I’ve known Bob Rumson for years, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it! We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.
President Andrew Shepherd — “The American President”
At 0205 on 06 November 2024, I confess that I truly despaired for the future of our country when Pennsylvania was called for Mr Trump which sealed Vice-President Harris’ electoral fate.
If I’m honest about it, it was patently clear that the pollsters were way off about which way this election was going to go and how close it was going to be when North Carolina and Georgia were called relatively early in the evening.
The reports of a decidedly lower voter turnout than 2020 and the very noticeable trend as the night turned into early morning that VP Harris was not narrowing the gap enough to hold the “Blue Wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that ultimately flipped to Trump was when I had no doubts about how the story of the 2024 election was going to end.
There’s going to be reams and reams of retribution written and meted out about how this election went from being “too close to call” to “God help us all” but in the end for me it comes down to four main factors:
- Whilst every political campaign ever fought has taken liberties with the facts, this is yet another election where significant portions of the electorate on both sides had absolutely no use for objective and provable facts as opposed to “alternative facts”, wild and easily disproven conspiracy theories, and partisan talking points parroted verbatim from their preferred source of propaganda and disinformation. This was then made far worse by consistent efforts bordering on the criminal at adding and amplifying of this disinformation from foreign adversaries (particularly Russia) as well as social media and “traditional” media on a 24/7 news cycle where even reasonable fact checking cannot counteract the total volume of the lies. Even when fact checking and reasonable attempts at discussion was employed, the usual response by these hyper-partisan voters was to accuse the person trying to communicate the truth as a liar or tool of the extremists of the other party and sometimes going so far as to delete the fact checker’s posts rather than engage in productive dialogue.
- By every objective and provably factual metric, the economy is doing way better than any other in the world post-COVID and the rate of inflation (roughly 3% and still falling toward the Federal Reserve’s preferred target of 2%) is dramatically lower in the United States. However, the perception of persistently high prices in the grocery stores whilst not remembering the price spikes when the supply chains were completely screwed (and earlier in the year at the petrol pumps even though prices per gallon on Election Day were amongst the lowest seen all year) coupled with wages still having a hard time keeping up with inflation means that the incumbent party in power is inevitably going to be punished harshly. That has proven true in every major democracy in the world including right-winger Marine Le Pen neutering the Macron government in France and Labour utterly destroying the Tories in the UK.
- Mr Trump was dramatically increasing his vote count over the 2020 election. The telling graphic was the one that showed all of the counties where he was gaining 3% or more votes in 2024 versus 2020 and that was happening in roughly 1,000 of the 4,000+ counties/parishes. VP Harris by contrast was dramatically under-performing President Biden’s 2020 vote totals pretty much nationwide with only a handful of counties where she was actually doing better than Biden by 3%. The total vote is also significantly lower than in 2020 implying that quite a few voters decided not to participate in the presidential election which made a tough task of overcoming Mr Trump’s over-performance much more difficult because there were less voters that VP Harris could afford to lose.
- Most importantly, Mr Trump has proven to be a grand master at selling fear as a way of persuading voters to vote against what one would think to be their own interests by stoking their fears, particularly when it comes to immigration, racism, and LGBTQIA+ issues. In his one debate with VP Harris, he outright lied about Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH being illegal when they actually had legal status and that they were EATING PEOPLE’S CATS AND DOGS…a story that had already been thoroughly debunked multiple times by several authorities in Springfield as being totally false. Even when that lie was pointed out, he still insisted on repeating those lies in spite of overwhelming documented proof otherwise. Given his campaign themes, you’d have thought that women and Latinos would have gone to VP Harris in droves. Not only did that not happen, Mr Trump was able to make crucial gains and/or VP Harris under-performed in all of those groups. Mr Trump maintained a cast-iron grip on his political base comprised voters without a college degree (white men in particular) and the self-identified evangelicals (which is even more baffling considering that Mr Trump’s life story is replete with being a serial violator of the Seven Deadly Sins and most of the Ten Commandments and my perception of him is that our labradoodles Mistletoe and Mocha are far more Christian in behaviour and actions than Mr Trump will ever be!).
The basic outline of this post was pretty much done in my mind after a couple of hours of fitful sleep and a quick trip to run Alexander to school.
I could have easily done the “hot take” incendiary post before I met up with Alexander and the doodles.
Nicholas certainly got a taste of just how angry and disappointed I was when he’d returned from a night at beer league hockey and I let him have a glimpse at the emotional turmoil that was going through my head whilst giving him an update on the election results about a half hour before Pennsylvania was called.
I think he’d agree with something I’ve learnt through the years that it’s often better to try to avoid publicly publishing my initial thoughts on politics and piss-poor customer service until I’ve gotten to the point where I can at least laugh at some aspect of it.
Thank you Berkley Breathed for reminding me of my first vote for President being a write-in for Bill the Cat and Opus Penguin from his comic strip “Bloom County”! That year, I was offered the choice between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis and the most memorable things of that campaign were:
- George HW Bush promising “read my lips…no new taxes!” which was promptly chucked aside once he was elected. I seem to remember one comedian riffing on that line with “yeah, read my lips because I’m lying out my ass!” I don’t know who said it but it sounds like something George Carlin or Robin Williams would have said.
- Arguably one of the worst instances of a negative political advert was the one put out by the Bush campaign concerning the weekend furlough of convicted murderer William Horton from a Massachusetts prison (whilst Dukakis was governor) who then absconded and proceeded to rape and pistol-whip a woman in Maryland for which he got two life sentences without parole + 85 years. The advert accused Dukakis of being soft on crime and there were later accusations of racial overtones but by then, the damage had already been done.
- Governor Michael Dukakis driving an armoured tank and looking quite the fool and pretty much sinking his campaign even without the effect of the “Willie Horton” ads.
- On a lighter note, there was a T-shirt that made a play on words with the candidate names and showed an ambulatory gentleman’s sausage chasing a equally ambulatory lady’s bits with the caption “it’s just one f***ing thing after another”. I can’t imagine that shirt or a variation on it ever being used in a modern political campaign thanks to excessive political correctness and the clutching of pearls but back then it was considered rather witty.
Bush/Dukakis 1988 was the first in what would be many disappointing presidential contests where I’ve often found myself looking for the less evil alternative of the two candidates with a plausible chance at election on offer. At least I’d met H Ross Perot and ended up voting “Ross for Boss” twice in the 1990s because Bill Clinton’s peccadillos and moral gymnastics certainly maxed the “ewwwww” factor for me but ever since then…I have yet to see a candidate for President that I can go “yeah, I really like that person and think they’ll be a really awesome leader of my country”.
Now that I’ve had a chance to work through the incandescent anger and rage, my form of therapy is to take the notes I’d written when I was very angry and flesh them out in the form of a question/statement with additional context and in so doing make my peace with the results of the election.
It’s cheaper than a therapist and often far more effective… 🙂
How in the hell is the gender gap *NOT* 100-nil against Mr Trump?
This one is really going to bug me for a while.
No matter what one’s personal views on the issue of abortion may be, I would have expected every woman in this country to agree with the basic proposition that the only person that should have any say in a decision as to what happens to her body should be *HER* and those that she chooses to allow to be part of that decision such as her doctor and family with the final decision being *HERS ALONE*.
Full stop.
When you have one candidate who is bragging loudly about having been the instrument of the downfall of Roe v Wade and the other candidate is actually a woman and several stories about women dying in states with draconian bans on abortion because the doctors were too afraid to render medical aid until she’d gotten so sick as to require emergency intervention, I would have thought that would have been enough for VP Harris to win this election in a walk with a veritable army of female voters that Mr Trump’s gains with other groups could not possibly overcome.
And that was before Mr Trump uttered this gem at a September rally: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
That was doubled down with this quote in Wisconsin after his infamous rally at Madison Square Garden in NYC when responding to his campaign suggesting the remark was inappropriate: “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.’”
I guess “protecting women” doesn’t include allowing them to make informed choices about their own body and effectively treating women as second-class citizens with no real agency over decisions that affect their lives.
How can he be winning the Hispanic vote when he’s made it clear he wants to deport them even more than Biden and Harris was already willing to accept?
The only reason I can think of that makes any sense is the similarity to the experience of the Irish where the first wave of Irish immigrants to America were welcomed relatively warmly because they could be exploited as exceptionally cheap labour with little to no rights.
As that wave of immigrants ascended the social ladder to financial and political success in the latter half of the 19th Century, the subsequent waves of Irish immigrants would often find signs along the lines of “no bloody Micks need apply” in the shoppe windows making it clear they were not welcome to seek employment as the first wave had done years earlier.
More often than not, those businesses were owned by those first wave Irish (who left Ireland before the potato famine) and the massive second wave that left Ireland at the height of the famine.
Mr Trump’s messaging on migrants to the United States was crystal clear: the ones that weren’t criminals, rapists, and dealers in drugs or abusing the asylum process were here to take jobs from Latinos and other blue-collar workers and wreck whatever financial and social progress they’d made.
To be fair, the situation at the border is a deplorable mess that frankly is remarkable for how inhumane it can be at times.
But this is hardly a new situation and for all of Mr Trump’s accusations against the Biden administration’s handling of the border, Mr Trump’s really wasn’t that much different or more effective than his predecessor Mr Obama. Ditto W, Brother Bill, Bush the First, and Ronnie Raygun…all of those administrations punted on immigration with the last major Congressional action on immigration being during the Reagan administration in 1986 with the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the Clinton era
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The latter was implemented as part of a massive 750 page omnibus budget appropriation act and dramatically tightened the requirements for legal immigration.
Notice that I don’t include the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a bipartisan proposal for a path to residency and work privileges and eventually citizenship for the children brought to this country illegally by their parents that was first proposed in 2001 and proposed in every Congress ever since but has never managed to find its way to the President’s desk for their signature.
Likewise, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was a programme implemented by order of President Obama to the Department of Homeland Security by memorandum in 2012 (as opposed to an act of Congress) to deprioritise deportation actions against children who were brought to this country by their parents.
The key difference between DACA and the various proposed DREAM acts is that DACA does not provide an eventual path to citizenship, it merely postpones deportation by focusing efforts on deporting criminals and older illegal immigrants.
Despite the fact that DACA has faced legal challenges ever since it’s creation, it is still a policy that is in force even though then President Trump canceled it by fiat in 2017. That decision was then challenged and ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court ruling that the Trump administration did not properly apply the Administrative Procedures Act to the cancellation nor did it provide a compelling reason to cancel the programme.
“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents. But we must also recognize that we are a nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”
President Trump public statement on canceling DACA in 2017
The new Trump administration may well have worked out how they can successfully kill the DACA programme once and for all even though solid majorities of the American public have consistently supported Congress actually passing the DREAM act and at least end the fear of deportation for DREAMers and DACA recipients with many echoing the view expressed by President Trump himself eschewing punishment for these people who are often very enthusiastic and positive contributors to American society.
But the Trump campaign also successfully stoked fears of another immigration amnesty like the one in 1986 and was able to effectively tie immigration round VP Harris’ neck like a millstone by accusing her of being the “border czar” over a failed immigration policy even though it was documented thoroughly she was never given that remit or assignment.
She was actually tasked with meeting and working with Central and South American countries to identify the root causes of the migration to the United States and find ways to work for the American government to work with those countries in terms of financial aid and other assistance to improve conditions there so that the migrants didn’t feel the need to flee to the north.
When you couple that with Mr Trump ordering his operatives in Congress to tank a immigration bill with all of the right-wing wish list items on border control and security written by Senator Lankford of Oklahoma (one of the most conservative members of the Senate!) so that he could run on the issue of illegal immigration rather than do support a piece of legislation that would do more on immigration than any administration for nearly 40 years…there was no way VP Harris could overcome that with voters who fear those who come from the south seeking a safer and better life.
How is it that we’ve forgotten that Soviet-style dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un are the *BAD GUYS*?
It’s hard to imagine a reasonable American voter thinking that the brutal and repressive regimes such as the ones found in Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea are anything worth emulating in this country.
Mr Trump has openly admired all three of these dictators since before his election to his first term and “Project 2025” which was written by quite a collection of former Trump administration staffers on behalf of the Heritage Foundation (a very right-wing conservative political think tank) makes it clear that Mr Trump not only admires authoritarianism, he’s got a blueprint for putting it into practise.
He’s repeated disavowed any knowledge of “Project 2025” but that seems dubious at best given who the contributors to that manifesto are and the very similar policy aims with those espoused by the Trump 2024 campaign!
“Project 2025” and similar proposals by Trump called “Agenda 47” are horrifying enough but one that really stands out is the policy both agree upon of reclassifying thousands of non-partisan civil servants as at-will employees that can be hired and fired by the president.
This country already knows how that is an epic bad idea thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s spoils system of political patronage that filled the civil service with political stooges that was mostly ended with the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 that was signed by the least well-known chief executive of all time…President Chester A Arthur.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 modernised the Pendleton civil service department policies and procedures and formed the current Office of Personnel Management.
With Mr Trump’s re-election, one can certainly expect that his infamous Schedule F exception created in Executive Order 13957 which was already considered a violation of the spirit if not the letter of Pendleton (and was later rescinded by President Biden) will come back in an even worse form.
A bureaucracy the size of the Federal government needs a professional apolitical civil service staffed with experts on how the government is supposed to function effectively. Replacing competent technocrats with ill-trained and inexperienced political operatives that may well be turned over every four years (or whenever President Trump is angered by their performance whether that anger is legitimate or not) would create so much chaos and turmoil that the civil service would cease to be an effective professional executioner of acts of Congress and protector of the Constitution.
That would be the best case outcome. Contemporary authoritarian regimes as well as their brutal history of repression shows what often happens to a population ruled by an authoritarian leader with little to no checks on their political power or ambitions and that story never ends well for the people.
Elon Musk has shown us that vultures unleashed by “Citizens United v Federal Election Commission” have come home to roost!
As long as there have been politicians, the wealthy have usually found one way or another to make sure that they can buy the politicians who, once bought, stay bought and dance to the tune their financial benefactors will play for them.
The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1976 was passed in response to the Watergate scandal and was supposed to provide effective enforcement of federal campaign limits with the creation of the Federal Election Commission which was undermined almost immediately by loopholes in the original law and more that were added due to changes to the law and the court cases it spawned.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold) was supposed to strongly curtail so-called “soft money” by requiring political parties to raise and spend money according to federal limits, even for state and local races and issue discussions as well as tighten the definition of issue advocacy ads and prohibit such ads paid for by corporations or union funds.
That was almost immediately challenged in court by Senator McConnell and made it’s way to the Supreme Court (“McConnell v FEC”) which largely upheld the provisions of the BRCA until the provisions prohibiting limiting corporate or union funding of issue ads was struck down in “Citizens United”.
It used to be that the wealthy had to jump through a lot of hoops and hide behind political action committees to disguise the fact that they were spending well in excess of federal campaign contribution limits. We knew they were flouting the law often without significant consequences (and the few fines that were levied were probably illegally deducted from tax as business expenses that ordinarily would be disallowed!) but largely this activity happened in the background.
“Citizens United” effectively put a “for sale” sign on political offices and the candidates that were being elected to them by rendering the FEC as a toothless paper tiger and it’s only gotten worse since that decision was handed down in 2010.
The office of President of the United States has been bought before but never so blatantly right in front of our faces.
Anyone who really doubts that should remember the images of the richest person in the world dancing on Mr Trump’s stage at a rally and realise he’d not only dumped at least $100 million into the campaign but he’s likely to get an influential post in the new Trump administration.
Can you seriously argue that Elon Musk isn’t going all-in on Trump without having a very good reason to believe that he and his businesses will benefit financially with sweetheart back-room deals and in turn put massive amounts of cash (likely from the taxpayers) directly into his pockets?
Mr Trump made it exceptionally clear in 2016 who he was really wanting to support in that election. He gathered quite a few wealthy individuals at Mar-a-Lago and promised that he was going to make them “rich as hell”. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 that he signed after he was elected was arguably the one campaign promise he kept lock, stock, and barrel. The tax cuts and benefits of the TCJA went overwhelmingly to millionaires and billionaires (the aforementioned group at Mar-a-Lago) to the tune of 83% of the total tax breaks. Middle and lower-class taxpayers really took it in the shorts with a lot of deductions they’d taken on their returns suspended until 2025 forcing many of those taxpayers into the standard deduction rather than itemising their deductions.
Oh, and that small matter of Elon buying votes in the swing states where he was cutting $1 million checks to supposedly random voters who’d hand over their details and registration and agree to conservative talking points…I think there is no doubt that whilst he was given a cease and desist letter and then sued, nothing of any consequence will come to Elon Musk or if it does, any fine is unlikely to be noticed as anything more than what we’d think of as a tip for serving a meal to us in a restaurant.
Which leads me to this final point…
The concept of the rule of law and blind justice seems dead and buried in America.
Mr Trump has long described the various investigations, trials, and in the election subversion case in New York where he was convicted by a jury of his peers partially selected by his lawyers on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as witch hunts, hoaxes, and any other way you can imagine to cast doubt on the rule of law and the fairness of the courts and the people who work in them.
He’s certainly entitled to his opinion and can loudly proclaim his innocence to all that may wish to hear him but the plain truth is that he’s managed to exploit all of the deficiencies in the modern legal system to essentially escape any sort of accountability for his part in the various criminal indictments that were handed down over his role in the January 6th insurrection and attack on the Capitol as well as his attempt on overturning the results in Georgia where he was recorded imploring the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find him 11,800 votes”.
It truly beggars belief that a convicted felon could remain on the ballot much less be elected President of the United States by a majority of the voters.
I’d have thought that actually being a criminal would be a deal-breaker for the vast majority of voters in this country…much like I’d imagined that misogyny, homophobia, and racism would be deal-breakers for enough of the electorate to ensure that any candidate ticking off any of those boxes had zero chance of election.
Boy, was I wrong on that one!
We’ve certainly had criminals in the Oval Office with the most notorious one being one Richard Milhous Nixon who was caught in a coverup of a bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate Office Complex in Washington DC.
He’d have almost certainly faced criminal charges for conspiracy and obstruction of justice and was very close to having Articles of Impeachment voted out of the House of Representatives when he chose to resign rather than likely be the first President removed from office by the Senate.
Nixon ended up escaping criminal accountability for his part in the conspiracy and cover-up but President Ford’s pardon ensured that Nixon would never again have a starring role on the front line of Republican politics (though to the day he died, he was always in the background offering advice, solicited or not).
As bad as Nixon’s actions were, Mr Trump’s were far worse when an armed mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and eventually overran the Capitol police to disrupt the counting and certification of the electoral votes that would declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Whilst those supporters were defiling Speaker Pelosi’s office and sending everyone running for their lives (including VP Pence who almost certainly would have been assaulted if not killed as one group got within 10m of him and his Secret Service detail that were trying to get him to safety), Mr Trump watched the horrific attack upon a co-equal branch of government and did nothing for hours until he finally told his supporters to go home well after the damage had been done.
Whilst I agree that a strict reading of the Federal “incitement to riot” statute likely would conclude that Mr Trump’s speech earlier in the day would not likely sustain a conviction under the statute, I’d argue that Mr Trump actually violated his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic” by essentially throwing the legislative branch of the United States government to a pack of very ravenous and murderous wolves which is a far worse crime, in my opinion.
Yes, he was impeached a second time after he left office but we all knew that was a joke as there was never the votes to convict and remove him from an office he’d already reluctantly vacated in the sham of a Senate trial that was an utter waste of time.
But the reality is that our system of justice has proven itself utterly incapable of holding a President accountable for criminal acts they commit. Leave aside for a moment the travesty of a decision in “Trump v United States” where the President was essentially made a king without an actual crown by granting immunity even for criminal acts that were committed as part of the President’s official duties.
Based on the redacted dump of evidence we saw in the DC case before the election, I believe the four indicted charges stood a good chance of surviving that analysis ordered by the Supreme Court and that had he not been elected, almost certainly would have been convicted in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s court.
As it is, Jack Smith seems to be preemptively winding down the case even before Trump can fire him upon inauguration because we’ll once again be governed by that utterly daft rule of engagement that DOJ can’t prosecute a sitting president.
That very concept already made the President effectively above the law and “Trump v United States” will ensure that even the most corrupt and criminal of Presidents will likely never see any accountability in a court of law.
Even if Smith wasn’t winding down the prosecutions he’s running, Trump was likely to fire the Special Prosecutor and order that his new Attorney General (who at one point was rumoured to be Judge Aileen Cannon…the same judge that was appointed by Trump and was clearly returning the favour who dismissed his stolen classified documents case with a novel theory that is likely to be overturned if the case survives that long) discontinue the prosecutions.
I’m sure there are many indicted defendants who would like to just summarily dismiss charges laid against them!
Indulge me for a moment here…consider any of the cases that Mr Trump was indicted and was going to be tried in a court of law. Consider all of the facts and evidence in those cases and change the name of the accused to anyone else who has never been President of the United States.
Were you accused of the same crimes with the same overwhelming evidence of guilt, do you have any doubts you’d be in jail at Guantanamo Bay whilst awaiting trial and likely ending up in one of the more unpleasant Federal prisons on offer? His repeated defiance of the various gag orders (including ten in the NY election subversion case alone) would have had anyone else jailed for contempt of court!
The fact of the matter is that the various players at the different levels of our “system of justice” (such as it is) has treated Mr Trump with such deference that no other defendant has ever seen. It has proven incapable of holding a criminal defendant accountable for his actions whether through slow-walking the prosecution, frivolous appeals, insane judgements by an obviously conflicted judge that’s already been reversed twice and deserves the third reversal and order to recuse), and a Supreme Court majority who apparently haven’t seen “The Pelican Brief” and the consequences of putting the power of a king into the hands of someone like Mr Trump for whom the term “amoral” doesn’t come close to describing the full range of his despicable behaviour.
He’s managed to run out the clock and get elected and he’ll certainly be allowed to be his own judge and jury and dismiss the charges against him in most of the open cases. We don’t know if Mr Trump will actually be sentenced on the 34 felony convictions he already has and it’s anyone’s guess whether the DA’s indiscreet behaviour of having a relationship with a junior prosecutor has fatally wounded that prosecution…one that had a very good chance of succeeding because WE HAVE THE TAPE OF HIM COMMITTING THE CRIME!
And what’s most laughable is Mr Trump’s assertion that the justice system (and the Department of Justice in particular!) has been weaponised against him!
Funny enough, the only one being held accountable for crimes that don’t come close to Mr Trump’s would be President Biden’s son Hunter who was prosecuted by a Special Counsel appointed by his very own Attorney General. In fact, the only people that have been held accountable were defendants who were Democrats.
The Department has been weaponised against whom exactly?!?
I’d argue that if the Department had it in for anyone, it’s the American People.
Justice delayed is justice denied and in Mr Trump’s case, that couldn’t be more true.
It makes me seriously wonder why in the hell anyone would faithfully follow the laws of this country when they see the most prominent citizen of this country be allowed to commit crimes (felonies, no less!) with impunity and no accountability.
So now what?
If you’ve made it this far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for hearing me out and letting me get those frustrations off my chest.
Whether I like it or not, the reality is that we’re going to have four more years of Trump and hopefully he’ll be wiser and spend his time productively helping the ordinary people of this country survive if not succeed.
The first four year term and his behaviour ever since do not fill me with a lot of hope in this regard.
I can only hope that the self-interest of the people who can effectively stand in his way and oppose his more egregious and damaging policies will take heart from the fact that he cannot be President again once he leaves office (presuming he survives this term which is by no means guaranteed).
As for me, I have faith that the Constitution will endure this dark age as it has in the past and that ultimately the rule of law and democratic norms will once again be how our country is governed.
After all, I’ve always hated it when people loudly bitch and moan about something but haven’t even thought of trying to find or offer a solution or two to the problem. The next post will be more specific about the actions I plan to take whilst enduring the second Trump administration.