Trump's Claims and Trump's Voters

 There are two questions about Trump’s claim of enough fraud in enough states by Democrats to steal an election he says he won.  The first is whether his lawyers can present enough evidence to win lawsuits in enough places. It seems clear that is not going to happen, and Biden will get the electoral votes from the states he won and become president.

The second is what to say to the  people who voted for him and  believe Trump is right even if his lawyers cannot make a good enough case in court.  That one is also important.  According to the news,  millions of people who voted for Trump believe he was cheated out of a victory. Many Trumpers and conservatives in the media certainly do. It would be good to persuade them to change their minds.

It might help to consider some of the claims from Trump. The fact of him  being well ahead in some states until absentee and other mail in ballots were counted would be reason for suspicion in a normal election, but not in one in which he urged his voters to vote on election day, while his opponent urged his to vote early and by mail. There is problem with the  story of a truck arriving in the middle of the night in one state with a load of thousands of ballots for Biden  in trash cans and boxes.  At a time when so many people carry smart phones, one would think that if the story were true, somebody would have photos or video of the truck and people unloading it.  I know of no one having published any.  There are stories of Democrats collecting blank mail in ballots from non-voters and using them to cast votes for Biden.  We  have seen no photos or videos of Dems going door to door in big cities before the election collecting such ballots, and if it happened with thousands of ballots, it seems likely we would have.  It has been claimed that more than a hundred percent of registered voters voted in many  counties or precincts. It would  be simple to post a spreadsheet and supporting screen shots of official data from 2020 showing this  if it happened, but Trump’s people have not done so.  There is a claim  that software on computer systems from Dominion  that was used in elections in several states  allowed tampering to change millions of votes from Trump to Biden.  It should be easy to get machines identical to those used in the states, load them with the software and a set of results, alter those  results, list the checks and controls used in the states using the system, and demonstrate those were inadequate to catch the switch.   We have not seen that either.

 His supporters have good reasons to be skeptical of officials and people in the traditional media. They should realize they also have good reasons to be skeptical of Trump and require him to back up what he says about the election with facts. He is not an honest man, and he lies a lot.  Instead they are taking him on faith, a bad idea with any politician. They would be happier, and the country would be better off,  if they would hold Trump to the same standard of proof to which they would hold a politician they didn’t like, accept the loss, relax, move on, and wait for next time.   

They probably will have to get there on their own. I doubt if Trump will be changing his story  any time soon.  His behavior it getting stranger not less strange, and there is little reason to believe he will care enough about what this is doing to the country to stop. I’m not looking forward to Biden, but I am looking forward to Trump’s being gone.

Thanksgiving 2020

 

Every un-incarcerated, un- incapacitated adult who considers Thanksgiving this year has to decide for himself what he will do about the holiday whether today, this weekend, or whenever the schedule  of his occupation permits.  That is not a political opinion. It is a statement of fact. A decision to follow the dictates of officials is still a decision. That most of what one hears promotes either blind obedience or unthinking defiance is typical of the twitteroid level of so-called discourse these days.  (It is certainly possible to believe that everything politicians and bureaucrats of one’s preferred party say and want is true, scientific, necessary, and desirable just as it is possible to believe that everything politicians and bureaucrats one does not care far say and want is false, hypocritical, unnecessary, and malicious.  However it is not smart.) It is interesting that one hears so little about another and better  possibility. People could try to make a rational decision based on their situation and what is known about the disease, the status of the epidemic, and which people are at risk for getting very sick.  That is what should happen and what officials should have been encouraging instead of issuing mandates which ignore relevant differences, which they do not follow,  and which millions of people will scoff at and ignore, often unsafely. They have come across as hypocritical buffoons, petty would be tyrants, or both, and too many people have tuned them out, because based on their behavior, they deserved to be tuned out. That is bad, because people do need to be careful and take the risks seriously.

Wrong about Trump

 Before the election I thought that, bad as Trump is, talk about his refusing to accept the facts if he lost the election was both farfetched and a veering a little toward the paranoid. Well I was wrong, and the paranoiacs were right.  It is one thing to observe that Democratic Party machines cheat a little at election time, and that the cheating probably has tipped a few very close state wide contests from time to time.  (The Texas primary that sent Lyndon Johnson to the senate and a recent senate race in Minnesota come to mind.)  It is another to claim that a nationwide conspiracy has erased millions of valid votes and counted hundreds of thousands of invalid ones in multiple states in a presidential election, thereby denying reelection to the actual winner. I know of no knowledgeable person who thinks something like that is doable. Karl Rove has likened it to a fantastic plot of a villain in a James Bond movie.

I don’t know if Trump really believes it or not, and in terms of judging his behavior it doesn’t matter much. A normal, responsible, at least fairly decent person who thought he might have been cheated in an election would gather his evidence and go to court where he would expect to have to put up or shut up with his evidence either being good enough to make his case or not good enough. He would not scream without offering any evidence that he had won “big”,  and that secret enemies had stolen the election from him.

That sort of behavior would be bad enough in a race for a seat on a city council somewhere. From a president of the United States it is dangerous and execrable, but that is what we are getting from Trump.  Recently as the experts in a council of the homeland security department  announced their findings that the systems used in the election were safe and secure, he tweeted that Democrats had used election  software to delete or switch to Biden almost three million votes for him. This stuff  is pathetic and funny and would be funnier if it were not for what it doing to the country.

Trump has convinced millions of people that this year’s presidential election was a fraud  with an earned victory stolen from him and his voters, and thus that the incoming administration will be illegitimate.   There are valid reasons for people to be generally skeptical of what they hear from officials, bureaucrats,  and those in the traditional media.  Such skepticism is generally beneficial.  Falling for nonsensical conspiracy theories is not.  Falling for  this one  can leave a person no longer believing he lives in a representative and fairly free republic. That’s not good for the country. I doubt if Trump cares about that, and that is one more piece of evidence of how little he seems to care for  the country or the responsibility of his office.

The good news is that he soon will be gone. There is evidence that the skids are being greased. Senator Lankford has demanded that Biden and Harris be given the intelligence briefings Trump has denied them and promised action if it does not happen.  There probably are other things happening as well to arrange for things to go right in the next couple of months, but it is a heck of a note that such efforts are necessary in the United States of America.

Trump's Political Suicide

 Trump lost an election  which his opponents did a whole lot to help him win. From America hating socialist poster children in congress to the green new deal to the politically correct cancel culture to false and insulting accusations that white Americans as a class were bigots (“systematic racism”) to their  governors and mayors appearing just a little too giddy over their power to shut  things down and boss people around  during  the epidemic to the plans to eliminate or defund local police, the Dems gave ammunition to the Republicans who took advantage of it to make gains in the house, hold the senate (assuming at least one win in Georgia), and do well in state elections despite having Trump hanging around their necks.

  Trump did not lose because of his administration’s actions or policies.  Some were good and some were bad, but none was enough to make him unacceptable to conservative or centrist voters in a contest against a typical big government Democrat. He did not lose because of bad luck, despite the covid epidemic. (A better president could have handled the epidemic in ways  that would not have harmed him politically.)  He did not lose because of the strength of his opponent. Biden was neither an appealing candidate nor an effective campaigner. Unlike other defeated elected incumbents since the start of the 20^th Century, he did not lose because of very bad times in the country or votes lost to an important third party challenger.

He lost because of himself, because of his obnoxious personality and repulsive behavior.  After being elected in 2016, he had almost four years to learn to how to behave like a president.  He surely must have been told by advisors that he needed to do so. Yet he didn’t even manage to behave like an ordinary  grown up, much less a president of the United States.   He remained mean, arrogant, blustering, bullying, expressively ignorant, erratic, bombastic, overbearing, unthinking, and unlikeable to the end, and he displayed it in public.  He wasn’t murdered politically. He committed suicide.

He was a mistake from the first. He won in 2016 because he was not Hillary Clinton, something other and actually qualified Republican candidates also could have done. I think a lot of people who have no use for Biden and think he will be a bad president still have a gut feeling of relief that that they won’t have to see or listen to Trump anymore.  I would guess that among them are a lot of Republican senators, governors, and congressmen. I am one libertarian who feels the same way.

 

Feeling Lucky

 

“God watches out for children, drunks, and the United States of America”

- Attributed in various forms to Bismarck, Churchill, and others

 

One does not have to believe in divine intervention or to diminish or disparage the way Americans have earned the country’s successes by their work and decisions to notice that sometimes we do luck out. This looks like one of those times. We could have had four more years of Trump leading to who know what or a big win for the Democrats perhaps leading to harmful leftist policies or even damage to the structure of the republic. Instead  we likely will have a Republican senate to block any dangerously leftist legislation and a one term, traditional Democrat president who is not Donald Trump.  That’s not too bad as strokes of luck go.

My Guess

 Here is my guess for the elections tonight, and is it only that – a guess. I think the Democrats will hold the house, and the Republicans will hold the senate. I think Biden will defeat Trump in a close one.  There are many people who care more about a candidate’s personality than about policies or issues. This gives the more likeable or in 2016 the somewhat less unlikeable candidate a boost.  I see Biden’s public personality as neither likeable nor unlikeable but rather somewhat blank, while Trump’s is very unlikeable. I think that allows  Chauncey Gardner to get by Willie Stark.