed, it is on its way to becoming reality. We have a couple of more weeks of this rancid shit show if we get it together and do that thing we must: Vote! And not only vote, but make sure other likeminded citizens who care about the future of this nation get to voting to oust this political inferno.
These past few weeks, in desperation mode, the president has been trying to undermine the idea of voting. This makes sense. If enough people vote, he loses. He has never polled over forty-four percent. He has never been in the black. He is, as far as I can tell, the only underwater president, as he was the only ever underwater candidate. He won a plurality against a larger field to gain the Republican nomination with less than forty percent in most of the primaries and then he won the presidency with one of the most improbable inside-straights in the history of national politics.
I’ll give you an example of how goofy 2016 was – Trump garnered forty-six percent of the vote and won. Mitt Romney, the previous GOP nominee, won forty-seven percent and lost. Romney was more popular than Trump. Wisconsin, a state that helped put Trump over the top, voted less for him than Romney four years earlier. The difference being Romney went up against the most powerful candidate since the late 1980s in Barack Obama, who did get over fifty-percent of the vote and won the overall count, which Trump did not, crushing it in 2008 and 2012, while Trump beat the worst politician of my lifetime, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sucked.
I wish to get into that subject another time, but I digress.
Where were we? Oh, right; Trump is fucked, and he knows it, so he needs to convince people that things are rigged and a fraud and all those things he says when he is fucked. Like the day before I sent this to press where he began spouting that his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, “hurts God” and would end religion. But by now we should know this crazy shit is coming. If not for being the leader of the free world, this nonsense would be ignored as the ravings of a lunatic. Like New England Patriots fans who keep trying to convince us they don’t cheat despite being fined almost annually for cheating.
Mail-in balloting seems to be a bugaboo for Trump. Not sure why. He votes by mail. Republicans do more mail-in voting than Democrats. Before Trump turned the party into a frat house, Republicans pushed for legislation to make it easier to vote by mail. The idea that one guy, and it is an important guy, no doubt, says something is illegal and fraudulent does not make it so. What it does tell you is that despite the brain bubbles Trump knows mail-in voting is going to be increased dramatically as the Trump Virus ravages the nation, so he makes this crap up for a built-in excuse when he gets his clocked cleaned.
None of this has any bearing on anything. States run these elections. The system, while weird and screwy for centuries, works. Even when JFK had dead people vote and George W. Bush got lawyers together to make him president or a game show host suckered a few thousand people in the Rust Belt to buy his snake-oil, it works. Always has. This is why Trump floated the universally panned idea, even at FOX News, that maybe the election should be postponed. Why would he say such a thing? A president suggesting something this country performed during the Civil War, every other war, and a Great Depression?
Predictable. If you are going to lose, that is. And Trump is going to lose. He knows it. If Trump were ahead in these polls he keeps calling fraudulent, he’d want to have the election moved up to this weekend. Remember in 2015 during the primaries, the man brought pages of poll numbers into rallies. He talked about polls the way Christians talk about Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. He is obsessed with ratings. While Americans die of a pandemic he failed to contain, he cites his television ratings. Ratings are polls. He likes those, but he doesn’t like ones where he is getting beat. Thus, they’re fraudulent.
Now, I have been getting a quite a bit of worried correspondences from people in my line of thinking – Trump must go – that somehow the president’s fucking with the Post Office, which he is doing to essentially slow down ballots or some other shenanigans he is cooking up to make his rousing defeat look like something else, will do irreparable harm to the process. And while Trump has worked hard to destroy America, he won’t be able to kick this one to the curb. Elections have rules that have nothing to do with Trump or any president, because the founders put in fail-safes for knuckle-draggers. And once they go in effect, Donald Trump is a candidate, not president. The boxer doesn’t get to referee. He might want to, and says he is going to, but he cannot. There is a referee for that, the United States Constitution. We already know Trump doesn’t care about that, but this also matters none. We run elections in this country, despite mentally-challenged narcissists with a Twitter account.
And here’s the best part: If counting the votes this November takes five, even six months to accomplish – most likely it will be weeks, but to calm my friends, let’s have some fun – as of January 20, 2021 Trump’s term is over. Until someone is officially elected then Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, becomes president. Trump doesn’t just get to keep going as long as there is not a result in the 2020 election or he engages in his showbiz lawsuits or “refuses to go” like I have seen in more fringe scenarios. Someone has to be in charge and the Constitution says Trump is done with his first term at 11:59 on the nineteenth. So, if you want to finally see a woman president at the expense of a bloated, big-mouthed misogynist, then root for some crazy long counting.
Other than that, voting is fine – by mail or over long pandemic-related lines at the polls. There is zero evidence that mail-in ballots can be fabricated or manipulated. This is an excuse for being wildly unpopular and headed for defeat from a guy who lies about everything all the time.
But, just to be clear, I think people should suck it up and go out and vote the old-fashioned way on November 3. Go to the polls. Put on a mask or a hazmat suit, get out of your cocoon, stop Netflix for a minute, and hit the streets. If people can take to the streets to protest amidst tear-gas and rubber bullets and endure armed paramilitary forces, or if people can rush into the streets to tear down statues and burn the local Wendy’s, or if people insist on going to beaches and midnight rages in the face of a pandemic, then they can vote. Drive down the street or one-hundred miles. Stand on line as long as it takes. If they want you to get an ID, then fucking get one.
It is a few hours, one day out of your life to end this nightmare.
Donald Trump has to be stopped. To do that, you don’t waste your breath berating him or arguing with your friends and relatives, or march against him with homemade signs of him dressed as Hitler, or impeach him, or write stupid op-eds like this one. You get your asses out there in November and save America from this madman.
Vote!
