Still too afraid to stand up to Trump, members of the GOP have abandoned their constituents (and democracy) in favor of furthering their own agendas
This is the part of the horror movie where the protagonist believes he’s finally killed the lead vampire, only to have it rise one more time.
If nothing else, you have to acknowledge Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to remain undead. He’s had multiple recounts and failed more than 50 times in court to overturn the election results, and on Monday the Electoral College certified Joe Biden as the country’s 46th president. Yet Trump still refuses to concede. He may think his second-term dream is still alive, but to the rest of the world he’s merely a bad joke.
Tuesday morning Trump was up early and tweeting: “Tremendous problems being found with voting machines. They are so far off it is ridiculous. Able to take a landslide victory and reduce it to a tight loss. This is not what the USA is all about. Law enforcement shielding machines. DO NOT TAMPER, a crime. Much more to come!”
When Trump won by almost exactly the same margin in the Electoral College in 2016 (and lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes), he called it a “landslide.” As President-elect Biden put it Monday night after the Electoral College votes were cast, “By his own standards, these numbers represented a clear victory then. And I respectfully suggest they do so now.”
Biden also called out Trump for his latest attempted con. “The Trump campaign brought dozens and dozens and dozens of legal challenges to test the results. They were heard. And they were found to be without merit. Time and again, President Trump’s lawyers presented their arguments to state officials, state legislatures, state and federal courts and ultimately to the United States Supreme Court, twice. They were heard by more than 80 judges across the country. And in every case, no cause or evidence was found to reverse or question or dispute the results.”
Donald Trump’s four-year reign of error—comprised of misdeeds, disdain, disgusting delusions and divisive disasters—is done and over, save for his shouting and grifting.
A future Jeopardy! episode will contain the answer, “This word, which emerged in late 2020 to describe a sore loser, is also now used as a synonym for misanthrope, misogynist, racist and/or con artist.” The question: “What is a trump?”
Donald Trump’s four-year reign of error—comprised of misdeeds, disdain, disgusting delusions and divisive disasters—is done and over, save for his shouting and grifting.
Trump, of course, does not accept this. He will not concede, even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell congratulated Biden on his victory from the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. With support from the MAGA marchers who demonstrated in D.C. over the weekend, Trump’s endgame now appears to boil down to watching Proud Boys engage in paroxysms of violence until donations to his campaign dry up, at which point he will become bored and move on.
When future historians chronicle the Trump era, they will not look kindly upon the complicity of those in the Republican Party who cast their lot with Trump. One-hundred-and-twenty-six members of the House should not be seated due to their involvement in his effort to steal the election from Joe Biden; their actions expose them as bad actors under a bad president interested in power over the people.
Trump more and more resembles a medieval lord who considers himself progressive because he only burns witches during Christmas season—he likes the festive outdoor lights.
Rush Limbaugh, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, suggested secession—and then hastily retreated from that term. Members of the GOP have asked constituents if they are ready to die to realize a Trump win. Some say Trump should institute martial law. Such threats may just be high wind in the trees, but they should be taken seriously as an attack on the democratic norms of our republic by those representing the Republic. The enemy is within.
In order to pursue their goals, Trump and his death cult have eroded the credibility of America’s most cherished institutions. Our courts. Our judges. Our legislative branch. Our executive branch. Our military intelligence. Our diplomatic corps. Our relationship with our allies. Not one sector of government has been left untouched by hatred, fear and doubt.
Trump minions hurl words like libtard, snowflake, communist and socialist with the intent to insult. Forgive me, but it’s hard to take their disapproval seriously when I see who and what they cheer for.
What other human being elected to the highest office in the land would burn it all down just to rule over the ashes?
When has the United States ever doubted the righteousness of its own elections? (Al Gore, it could be argued, had a far better case in the 2000 election than Trump ever did. Gore put the country ahead of his own aspirations—something Trump never has done and never could do.) Men and women from both parties worked side by side to make sure the 2020 tally was correct. It was.
The national GOP abandoned its roots, along with its constituents, as it not only tolerated but adopted and utilized Trump’s tactics of lying, deflecting, changing the narrative and obscuring and denying the facts to further their own agenda. It’s all about greed and power.
Republicans accuse Democrats of wanting to pack the Supreme Court, while denying the obvious, point-blank: They successfully packed the Supreme Court.
McConnell delayed filling one Supreme Court seat in 2016 and rushed another in 2020 to ensure Trump could manipulate the court into a solid conservative majority; it’s the senior senator from Kentucky’s crowning achievement. The goal of court-packing is to change a court’s balance, making it more favorable to particular goals or ideologies; typically it involves an increase in the number of seats. While the Republicans never added jurists, they certainly manipulated the court to favor the GOP’s worldview.
Today’s GOP includes members who will walk onto the floor of the Senate clutching a snowball and sneer at climate change.
That worldview is not only seriously warped and flawed, but also constitutes a clear and present danger to the rest of the globe. Because of its denial of science, we are now gambling with the real possibility of human extinction.
Today’s GOP includes members who will walk onto the floor of the Senate clutching a snowball and sneer at climate change. It includes people who believes wearing a face mask is a political statement. It includes Christians who supports a misogynistic racist as president. It includes both men and women, overwhelmingly white, who are fine with millions of Americans being out of work, as long as their own 401(k) plan is doing okay. Today’s GOP is a group of people who scream that blue lives matter but won’t admit Black lives do. It is overwhelmingly bitter. It is overwhelmingly angry. It is an aging white man who thinks he’s losing his civil rights, when he’s only losing his white privilege. It is the working poor who don’t have time for the nuances of politics but desperately fear socialism.
This isn’t about false equivalency. It isn’t about defending the Democrats against the Republicans. It is about the destruction of a nation.
Why don’t we all acknowledge that we have far more in common with each other than not? I have struggled to understand this my whole life. I made it my mission after encountering politicians (including Ronald Reagan) who claimed to support equal rights while systematically eroding them. How can someone support the appearance of democracy instead of the reality?
The GOP will twist this of course. The likes of Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham and Jim Jordan have found a variety of masters to serve in the pantheon of demons. They remain lesser imps who love to circle those with more fire. Trump is the fire in which they currently dance.
Biden recognized these imps Monday night, calling out the 17 Republican attorneys general and 126 congressional Republicans who endorsed the state of Texas’s lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to reject four other states’ certified vote counts.
“This legal maneuver was an effort by elected officials in one group of states to try to get the Supreme Court to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans in other states and to hand the presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse,” Biden said. “It’s a position so extreme we’ve never seen it before. A position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law and refused to honor our Constitution.”
Trump is no stranger to extreme positions. He’s the master of disaster. The vampire who keeps rising.
So far, President-elect Biden has hit the right notes. Can he sustain that—and can he stick around to finish off the other GOP vampires?
Trumpism will continue to exist without Trump. He isn’t the only vampire around.