Not too far back, I said “Very soon, and certainly if Trump is re-elected, we are all going to find out what it is like to be black people.”
Did that seem like a belligerent, or insensitive, or politically incorrect thing to say?
I meant what I said. I do not mean that white people will be discriminated against in the way that Jews and Catholics and Chinese have been discriminated against in this country. I mean that the Trump Organization, and the political party it absorbed in a leveraged buyout, are going to attack the fundamental rights of white people in the same way that black people have been attacked throughout our history.
For example, with voting.
After Joe Biden told people – in April – that resident rump would try to “kick back” the election after previously threatening to veto Post Office funding in order to ‘do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote’, Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, instituted certain reforms this month. DeJoy, who like most of Trump’s appointees has a conflict of interest with the bureaucracy he’s supervising, staged a “Friday night massacre” with a reorganization of leadership positions including a hiring freeze. This was combined with a severe cutback in vote sorting machines and documented cases of the United States Postal Service removing mailboxes from locations across the country.
And while these changes are defended by the Post Office as cost cutting measures, Mr. Trump, in his “I’m too stupid to NOT say the quiet part loud, and it doesn’t matter, because my party will support me even if they see Vladimir Putin bend me over a desk on live TV” way, said flat-out on Fox Business Network August 14 that “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” The backlash to that was such that on Tuesday the 19th, DeJoy, now facing a congressional hearing and investigations, told Congress that he is suspending the planned post office changes until after the election, apparently on the assumption he will still have a job. In a statement, DeJoy announced he was reversing course “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail,” which sort of implies that that wasn’t a consideration before.
Now, maybe that seems like he’s backing down, maybe he’s just backing down for the sake of appearances. But it certainly doesn’t contradict the axiom that “character is what you do when nobody’s looking.”
Why was this a bad move? Because unlike, say, Brian Kemp’s election stunts, screwing the USPS doesn’t just affect poor and black people. It doesn’t just affect people who were planning to vote by mail. It affects the mailed payrolls and insurance documents of businesses. It affects the medical documents and prescriptions of veterans. It affects Social Security payments. You know who that affects? Old people. OLD WHITE people.
You knew this was not going to work when the first sign of pushback was when a hard-right Republican Congressman and Democrat Senator got together to stop the removal of mailboxes in Montana.
Do you know how scared Republicans have to be to pull that in MONTANA?
Montana and Idaho are where the Aryan Nations and their fellow travelers love to pilgrimage. It’s their Perfect Place. Even better than Argentina, cause there’s no Jews or Spanish speakers.
For all the cheap excuses of cost-cutting and how “unfair” and “rigged” mail voting is (for everybody except Trump), you know damn well Trump wouldn’t be doing this shit if he was 5 points ahead of Biden in the polls or even at margin of error. He’d be crowing about how invincible he is and how great his polls are. The fact that he’s doing this even before his party convention betrays his own belief that he’s a goner because he can’t turn things around, and that’s because he simply doesn’t know how.
The strategy, to the extent that Trump’s baby-shark brain is capable of formulating one, is like this: Just create as much chaos as possible to undermine the credibility of the entire election process so he can bullshit his way out of losing an election just like he and his party of enablers bullshitted their way out of impeachment. The problem being, the council deciding his fate is now a lot bigger and more diverse than the US Senate.
Not just that, I think Banana Republicans have severely underestimated just how much rage the Democrats are carrying over having lost one Electoral College race with a popular vote majority 16 years prior and then the last election to a candidate they considered far more “deplorable” than George Bush. Such anti-(d)emocratic results, while perfectly fair and square under the Constitution, are not only counter-intuitive, they offend the Democrats’ need to see themselves as the heroes of America’s story. So some of them are spoiling for a fight, and the best way to give them one is to steal the election in such a way that Democrats can actually PROVE you’re doing it.
The Lamestream Media has this cliche that is nevertheless very true when they talk about Trump’s 2016 victory: They say he drew an inside straight. That is, he got a lucky set of cards that he was extremely unlikely to ever draw again, and he has in fact not done so. First and foremost of these: HILLARY CLINTON IS NOT RUNNING. It has been a lot harder for Trump to tag and slander Joe Biden, because he doesn’t have nearly as many negatives as Clinton, and because Biden himself seems like a clumsy, politically incorrect “straight shooter” who appeals to the kind of people that Trump appeals to.
The fact that Biden doesn’t have Clinton’s negatives means that the “third” party option is now much less attractive. (Sorry, Jo Jorgensen.)
Moreover, Trump no longer has the negative advantage of not being the president, and not being in the ruling party. He can no longer go to black and working-class white neighborhoods and go, “What the hell have you got to lose?” Because now we know. He cannot ask the famous question Ronald Reagan asked about Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Is Herman Cain better off now than he was four years ago?
No, because the other factor is that no other president would ignore the spread of a virus from outside the continent cause “I like the numbers where they are“. No other president would have a Minister Without Portfolio who worked on a plan to address the coronavirus and supposedly threw it out because the virus was mainly killing people in Democrat-led states, as if a virus cares any more about political parties or state lines than it does about the Chinese border. And Trump, who is certainly not the cause of the “China virus” but IS the proximate cause for why we have lost a greater percentage of our population than any other Western country, is asking us to reward his performance with another term.
Are you going to reward that?? Are you going to reward the guy who is the reason you got laid off? Who is the reason people are getting foreclosed? Who is the reason your Governor is making you wear a mask? Who is the reason you can’t go to the hair salon? The movie theater? The buffets? You want four more years of the last six months??
I don’t think so, Tim.
And none of that may make a bit of difference because Trump’s singular advantage combines with the advantage he previously did not have: He’s Donald Trump, and he’s the president.
In his private career, Trump always has acted on the principle that “it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.” As president, he combines that with what could be called The Nixon Principle: “If the President does it, it’s NOT illegal.” And flatly stated, if at least one-third of the US Senate are party stooges willing to enable you, then effectively nothing you do can be illegal.
In this case, we’ve got a president deliberately holding up funding for the Post Office while cutting off the services it is still set to perform on the current budget, saying that mail-in voting is insecure, yet there wouldn’t be a national need for mail-in voting if the Trump Virus wasn’t it making it dangerous to go out in public. And yet, Trump is doing a LOT more to stop mail voting than he is to stop coronavirus.
Why, it’s almost as if Trump is doing everything he can to avoid containing the coronavirus because without a public health crisis, it would be easier for people to vote.
Does that seem like a crazy thing to say? Was it crazy when Joe Biden told people that Trump was going to try to postpone the election? Remember when Biden said Trump would try to screw with mail-in balloting, and people (including his own side) said that was crazy?
For a guy who is assumed by some to be too naive and trusting, Joe Biden seems to have Donald Trump’s number. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to be especially savvy. You just have to realize that any disgusting thing that Donald Trump is accused of is something he either has done or WOULD do just because.
And here is one area where Trump’s approach makes a brutal, even Stalinist, sense. There is a long-term phenomenon in election returns that has entered this year’s public discussion called “blue shift“, where because Democrats and their usual demographics often use provisional ballots – which are not the same as absentee or mail-in ballots, actually – and these ballots are legally counted last. These votes have not only led to a slower count of ballots and thus later election results, the later votes are often most likely to be Democratic, and these “blue” votes made the difference in a lot of 2018 midterm races.
Thus the strategy to undermine the process: If the result is not immediately clear, or seems to lean toward Trump on Election Day, it makes it that much easier for him to whine that the whole thing is “rigged” and gum up the works so he can try to win a technical victory against the public. But that’s not the brutal and Stalinist part.
Because this strategy assumes that his cult will be willing to go out en masse in person to vote for Republicans on Election Day itself so that the results will look better for him on Election Day than they will probably be in the final outcome.
Trump is quite willing to have his core supporters risk sickness and death, and losing those people in the future won’t matter to him as long as he gets to keep being president.
If you Trumpniks have not yet realized how self-absorbed and evil the man you worship is, consider that.
Of course there are some Kool-Aid drinkers who really would risk themselves by voting unmasked for The Leader, but it is still possible to go to the polling place and take precautions. And again, that depends on whether you’re even able to go to a polling place, which is another area where Banana Republican vote suppression may affect white people too. Not only that, early voting has been a feature in some states (like Nevada) for years, as in before God-Emperor Trump reset the calendar to Year Zero.
And then, the strategy assumes that the Left won’t just call the bluff. In the Democratic National Convention, which matters as much as it normally does, meaning it doesn’t, Michelle Obama exhorted people to cast ballots “in person, if we can“. And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie previously expressed a similar opinion: “The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.”
And on the other side, you had the Tulsa rally. Trump’s “comeback” had a really big crowd, and a really enthusiastic crowd, but it was only one-third the volume of the venue, which meant that for political purposes it was only one-third as big as it needed to be. Empty seats don’t lie. The event proved that Trump really does have a large number of ride-or-die fanatics (emphasis on the ‘die’) but they are almost certainly not in the numbers he had in 2016, and that’s the last card of the inside straight that he doesn’t have. Now maybe the two-thirds of the Tulsa auditorium who would have come out for Trump before corona would be willing to cast a secret ballot, especially if they got access to a mail-in ballot. But then we come to the point that Trump’s special bond with his base is that he shares all of their negative qualities. Thus Trumpniks, in all their boundless self-absorption, have to ask themselves if they truly care about Donald Trump’s welfare any more than he does for theirs.
So on November 3rd, let’s see who really goes postal.