Well… That Didn’t Go as Planned
I’ll eat crow. It’s fine. I was wrong. Is everyone happy? Good. The race isn’t finalized yet, Biden or Trump to be determined, but what I predicted did not come to pass.
Growing up in rural Michigan and living in seven different states by the age of 30, I saw a lot of the country and met a lot of its people. When Donald Trump won the first time, a lot of us chalked it up to an aberration. Now, on the cusp of a second win, we fear there might be something more insidious on the horizon for this great country.
Donald Trump isn’t a good man. He isn’t a smart man. He is about as complex and deep as a puddle. Equal parts opaque and dirty. And yet, the facade he projects, the poorly constructed strong man persona, resonates with tens of millions. Is it an indictment of our governmental system? Or an indictment of the American people?
Republicans love to vilify ‘mob rule’ when talking about the left, protesters, and Antifa. But this week, I watched a group of Trump trucks intimidate a Biden/Harris campaign bus to the point they canceled their event out of fear. Dozens of incidents around the country of Trump supporters intimidating critics, stopping traffic on major highways, etc. Doing the exact thing that they accuse the left of doing, acting like a mob.
At the end of the day, all the valid criticisms leveed against Trump and his supporters meant nothing. How do you change a race's trajectory when the participants of that race are impervious to criticism, feedback, correction, or even shame? You can’t. It’s Thelma and Louise barreling toward the cliff. You want to jerk the wheel, slam the brakes, but you can’t.
So here we are, the morning after the election, one that should have been a landslide in any traditional time. But I was wrong. It wasn’t a landslide. Now the real fight begins where Donald Trump declares victory early, without proof, and he sends his massive team of lawyers to every state to fight the results.
Like I said before, if this race is close, Donald Trump will try to find a way to steal it with his judiciary stacked with more than 200 hand-chosen appointees. The referees will decide the contest in the final seconds. And they have been chosen strategically to be loyal to one political party. Over the country, even sometimes over the law itself.
The American people willingly learned nothing over the last four years. They didn’t need to. Worse, they didn’t want to. They have everything they need in Donald Trump. And therefore, Trump needn’t learn anything new either. The same ole Donald continues to work perfectly. Gaslight, distract, deflect, sue, and move on. It’s been his winning strategy for 50 years. If it ain't broke, don’t fix it, right?
I was wrong because I had hope. Hope that the American people would wake up and see a con man had been running the country for four years. A grifter who uses his own private properties as a siphon of American tax dollars. An incubus who turned the presidency into a permanent business venture for his entire family.
But that hope is gone now. Americans didn’t learn anything in four years. They don’t see what the rest of the world sees. They want a moronic strong man. They want someone who projects strength and talks tough. They want The Wizard of Oz, even if it is just a small man behind a curtain.
