Dear America,
As Donald Trump thrashes about trying to find a way to excuse himself for the fact that he ran for president when he had no idea how to do the job, I find myself almost desperate for reassurance that his tenure will end after this coming election. It is incomprehensible to me that about 40% of Americans continue to approve of him overall, but it is somewhat reassuring that the polls show that if the election were held today, Biden would beat him by something between 4 and 9 points. That should be consoling, but until the votes are counted, and even then, until Trump actually vacates the White House, I won't feel safe. I know that he will try to invalidate the election results--at best he'll do plenty of puling about election fraud, still without any evidence mind you--and thus I am not confident that he isn't going to pull some coup type trick to get into the Putin-Erdogan-Xi autocrat club. I am convinced that he admires those guys and thinks that they are imperial in nature, which is what he thinks of himself. Unless it's a landslide, Trump will try to crown himself king, but we can worry about how congress, the police or the military are going to handle that when the time comes. In the interim, we can all just take our Xanax before bed and try to sleep through the night.
It seems that the more things he gets wrong, and the more often he bumbles through denials or excuses for them, the more secure we are from the threat of another Trump four year debacle, or worse: eight years or even twelve as he exhorted his base to ask for at a rally in Texas last year when they started to chant, "four more years!" It sounded an awful lot like an admission that he was planning the aforementioned coup, but let's hope he isn't that stupid. In fact, sending troops to Portland and other cities against the will of their mayors looked an awful lot like a dry run. Well...let's just cross our fingers and think good thoughts for safety's sake. It's hard to admit, but the more bad luck we have as a nation, the better the chance that we will be rid of its cause come next January. In other words, there may be a consolation to the misery and chaos the pandemic is inundating us with. The morbidity of Covid-19 is approaching 5 million and will surely reach six or seven: 2% of the population. Fortunately, the mortality rate has fallen from 6% of cases to about 3.5%, presumably because there are finally enough ventilators and Remdesivir has been discovered, but no thanks to our crack-pot-in-chief's ascription of curative properties to Lysol and hydroxychloroquine. Between his lies and the canards he has spread to his willing and eager dupes, we're lucky that more people aren't dead.
I'm not saying that I am glad that the pandemic is devastating our country, and the world for that matter. Like every other civilized person, I grieve for those lost and the misery of those who survive. And as to Trump's coup fantasies, they scare me, but it is important that we all think about the possibilities that the Trump ego trip might end up in our peril. The bottom line is this; if you know someone who doesn't plan to vote, make sure he or she changes his or her mind...unless we're talking about a Trump voter.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment