Thursday, November 12, 2020
Trump was a valuable aberration, never a long-term option
One opinion
Veni, vidi, vici. Donald Trump came, he saw, he conquered. Not for long. But long enough to leave a substantial legacy. Like a case study in Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction, the deal-making entrepreneur came, he saw and he disrupted many of the political and policy baselines that had been the received wisdom.
But the chaos candidate asked too much of voters at the 2020 election. Most people can hold their noses for only so long to avoid his badmouthed, bad-mannered, boorish, bullying and often deranged behaviour. Another four years was beyond the pale.
Trump was always going to claim, with scant evidence to date, that dark forces stole high office from him. Mr Fake News warned us that he is a bad loser. His behaviour confirms why a blustering, self-obsessed and insecure man who tweets in capital letters like a madman is an aberration, not a long-term option for Republicans.
That said, his legacy is undeniable. Before his arrival, the Republican Party was dangerously uninterested in the dislocation felt by millions of Americans, economically and culturally. It isn’t any more. Voters who were forgotten by the Republican establishment were out-and-out despised by the other side. Democrats, and Hillary Clinton, learned the hard way that dissing possible Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was not a path to victory.
Trump’s legacy is that the Democrats chose Joe Biden, a working-class kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who was able to reconstruct the blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that Trump, the disrupter, breached in 2016.
On policy, the disrupter-in-chief challenged a cosy consensus that China’s economic growth — the communist country is now the second largest economy — would bring it closer to the West. Trump confronted China’s gaming of its “developing country” status, where countries self-declare their status to the World Trade Organisation to attract “special and differential treatment”. It is obscene that some of the wealthiest WTO members — including Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Israel, Kuwait, Brunei and Qatar — self-declare as developing members to avail themselves of special treatment that applies to sub-Saharan Africa.
Trump has reminded Europe and NATO to fund more of their own security. Europe is learning from Trump that every country needs to secure its own borders.
He shook-up the media, too, even if that didn’t last long. After his 2016 win, The New York Times and Washington Post delivered grovelling apologies for not understanding or caring about large swathes of the country who voted for Trump. If they do not glean anything from the fact Trumpism was not trounced at the ballot box last week, Trump’s case to voters will remain powerful: the country is at risk of being stolen from mainstream voters by big business, big media and cultural elites.
It is Trump’s legacy, too, that Americans voted in record numbers. Just as Trump was a necessary jolt to the system, Biden’s win is a sensible shift in this political cycle, signalled by him securing not only the electoral college votes but also the largest popular vote in US history. Even so, Democrats should be wary of gloating. After all, Trump won the second largest popular vote recorded.
Just as Democrats regrouped around Biden after Trump’s win in 2016, Republicans now can search for a longer-term alternative to Trump. Sound economic policies, tackling PC culture and identity politics, and a nation’s security cannot rely on a foul-mouthed bully who lacked grace and decency in the highest job. His vulgar contempt for the country, not yet conceding defeat, confirms why Americans voted strategically: on personality, they categorically fired Trump. But Biden was not handed a resounding policy win.
No Republican standing for re-election in the House of Representatives lost their seat. With Democrats losing at least seven, their majority is reduced to the thinnest margin in decades. No wonder centrist Democrats are coming for house Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Republicans look set to maintain their Senate majority, too. There are more GOP governors than Democrat ones and Republicans control most state legislatures.
In other words, Americans do not want to veer wildly to the left. The results are an invitation to moderates on both sides to take steps to lead the country out of a period of profound polarisation.
Doubt there is a constituency for a depolarisation project? Notice that woke folk didn’t get a blank cheque from voters even in California. A state measure, Proposition 16, would have introduced race-based preferences into state education, hiring and contracts. Supported by most of California’s political and business elites, it was rejected at the same ballot box that swung Biden’s way.
Writing in Politico Magazine, Michael Grunwald summed up the election this way: “Trump called Biden ‘the most boring human being I’ve ever seen’, and a majority of the country seemed OK with that. Normal is underrated in politics, and norms are underappreciated until they’re gone,” he wrote. “While Trump’s great-again message evoked a certain kind of nostalgia for an America before diversity workshops and gender-neutral bathrooms, Biden evokes a different kind of nostalgia for an older brand of politics.”
Biden delivered a pitch-perfect speech on Sunday, pointing out the need to start healing divisions in America. Not just in America, in fact. “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric,” he said, “lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again and to make progress. We have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies.” It’s schmaltzy. And it’s true. Many of us are exhausted, disappointed and bewildered by the confected and downright crazy Armageddon arms race launched by the extremes of both side of politics, and not just in the US but in Australia too.
Just as Trump’s win in 2016 was not the end of the world for the left, neither is his defeat the end of Western civilisation for the right. Biden said he understood the disappointment of Trump voters: “I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now let’s give each other a chance.”
If he is serious about transforming the teleprompter stuff into action, he could start by reminding his party and the broader liberal-elite hegemony that if you deem certain views deplorable, don’t be surprised if another deplorable populist exploits genuine voter frustration. Can Trump supporters give Biden a chance? Many won’t, especially those in the media. They have invested too much, often their careers, in Trump and Trumpism to admit when he crossed countless lines of basic decency. They emboldened Trump to descend into the final Borat-style farce of claiming hundreds of thousands of votes were stolen from him. His blinkered boosters have ensured he is a laughing-stock, despite his legacy elsewhere.
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Wait Just a Minute! Some Very Good News May Be Coming
Like many, I spent the last few nights waking up at 2:03 A.M., no reason, then looking at my phone for news, any news, that might be positive for President Trump. I survived on Rush, Bongino, Mark Levin. When the news continued to be ugly, I even checked in on ridiculous bloggers promising that ballots were watermarked and D.J. (our household name for a president we love) was actually launching a sting on the Deep State.
Enough already. Stop the madness.
Hey, I have a degree in statistics, and I have some level of critical thought. If there is such pessimism in my tribe, I am not going along.
So today, I started to dig into the numbers, and as I did, I fought my confirmation bias at every step.
I realized that I, like millions of others, had been numbed into despondency by the overwhelming press, media, social media push to certify President-Elect Biden. (I put that in there so you can see how repellent it is.)
Hey guys, this thing is not only not over; it is scary for Biden. I mean really scary, and most of all, the media know it. Thus, the rush to get everyone in line with the narrative that a 78-year-old, early-dementia former V.P., who could not draw a crowd larger than a dozen, just beat D.J. in a fair election.
Process that for a moment.
Start with Pennsylvania. Biden, as of this writing, is at 290 electoral votes. Pennsylvania is 20.
I read the Justice Alito opinion, and it is pretty clear that he wants the after election night at 8:00 P.M. votes separated for a reason. Biden is going to lose at the Supreme Court, and they know it. Four justices already said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court cannot adjust voting rules. A new arrival, Justice Barrett, says she is there to apply the rules in the Constitution. OK, wanna bet she does?
Remove the after 8:00 P.M. ballots, and Biden loses Pennsylvania. Biden 270.
Let's visit Nevada. I have lots of friends in California who have condos in Nevada to evade state taxes. There are not a couple of people doing this; there are tens of thousands. Everyone knows it, and California seeks them out.
Our old pal Harry Reid knows it as well, and he apparently has them voting in droves in this election. Probably not a big D.J. constituency. Within 72 hours of the election, the Trump team found, validated over 3,500 of them. I do not suspect that Trump's people stopped counting.
Every one of these is a ballot reduction for Biden
Nevada, as of now, is well within reach for DJ and the Trump team — particularly when the California crowd is reduced. And a few of them may testify since a false vote is a very bad thing, with jail time if convicted. Maybe a bigger story here.
Remember where we are, people. Biden is at 270 after a highly probable Supreme Court decision (read Alito and concurring opinions).
Lose Nevada, lose the election.
But wait: it gets better.
Let's visit Wisconsin. Right now, it is 20,000 votes in Uncle Joe's direction. Lots of stories out there, well below the Google fold, that there are way more Wisconsin votes than there are registered voters. OK, maybe the dead can vote up there — probably a Midwest thing.
Well, last night, we found that Wisconsin election clerks were told, and followed the direction, to modify mail-in ballots and fill in the blanks where witnesses left out critical info.
I am sure it was just a good customer service thing and they meant no harm. The problem is every such ballot is now toast.
There were "thousands" of such prima facie wrongful votes. Oops. Biden up 20,000 — now that number is in question. No more truckloads of votes coming in, so every ballot D.J.'s team eliminates gets President-Elect Biden one step closer to former V.P. Biden who lives in a basement. Not good here.
North Carolina. That one pretty much looks like as though it is over and D.J. won it. Fox News is rumored to call it for Trump around April 2021.
Remember where we are here. Biden is probably going to lose Pennsylvania, so if he loses even one state, even one Electoral College vote, ouch!
Either D.J. wins outright, or it goes to the House, which means that D.J. has four more years.
We're not done yet.
Michigan. Oh, yes, the land of the "glitches" in the voting machines. Six thousand votes for Trump given to Biden in one of 47 counties where that software is used. About 150,000 votes in Biden's favor right now.
Google the 130,000 Biden votes that showed up in the middle of the night, and you can see how the wonderful people at Google are fact-checking this "debunked" story. In fact, for fun, Google "Michigan voter fraud," and you get literally three pages of "this was fact checked and proven to be false." Why would Google be so assiduous?
They too see that if Amy votes with the four, Biden is one vote away from the basement.
Lawsuits in Michigan and the other states are being launched, and discovery will take place. Google will not be there.
Voter fraud is kind of like larceny. A little is OK. It is even kind of entertaining.
Dead people have been voting for a hundred years in Democratic cities. It is such a constant that one would think the Republican Party would consider a Dead Voter Outreach program to get their share.
But voter fraud on this scale is just not sustainable. It does not pass the common sense test.
We have bloggers with lots of time on their hands going through voter rolls and showing that person after person who voted in a swing state also fought in the Civil War or maybe the War of 1812. It was funny at first, but the overwhelming number now goes beyond humor and rubs our faces in it.
I think D.J. has to swing one state. Actually, one electoral vote. Not only is this thing not over, but the Biden team must be sweating bullets.
Voter fraud at scale seemed like a really cool idea until D.J. went to the mattresses. Now that he is fighting it out one voter at a time, with the Supreme Court likely to create the starting point at Biden 270, Biden has everything to lose.
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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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