Not Dead Yet

 

Many Trumpists and conservatives are gloating that the results of this year’s election show that the traditional media organizations have lost their power to influence the country or even have become moribund. I think that is wrong, and those in the traditional media did remarkably well, given the cards they had drawn. One should remember that back in the spring Kamala Harris was less popular than Joe Biden and  publicly noticed mainly as an object  of ridicule.

Then Biden dropped out and she was picked as the candidate, giving the traditional media people the task of selling a foolish, unlikable, inarticulate, leftist, lightweight as America’s sweetheart. It was a hard job, and they did it fairly well. She did not lose by much. They were helped by the fact that her opponent was Donald Trump, but what they did is still impressive.

They are not dead yet, and those who do not care for them need to realize that and be ready to play the next hands. The game is not close to over.

Post Election Follies

 

“I Haven’t Seen Democrats This Mad

Since Republicans Freed Their Slaves”

-post election internet meme

 A person does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to be amused by the stuff coming from some Democrats since the election (not the ordinary Democrat voters who are disappointed and concerned but keeping their heads). We have shaved heads, sex strikes, people checking with Google to see how to get to Canada, tearful TV late night show hosts, Harris people blaming Biden, Biden people blaming Harris, somebody blaming almost everybody except Obama, various friends of democracy blaming the voters for being too stupid to appreciate them, all sorts of people blaming men, and colleges and law schools offering students cookies and coloring books to ease their suffering. It’s a show.

There is also the phoniness that has been revealed in the last few days. As Kat Tempf and others have noticed, all the people on leftist TV outfits who claimed they would be imprisoned if Trump won showed up for work after the election as if nothing had happened. One would think that if they believed what they had said, at least one of them would have gone into hiding or run for the border. Since none has or likely will, one may assume they were lying all along. The same thing goes all the more so for those who claimed Trump was another Hitler who would become a dictator and end the republic. If they really believed that, surely at least one of them would be getting out while the getting is good.

I think a special prize for phoniness should go to those such as some of the gang at the Bulwark who have spent the last few years proclaiming preserving democracy as the crucial issue of the age and their role in defending it as a high calling. That was before the election went the wrong way for them. Now they are declaring that the demoi are fools not to be trusted, that their stupid choice should not be respected, and that its implementation should be resisted and sabotaged starting immediately. A person half expects them to follow the Babylon Bee’s lead and come out for abolishing both the electoral college and the popular vote to save our democracy. It may become hard for them the get people to take their “we have no tribal loyalties; we’re just warriors in the sacred cause of democracy” pitch seriously.

I voted Republican against the left rather than for Trump, and I will oppose some of the stuff Trump plans to do. But you have to give the guy credit for both triggering some fine entertainment and highlighting some serious phoniness in the last week.

Getting too Worked Up

 

There are stories in the news about people breaking with friends or even relatives over displeasure with which candidate and party they favor in tomorrow’s election. This strikes me as being both wrong and a little nutty. Yet it seems to happen a lot. (I experienced a mild version of it in early 2017 after Trump became president. A relative ordered me out of his house, not for voting for Trump, which I had not, but for joking about Trump. Apparently to him Trump was so dark an evil as to make humor or levity on the subject too inappropriate or immoral to tolerate. That was strange and not profitable for any concerned.) It is not only that a person’s voting preferences are not the most important thing about him. It is that they usually are among the far less important things about him and a truly asinine criterion for judging him as a human being. It is a corrosive thing to see politics as more important than it is, to make it determinative of one’s opinions of others and even one’s outlook on life. It’s just politics after all. In this election we have two lousy candidates, one of whom will win and do some bad things. It matters, but we are lucky to live in a country where it does not matter that much. The country’s culture, principles, and people are far more important and far better than its politicians and government. Regardless of which of the two losers wins the election, the country and the republic will abide. People on both sides who are giving apocalyptic warnings about the other side should look around, calm down, and see that. They are not doing us any good.

Strange at the Bulwark

 

Despite the claims of being committed to defending liberal democracy without tribal loyalties or partisan prejudices, for a long time the work of the Bulwark mainly has been shilling for the Democrats. Lately its writers have gone well beyond that to something pretty nearly Manichean.

Today there was a silly piece on the site condemning libertarians for the sin of “bothsideism” (that is, accurately recognizing that there are threats to liberty from both Republicans and Democrats) and not automatically throwing in with the Dems as all right thinking people should.

Other writers at the Bulwark have been equating voting for Trump to favoring authoritarianism, fascism or, lately, actual Hitlerism, and seeing it as evidence of something frightening and “dark” in the people who will do it. This of course is nuts. Millions of people will vote for Trump despite not liking him or even disliking him, because they see him as less bad than the leftist alternative. And among the ones who do like him, I would guess that the number of them wanting a right wing authoritarian state is smaller than the number of Democrat voters wanting a Marxist one.

It is all a little strange. It’s a political campaign, for gosh sake, not Armageddon. Maybe part of what is going on at the Bulwark is just panic over the increasing likelihood that Trump will win. It surely is not good for the country. I think either Trump or Harris would be a bad president, but I do not plan to anathematize people who vote for either of them. We are all still Americans, and the partisan fanatics and tribalists at the Bulwark should stop seeing half of us as children of darkness. Besides, it makes them sound a whole lot like Trump at his craziest and nastiest.

How I Will Vote

 

I dislike Donald Trump. I have never voted for him in either a primary or a general election. I have written some very harsh things about him, and I still believe them. I wanted the senate to convict him after the second impeachment in 2021. I wanted the Republicans to move on from him after he left office in disgrace. I wanted Jack Smith to convict him of one of his crimes. I wanted DeSantis or Haley to defeat him for the Republican nomination. I wanted the Democrats to replace Biden as their nominee with a moderate rather than a leftist. I still wish any of those things had happened.

But none of them did. So now we get to choose between Trump and Harris as to which would be the lesser evil (which is a different question from which of them is the less bad human being or the lesser fool). The choice is not an obvious one, but I think it is likely that the country would be better off and suffer less with a Trump administration than a Harris one.

There are issues on which each of them is better or less bad than the other. However, on the important issues of national defense, illegal immigration, personal freedom, the economy, and siding with Israel and civilization and against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and barbarism, Trump and the Republicans are better than Harris and the Democrats. A Trump administration would be likely to be harder on our enemies and to move America’s armed forces away from spending time and effort on various irrelevant or even harmful leftist fads and causes and make them more nearly fully directed toward the crucial mission of deterring and, if necessary, defeating the country’s enemies. Trump would try to  restrict illegal immigration, while Harris probably would keep things much as they are now. On personal freedom, Trump and the Republicans would be likely to restrain federal bureaucrats, cut at least some regulations, and generally make Americans a little freer to live their lives as they like, while Harris and the Democrats would be likely to do the opposite. (Some point to abortion as an exception to this, but as a practical matter, abortion is moot at the federal level. The filibuster is not going away, and there will not be sixty votes in the senate for new laws restricting abortion. The issue will stay with the states.) Trump has some bad economic schemes, but overall, Harris’s are worse. Finally, the Republicans mainly are clear that in the present conflict Israel is right and should win decisively, and its enemies are wrong and should lose disastrously. Too many Democrats including Harris are “nuanced” or worse on that.

While both want to do things I think are seriously wrong, Trump would have the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, and  the traditional media working against him as he tried to do some of the bad things he  wants to do, while Harris would have the same people working with and for her as she tried to do some of the bad things she  wants to do. Because of that she probably is more capable of doing harm than he is.

So I will vote for Trump. I don’t like it. I am displeased with the stupid voters in Republican primaries for putting me and the country in this predicament. But I’ll do it. It won’t be fun, but I’ll do it.

Deciding How to Vote

 

I  usually have voted for Republicans for president. I have never voted for a Democrat. The closest I came to doing so was in 1976 when I almost voted for Carter but finally decided on Ford. I voted for the Libertarian candidate the first time I was eligible to vote (John Hospers as a write in in 1972) and in both of the last two elections, three votes I am still proud of given the other choice of Nixon, McGovern, Trump, Clinton, and Biden.

Once it became clear that Trump would be the Republican candidate, I thought about breaking my streak and voting for Biden, bad as he is, because Trump is so extraordinarily bad. I surely did not want to, but it seemed to be the right thing to do. I knew I believed the country would be better off if Trump lost. Then Biden decided to turn on Israel in its war against Hamas, and that, on top of all the rest that is wrong with him, brought me to my senses. I plan to sit out the presidential election, vote for the Libertarian, or write in Nikki Haley or Liz Cheney. I still think Biden is less bad than Trump and should defeat him, but I cannot vote for him. Sometimes the lesser evil is just too rough, and this year is one of those times.

Trump and the 14th Amendment

 

An insurrection is an attempt to overthrow a government as distinct from only conspiring or thinking about doing so. On January 6^th and the in days before it, Trump clearly made such an attempt. The election was decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th, 2020 when the electors voted. Trump’s efforts after that to remain in power were intended to overthrow the government of the United States. I have often wanted to ask some of Trump’s defenders what other purpose than blocking the final certification of the election they think there could have been for staging the rally on January 6^th. It surely wasn’t Bing and Danny getting the men of the 151^st division to show up on Christmas Eve to show the Old Man he wasn’t forgotten. I think the frightened, overwrought supporters Trump brought to Washington and stirred up with talk of losing their country if what was about to happen in the Capitol was not stopped probably were called in on some vague idea of Trump’s to use them to provide muscle for the efforts to remain in power illegally. However, it really does not matter if I or anyone else is wrong on that. Trump would have been guilty of insurrection if his supporters had stood peacefully outside the Capitol and chanted slogans instead of attacking. Trump’s order to Pence to not allow Biden’s election to be certified and instead recognize bogus Trumpist electors from several states was by itself an act of insurrection and an attempted coup. Again, the election had been decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th. Anyone working to overturn it after that was an insurrectionist enemy of the republic. I doubt if it will matter, but the 14^th Amendment applies to Trump.

Republicans Coming Up Short

 

Republicans thought they had good reasons for expecting to do very well in the midterm elections. Biden was unpopular as was his policy of de facto opening the southern border to illegal immigrants. Price inflation was driving real incomes down. Many people were worried about crime, and many Democrats were ignoring their fears and sometimes seeming to side with the criminals. The end of the Afghanistan war had been a fiasco, and people were questioning the way governments handled the Covid epidemic, especially in schools. On the other hand Republicans already held 212 seats in the house after unusually gaining several in 2020, and all but one of the senate seats they hoped to gain and a couple of the ones they had to to defend were in states Biden carried in 2020. Still they were optimistic about having big gains in the house and gaining enough for a majority in the senate. They were wrong. Depending on a runoff in Georgia the number of Republicans in the senate will be the same as or one less than it is now. They gained enough in the house for a majority, but only a slight one. Relative to their expectations the election was a failure for them. Many Republicans are asking what went wrong.

There are some obvious conjectures. According to the news, the Democrats main selling points were defending legal abortion, claiming Republicans wanted to cut social security, and accusing them of being a “threat to democracy”. The Republicans helped the Democrats out on all three. The general understanding in the country after the supreme court reversed Roe v. Wade was that the government of each state would make its own laws on abortion, leaving access to abortion unchanged in blue states with pro-choice governors or majorities in their legislatures. Then weeks before the election Republican senator Lindsey Graham announced a plan to ban abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy everywhere in the country by an act of congress. Such a bill would never have passed, and would have been vetoed by Biden if it did, but by proposing it, Graham helped the Democrats convince some women that a Republican congress would outlaw abortion. Another senator Rick Scott gave the Democrats a hand on social security by proposing sun-setting federal programs every five years without having the good sense to exempt social security and medicare from his plan explicitly. The Democrats’ scare stories on both issues were dishonest, but foolish mistakes by prominent Republicans made them seem more plausible to some people.

Then there was the Democrats’ pitch on a threat to democracy. There the Republicans failed not so much by what they did as by what they did not do. After losing the election in 2020, Donald Trump tried to stay in office through a coup d’etat. Republicans refused to vote to impeach and convict him, and very few even spoke against him. Then weeks before the election this year, he demanded to be returned to power immediately. Even he probably was not ignorant enough not to know there were no legal or constitutional means for that to happen. Republican officials surely were not. They had to know that what the man was calling for was overthrowing the government of the United States. If any prominent Republican denounced him over it, I missed it in the news. While the Democrats exaggerated the threat in their campaign, since nothing did or would come of Trump’s schemes and rants, the man was an ex- and would be future president from the Republican party. Republicans had a responsibility to do something about him, and they didn’t. That (along with some of the odd Trumpist Republican candidates in some races) made it easier for Democrats to convince people that this year a vote for Democrats was a patriotic vote for the laws and Constitution of the republic.

A person can wonder about the Republicans, as Casey Stengel is said to have wondered about the 1962 Mets, whether anyone there can play the game. If so the first step should be a break with Trump, both for their good and the good of the country. Many of them may not care that it is the ethical thing to do, but perhaps they finally will realize it is also the expedient one.

A Couple of Wild Tales

 Years ago I worked with a guy who had served in the army during the Vietnam war. He told some of us  a story that the MIAs from the war were not really missing in action or prisoners of  the North Vietnamese but rather were held by our government in a secret sanatorium/prison camp in the Philippines because they had contracted the incurable black syphilis in Southeast Asia and were being kept in permanent quarantine to prevent the disease from spreading to the United States.  We  listened politely and  took it as another tall tale from a guy who liked to tell tall tales.

But suppose someone had a reason for taking the story seriously enough to ponder whether to believe it was or to think it might be true. How would he go about deciding reasonably?  He wouldn’t  accept it on faith. He might ask himself whether the person telling the story was generally honest and level headed, and ask him whether he had seen the camp or only heard about it from a guy who heard about it from a guy who heard about it from a guy who said he had seen it.  He might wonder why almost all the listed MIAs were people who disappeared in combat, rather than having vanished  from the streets of Saigon. He  could ask himself why there were no reports of the black syphilis  spreading from Vietnam to other places or infecting anyone in Vietnam or other countries in Southeast Asia, or even existing and infecting anyone anywhere.  He could wonder how, if the story were true, such a secret could have been kept. Most of all, a reasonable person would want to know what evidence the guy telling the story had for his extraordinary claim.  The evidence would have to be compelling to get him  to believe the story and very good to make him even consider it as a possibility. Without evidence  a reasonable person would  dismiss or ignore the story and perhaps wonder whether the one telling it was lying, just having fun pulling people’s legs, or maybe at least a little strange in the head.

Now consider a guy  telling people a story that his landslide victory in  the most recent American presidential election was stolen from him in a huge, nationwide conspiracy with millions of votes mysteriously  switched on compromised voting machines, hundreds of thousands of bogus mail in ballots secretly delivered to counting sites in the middle of the night, thousands of flawed ballots approved by crooked election officials including those of his own party, and untold numbers of votes allowed from dead people, double voters, illegal aliens, people who had not established residence, and others  who should not have voted.

How would a person go about deciding reasonably what to think of that story? He wouldn’t take it on faith. He would remember that the man telling it has no reputation for general honesty and level headedness, but rather the opposite.  He would notice that the storyteller did not  directly observe the events he said happened. He might wonder why election officials  of the man’s own party, people who wanted him to win, have said and  ruled that the election was on the up and up, and the votes were counted accurately. He could ask himself  why the man’s  lawsuits on the election were unsuccessful, and why the man’s own attorney general and head of cyber security contradicted his claims. He could consider how many people would have to have been in on the conspiracy to bring it off and be puzzled why none of them had been caught or induced to rat out his confederates.  Most of all, a reasonable person would want to know what evidence the man telling the story had for his extraordinary claim.  The evidence would have to be compelling to get him  to believe the story and very good to make him even consider it as a possibility. Without evidence  a reasonable person would  dismiss or ignore the story and wonder whether the one telling it was lying or maybe at least a little strange in the head or both, since the man clearly was not pulling anyone’s leg.

I know decent, usually sensible people who wanted Trump to win  and in their disappointment have accepted his story about a stolen election. They are not credulous fools, and they would not have bought the first story. They need to be honest with themselves and stop believing the second because it stands up very little better.  They and people like them  have been conned, and the sooner they realize it, the better off the country will be. Others should try to help them realize it. Dismissive ridicule won’t work, but polite, rational persuasion might at least some of the time.

Whatabotism

 There has been discussion in the last few weeks about “whataboutism”. Whataboutism is the act of responding to a true accusation of  character flaws in or bad actions by someone one favors by pointing out  the same or similar flaws in or actions by those the accusers favor.  It has appropriate and  inappropriate uses.

Whataboutism is invalid as a means to excuse  bad character or  conduct.  If the candidate of party A is a worthless, low life, chicken thief, it does not make him any less so for his supporters to point out that the candidate of party B is also a worthless, low life, chicken thief.

However it can be valid for other purposes. It can be used to demonstrate the hypocrisy of accusers who tolerate and accept things in those they like while making a show of moral outrage over the same things in those they dislike. More important it can present useful evidence that  those favored by the accusers also fail to meet appropriate standards.  Some people have a tendency to believe that if one person is bad, his opponents must be good and need reminders that that  is not necessarily true.   The chicken thieves of party B can be about as likely to raid your hen house as the chicken thieves of party A.

In the present controversy, Republican whataboutism  about riots, incitement, big lies,  authoritarian tendencies, divisiveness, and disdain  for constitutional limits and processes in no way exonerates or excuses Trump. He is guilty. But it does show many Democrats’ phoniness and that they too cannot be trusted to govern well.  

Sympathy for the Suckers

I have no sympathy for the thugs who broke into the capitol yesterday. As with  all the other rioters and looters of the last year, they should get what is coming to them. However I do have some  for the earnest,  peaceful protesters who came to Washington yesterday on a fool’s errand and could not see they have been played as marks by a vicious con artist. A usually ignored part  of Trump’s  generally  egregious behavior since November 3^rd has been his treatment of  the people who not only voted for him but believed in him as a trustworthy person. His lies and scare stories have left many of them angry, despondent, deluded, nervously mistrustful, belligerent, and even worried about the survival of the country and their way of life.  

They should have paid attention and seen what was going on. Trump has made what he is  pretty obvious, but one can still feel sorry for them. They gave their faith to a scoundrel  who had made them believe he took them seriously and cared about their values, and they are paying for it.  

Why Make a Big Deal of It?

 Some people wonder why others are making a big deal of the things Trump's allies have been doing since December 14^th after the legal challenges failed, and Biden was officially elected president. They point out correctly that none of it is going to change anything.  They say, also correctly, that  politicians in both parties routinely put on shows for their rubes of striving for outcomes they have no notion of (and often no interest in) achieving.  They see the actions  of some Republican politicians in the last three weeks as just another example of that, perhaps a  particularly outré example, but nothing to get worked up over.

They make good points, but they miss something important. The evidence is that  Trump is not just putting on a show for the rubes  but is actually scrambling for some illicit way to stay in power.  If he is in on the gag, he hasn’t shown it.  It is not enough that he will fail. People need to understand that he should fail. Americans need to repudiate the idea of what he is trying to do, and Republican politicians have a responsibility to help that happen.  They can play to the rubes later.

Please Think It Over and Stop

 It is not really surprising that Trumpist lawyer Lin Wood is reported as calling for martial law to keep Trump in office,  accusing the chief justice of being a murderer and child molester,  and demanding  the arrest and execution of the vice president.  One can find a lawyer somewhere who will say just about anything one might imagine no matter how nasty or absurd. The surprising and unpleasant thing is that, based on a few searches on DuckDuckGo, there are people out there taking Wood seriously and liking what he is doing.The man may be nuts, using the Nazi and communist technique of the big lie, or both, but he has a following.  So does  Sidney Powell. So do General Flynn and a bunch of other so-called conservatives who are advocating or coming close to advocating the overthrow of the republic -  to save Donald Trump for gosh sake. 

The madness needs to stop.  The election is over. Biden won.  A belief in a conspiracy having stolen  the election from Trump would need an assumption that  the conspirators were slick enough to bring the thing off without leaving  evidence anyone can find of what they had done.  It now probably also would need  to include the entire Supreme Court, dozens of other judges, Bill Barr, Republican secretaries of state and other election officials in several states, the FBI and homeland security, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, several voting software and hardware companies, people  who did hand recounts in  various states, the Republican governor of Georgia, and the Republican controlled legislatures in several states among the conspirators or their fellow travelers and cowardly enablers.  That’s a hard sell.

Of course many people  still  think the election was won by Trump and stolen by Biden, millions of people according to polls. So given that a person believes that, what should he do?  By now he has only two main choices - realize that his side failed to prove its case and accept the (to him) bogus results or join those who seek to save Trump by at least partially overthrowing the republic.  The answer should be easy for any patriotic conservative.  He should accept the results irrespective of whether he likes or trusts them.  Preserving the republic and the constitution is more important than whether Trump or Biden will be in the White House.

Trump’s attempts to get people to believe the election was stolen and to fight  the results in court were foolish, wrongheaded, and disgraceful, but they were not an attack on the republic. What has happened since  December 14^th is.  Any politician or person in the media who has participated in that stuff has behaved as an enemy of the republic.  That will go double for participants in or supporters of the clownish and doomed attempted coup planned for Wednesday in the congress.  It will be very difficult to take those who are  part of that seriously as a patriots, believers in the rule of law, or supporters of the constitution for a long while. It will be easy to laugh them off as silly scoundrels. They will have deserved it. For their own good as well as the country’s, they should think about that and change their plans. Trump will be gone soon and with  him the short term political benefits of playing along with him. The disgrace from going through with this thing would stay with them much longer.

 

 

Unsolicited Advice to Trumpers

 I write this as an outsider. I did not want Trump to be reelected. I wanted him gone. I will be pleased when he is gone.  I voted for Jo Jorgensen,  but  I am not among those who condemn others for voting for Trump.  

It is time for  people who supported Trump to behave as patriots and stand up for the Constitution and laws of this republic. Trump’s behavior since the election has been ridiculous, disgraceful, and harmful to the country, but up until Monday it was at least legal. (There is no law against being delusional, telling outrageous whoppers, filing doomed and foolish lawsuits, or making a worse ass of oneself than usual.)  That is no longer true. He and various Trumpers in the media are now talking about having the house and senate refuse to accept the certified and transmitted votes of the electors of the states and instead declare Trump to be reelected.  That is pretty much by definition advocating a coup d’état.  It won’t happen  of course. It is a crazy fantasy that no one needs to take seriously as a possibility, but it is still serious.

I understand people who voted for him had their reasons, some of them good ones. I understand they were disappointed or even terrified by the results of the election. I know many of them believe they were cheated.  None of that matters here. Trump has now as much as declared himself an enemy of the republic.  His supporters can still wish he had won, can still be worried about the Dems, can still think the game was crooked, but they must reject his efforts to overthrow the government and Constitution.  That is they must if they wish to behave as decent and good Americans who love their country.

Worse than I Thought

 Before the election I thought those who worried that Trump would not accept the result if he lost were overwrought and even a little silly and paranoid.  After the jackass refused to admit he lost, made wild claims about being cheated out of a victory, and filed lawsuits to overturn the results of the election in several states, I admitted that I had been wrong, and the paranoiacs had been right. He was refusing to face the facts and behaving worse as time went along.  I still thought though that people who worried that he might try to attack the republic itself and keep power by some unconstitutional or illegal means if he thought he could were letting their understandable contempt for the man  get them too worked up and going too far.    

Now I am less nearly sure of that. After losing in courts  time after time in various states, he and his ally the embarrassing attorney general of my state took the case to the Supreme Court and lost nine to nothing.  (Seven justices including all three Trump appointed did not think the case worth considering at all.  Alito and Thomas favored looking at it on technical grounds  because it was a case where the court had original jurisdiction, but said they would offer no relief.) That should have been the end of it. Trump got his case to the Supreme Court, and the justices threw it out. The electors vote tomorrow, and Biden will be elected President of the United States officially.

However according to the news, Trump says he is not giving up and will be trying something else.  I’m not particularly worried by that. Whatever it is won’t work. Republican legislatures in states Biden won won’t meet tonight and select electors for Trump.  Congress is not going to fail to accept the results. The republic is strong. The citizens and the  armed forces are loyal to the  Constitution. Trump does not have a Thirteenth Legion to lead across the Rubicon.  He will be gone in a few weeks.

He won’t overturn the election and stay in power, but his behavior of the last few weeks is enough to make one worry about what other things he might do while he still can. He seems at least a bit unhinged – continuing to claim he not only won but won in a landslide. Several writers have likened him to  Norma Desmond. I would add to that a little of Bogart’s Captain Queeg  explaining about the stolen strawberries.   I hope all he will do is continue to rant, fire a few people, and pardon a few cronies and perhaps himself.  If people around him can limit things to nothing worse than that, they will have done well by the country. We’ll see.  Some people are more worried than I am, and those people have been on a winning streak in predicting what Trump would do.

Making Like Trump

 I have no use for Donald Trump. I am pleased that he lost the election. His  behavior since losing has been far worse than I would have guessed. It will be a good day for the republic when he finally is gone.

 However I also have no use for what various Twitterites,  traditional media types,  and writers at places such as the Bulwark are sayings about people who voted for him.  They claim  that the choice in the recent election was a simple one of good versus evil, and that those who voted for Trump sinned against morality and decency and should be treated  as unredeemed sinners at least until they repent and do penance.

There are good reasons why people might have supported Trump. The left wing of the Democrat party, which seemed to be in ascendency earlier in the year, wants to do some very bad things to this country. The so called center/left Dems are bad enough, and some  of Trump’s notions on policy are better than  or at least not as bad as theirs. It is not unreasonable  to have decided that Trump was the lesser evil in terms of policies and proposals and supported him for that reason, irrespective of his personality.  Of course some people went further and went for Trump enthusiastically.  Many of them were self-supporting, middle to low middle income, taxpaying, traditionally minded, often religious  people who were tired of their lives and beliefs being mocked, attacked, ridiculed, threatened, and belittled and saw Trump as someone who at least said he was on their side and said so vigorously.  One can’t blame them for that, though they should have found a better defender. They have valid reasons for being upset.

So I refuse to accept the notion that some of my friends and relatives or anyone else who voted for Trump is morally tainted for having done so. It is both nonsense and a little too medieval for me.  It is also ignorant, arrogant, pompous, rude, cruel, and unthinking – you know,  the sort of thing a guy like Trump would have come up with.

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.

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.