We Are Not Over the Hump
Misinformation sprinkled with hints of stupidity is a potent concoction and leads many to stick with Trump.
A lot is looking good right now. Coming off a very successful and well-done DNC, Vice President Harris seems poised to lead the Democrats into power nationwide. If not for the Electoral College, Ms. Harris’ slowly rising lead would likely, barring any significant gaffes or crises, be substantial enough to put in orders for the celebratory balloons and cake.
However, the shadow of that political anachronism looms large and seems to get bigger with each passing year, taking on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon size. As if the massive Snoopy balloon broke away in a gust of wind and terrorized New York’s 5th Avenue in 2016, if not for that grand compromise settled upon by the Founding Fathers in 1787, our rampaging Snoopy would have been quickly brought back under control and continued merrily down the famous avenue and past the tower of the loser, Donald Trump. Instead, Trump watched that year’s parade from his tower as a victor.
As I said, we are all feeling good right now, but we also remember how we felt in 2016. Hillary seemed unstoppable, and Donald Trump seemed like a joke. Then, the crises seemed to keep happening to Trump, and despite some unsightliness from Clinton (her fall getting into her car and that blackboard-scraping cough from making too many speeches) and a dash of arrogance, it seemed a safe bet that the glass ceiling would be shattered. And then James Comey interfered — the more I read about this, the more I do find this to be the final nail in Hillary’s coffin — and our nation’s nightmare crawled out of the closet and threatens to hold us again hostage while ending our democracy.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Kamala Harris has not won anything. Kamala Harris has raised almost double the money that Trump has, and she actually spends it on the campaign and does not funnel it into her companies as we are learning Trump is doing. Hillary also had a huge fund-raising advantage and the RNC in 2016 was not just a sideshow at the circus but a sideshow in the parking lot at the circus — it was that bad.
The problem we have in how we choose the president in our country is one about which even Thomas Jefferson worried in 1787.
Some delegates at the Constitutional Convention thought that letting Congress pick the president would provide a buffer from what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “well-meaning, but uninformed people” who, in a nation the size of the United States, “could have no knowledge of eminent characters and qualifications and the actual selection decision (Who Invented the Electoral College).”
The “well-meaning but uninformed people” of our nation are more today than Jefferson could ever have imagined. He also couldn’t have imagined the brain-numbing effects of social media (but the Founding Fathers did imagine a cancer like Fox News). Millions of Americans across our quilt-like land express pretty negative opinions about Trump — he is a whiner, he is vile, I am sick of him — but when asked by journalists who they will vote for, the answer consistently comes back for Trump.
The New York Times recently wrote a piece about Maine lobster fishermen. The most common complaint of all the men and women interviewed was that climate change was killing their livelihood. Nonetheless, most plan to vote for Trump because of the good things he did as president.
Though he has regularly voted Republican, Mr. [Dana] Black is far from MAGA. Like many Maine Republicans, at least historically, he is fiscally conservative and no fan of big government. He believes in climate change, isn’t worried about immigration and considers the former president to be something you won’t hear Jessica Fletcher say in reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” But it is likely, at this point, that he’ll cast his vote for Mr. Trump. “I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did (What the Lobstermen of Maine Tells Us About the Election).”
“I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did.”
I don’t care if Kamala Harris invested $100 million into the town where Mr. Black lives if he still thinks that Trump made “good decisions on stuff” when he was literally the worst president we ever had, then there is no way this “uninformed” — to be nice — citizen can “get informed.” He is complaining in the article about how the ecology is rapidly changing because the waters are warming so much, and mindlessly stating that he will cast his vote for a felon who rejects the existence of climate change. Black himself accepts that climate change is killing his livelihood but is perfectly okay with choosing a corrupt tyrant-to-be whose policy will only further make things worse for him.
Black, like others in the article, complain about prices of gas and food without realizing that much of what has made things more expensive were the policies and criminal ineptitude of Donald Trump. The “uninformed” Americans number in the tens of millions, and they are everywhere. As bad and almost sad as Trump and his clown-boy JD Vance seem these days, the Dana Blacks are lurking out there in the shadows, openly admitting to a litany of things that mess up their lives, but then when given the chance to not vote for the person or party that has caused them that pain, they shoosh you with a hand, scoff and grunt and say ridiculous, even stupid things like, “Trump did good things for our country.”
When you ask them to name a few, they hit you with whataboutisms or, “Well, he wasn’t as bad as Biden.”
Thomas Jefferson was right to be worried about the “well-meaning but uninformed.” Unfortunately, today, the army of the uninformed too closely mimics their hero, Donald Trump. They complain for hours about this, and when presented with a potential solution to their problems, they fall back on the safety of their misery: “Nah, I will still vote for him.”
When did the Republican Party become the party of dummies and whiners?