CommentsAT LENGTH-It’s not even a prediction that Donald Trump will lose California on Nov. 3. Even though the California GOP is fooling around with phony ballot drop boxes.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton won the highest majority of any candidate that ever ran for president in this state. Trump only eked out slim majorities in nine out of all the precincts in the seven cities surrounding the Los Angeles Harbor. Yet his supporters today are just as loud and obnoxious on Facebook locally as he is on Twitter nationally.
This is not to make anyone feel safe. We all know the battleground states are still-in-play even though the polls (does anyone still trust them?), are leaning significantly towards Biden.
Both of the recent debates haven’t made Trump any more popular. In fact, the fly on Vice President Mike Pence’s head on Oct. 7 has attained celebrity status, at the expense and much to the chagrin of Pence and the Orange Man. This was the kind of gift that even the average pig farmer in Iowa understands and that Vice Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris didn’t have to explain. Although the immediate fly swatter promotion was a humorous touch, that won’t sway the election.
Nor is the rising infection rate of the coronavirus something that can be easily swatted away or denied with the Trumpster testing positive after being in denial of the virus since February. As much as he wants to make this a battle between him with his overblown ego against Joe Biden the issue is that this election is between Donald vs. COVID-19. And the virus is winning.
All Biden and Harris have to do is show some plausible compassion for the American people, talk about real issues like health care and avoid stepping in anything that draws flies for the next few weeks. Yes, and make sure that the failure of the pandemic response is owned by this administration.
Sadly, the fact Mr. Trump seems to have infected much of the White House staff and gotten most of the highest ranking officers in the National Security Agency quarantined is sort of like the fly on Pence’s head – you can’t argue with the virus or a fly. You can only swat at it hoping it will go away, which only works on the fly. This however is what Trump is attempting to do with the virus – swat at it.
Does any of this curious display of circumstances beyond his control change the minds of his gun-toting extremists or QAnon believers? It’s doubtful. Fox News and the 16 or more qualified FAKE NEWS sites (all you have to do is Google that term to find them) will not be changing sides this late in the game. They have all bought in heavily, doubling down on their political roulette bets — that they won’t get sick and that they must pack the Supreme Court with one more justice before losing power.
For as we all fear Don-the-con Trump is not about to go quietly — even when he loses, or even if he cheats and wins but gets caught. I can just hear him screaming from the White House portico, “It’s all a hoax!”
And now just this week just after his 10 days in not so much isolation he’s back at it again in Florida, a state with a still exploding infection rate, holding a rally with a thousand people not wearing masks. According to Yahoo News, “Even after the cluster of cases at the White House, Trump’s Florida rally still didn’t include standard measures designed to minimize risks of coronavirus spread. Guests were packed together, and many did not wear masks.” Clearly, he just doesn’t care about anything but winning.
Trump is indeed counting on the “herd mentality” as he actually said recently, to cure something but it’s not going to be the disease; perhaps it’ll cure the mass ignorance associated with his followers?
At this rally he claimed he has immunity to the virus on the very same day one of the first confirmed COVID-19 patients in the U.S. who had contracted the disease before got it a second time. This, while the infection rate is racing across Wisconsin and the rest of the mid-western states.
And he again is droning on about Biden being in the clutches of the “radical Democrats” or that “he’s saving America from socialism” and that he is going to protect America against ANTIFA while ignoring the extremist militias planning to kidnap and kill Michigan governor, Gretchen Esther Whitmer. Even William Shakespeare couldn’t make up a plot this bizarrely twisted!
This is what he is good at, keeping everything off balance and confused, you shouldn’t expect anything less. And we can only expect more of it in the days ahead from both Trump and his enablers, even after the votes are counted.
Perhaps Thomas Jefferson’s generous perspective serves to explain:
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part, which is wrong, will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
So it is that we’ve always had the “misinformed” in America from the very founding but perhaps Jefferson never conceived that the ignoramus leading the ill-informed would be spreading misconceptions like a plague from the very Oval Office in which he once sat.
Yet, again perhaps this uprising of the stupid, misinformed and delusional along with the exposing of the inequities in our nation has woken the sleeping consciousness of a new majority in America — enough to finally end this “reign of error” and to fulfill the promise of its creed of liberty and justice for all. This is perhaps far too optimistic for our current circumstance because first we must vote him out, but it will not kill the ideology that supported his rise in the first place.
Trumpism must be stopped to save this republic!
(James Preston Allen is the founding publisher of Random Lengths News. He has been involved in the Los Angeles Harbor Area community for more than 40 years.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
