My Democratic friends are holding on for dear life, hoping against hope that we don’t get a repeat of 2016, with Donald Trump winning the Electoral College after losing the popular vote, a uniquely American scenario that has already happened twice this century.
Me, I don’t look at the other, more likely outcome, a narrow Kamala Harris Electoral College win, on top of a more comfortable popular-vote win, as being all that much better.
I say that because, it astounds me that this election is anywhere near this close.
It was abdundantly clear that Trump is in obvious mental decline before he swayed to music on a Pennsylvania stage for 39 minutes last night, looking dazed and confused, borderline high on pharmaceuticals, and not necessarily the kind that you get prescribed.
His supporters, and they are legion, will tell you they’re OK with his rambling, incoherent rallies, because they like his policies, though when pressed, they can’t articulate which policies, or even that Trump has actual policy positions.
Oh, sure, they’ll yammer about preferring him to Kamala Harris at “the economy,” when the fact is that his administration simply inherited the strong economy handed to him by his the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama, which Trump promptly squandered because he decided to cash in the economic growth to fund massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.
Fully one-quarter of the national debt that our country has run up since its founding in 1789 happened on the four years of Trump’s watch.
Let that sink in.
Trump ran up $8 trillion of debt in four years, left office with the economy on the brink of collapse, and 46 percent of the country wants to give him another four years because they’ve allowed their favorite fake-news networks to convince them that none of that actually happened.
The propaganda machine also has them convinced that the biggest issue facing us as a country isn’t whether or not we have good-paying jobs that help people pay their bills and raise their kids, but rather, border security.
We’re being overrun by illegal immigrants because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they say, when the fact is, the population of undocumented immigrations today is lower than where it was when George W. Bush left the White House in 2007, and it’s not because Trump built a border wall and got Mexico to pay for it.
In fact, there were a grand total 85 miles of border walls during his term – for context, the U.S.-Mexico border is 1,954 miles in length – and, no, Mexico didn’t pay a dime.
Fact of the matter is, there were still 10.9 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. when Trump left office, and the total only dropped about 300,000 during his term.
So, for all his bluster, Trump wasn’t even as good as Obama at dealing with undocumented immigrants, and he took the smooth-sailing Obama economy and ran it into the ground.
Why, then, does he have the undying support of the 46 percent?
It’s telling to me that, when you corner MAGA on what really motivates them, it’s not really the economy or border security, but rather, Trump’s rants on kids going to school and coming back a different gender, as if that actually happens.
It’s keeping men out of women’s sports – when none of those people are actual fans of women’s sports to begin with, and have no idea that the number of trans athletes there really are.
It’s Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets.
What it really is, it’s that they hate what America has become, what it is – a nation heading toward being majority-minority, that embraces its different populations, wants to be inclusive toward its disparate ethnic, religious, sexual- and gender-identity groups – and they want it to back to where it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, when women knew their place, when brown-skinned people knew their place, when there wasn’t such a thing, in their minds, anyway, as something called LGBTQ+.
Trump has already won one presidential election, but that one, eight years ago, you could chalk up to his base, roughly 30 percent of the population, being augmented by moderate Republicans and right-leaning independent voters holding their noses, after convincing themselves that there’s no way that the candidate they saw telling them that he would undo Obamacare, that he had no problem bending the knee to dictators, that he would weaponize the Justice Department to go after political enemies, would actually follow through on any of that.
We survived four years of him running our country into debt on an unprecedented scale, of trying, and fortunately failing, 60 times to throw tens of millions of people off the health-insurance rolls, of him comically weakening us vis-à-vis world powers China and Russia, of him trying, and again, fortunately failing, to use the DOJ and IRS to persecute his political detractors.
And yet, here we are, again, in a pick ‘em presidential race.
Kamala Harris is going to win, but that in itself isn’t going to solve the biggest issue facing us, that, for the second time in four years, 70 million Americans want that high-as-a-kite hateful old man, swaying on a stage last night, unknowingly ,to a gay anthem from the 1970s, among the nine songs that he had them play for him, back behind the Resolute Desk.
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Chris Graham
