And all his bizarre little henchmen
I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen, all the people pointing to the visibly meagerly attended Trump rallies of the campaign’s final few weeks: that was meaningless. People stopped going to Trump rallies because they were not fun anymore, not because they didn’t support the man. (And they might’ve been a little worried about getting shot.)
But doesn’t mean they want to mete out pain and punishment any less to those whom they feel are doing the country wrong. And don’t yet see (or maybe even want) what damage Trump will do to civil service. (Which is probably the only reason Harris didn’t lose Virginia: because a lot of government workers who live there know they’re probably going to get fired so they can be replaced by Trump lackeys.) And don’t yet see that Trump’s absolutely NOT “better for the economy.” Not by a long shot.
By the time they do, it’ll be too late. I keep thinking back to when Trump wanted the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates to nothing. Then Covid came along, and of course, if the Fed had no room to drop interest rates at that point, which they wouldn’t have if they had listened to Trump, they couldn’t have saved the economy. Now, one of the first things he will do is fire Fed Chief Jerome Powell.
And everybody in the media who’s normalizing Trump by saying he views everything transactionally, stop saying that as if that’s a valid way of explaining his MO. Because really he doesn’t. He views everything through the lens of whether people are nice to him or not, without him feeling compelled to be nice to anybody. And he’s often said people who don’t treat him nice deserve to get deported, imprisoned, or shot. So far that’s rhetoric. In this term, I’m pretty convinced, he will kill people deliberately and out in the open. (And I’m no alarmist, as you know if you follow my stuff.)
And a lot of what he’ll be doing as president is governing by executive order, which he now has a lot of power to do as long as those orders are considered “official acts”. He doesn’t really need Congress for a lot of stuff. Like tariffs, for instance, for the most part.
And those military parades Trump wanted in his first term: they’re coming. As much to indimidate fellow Americans as adversaries outside our border.
Personally, the sad thing is, I don’t think I will be alive to see how this ends because it’s going to be decades now before it works itself out. What with Trump probably appointing several more Supreme Court justices and all that. That’s a done deal with the Senate controlled by Republicans. They control who gets approved to be a judge. The House — even if it is controlled by Democrats — has no say. And if Republicans get control of both Senate and House at some point, it’ll probably destine a nationwide abortion ban and worse health care in general, which Trump WILL sign, even though he said he wouldn’t. He’ll say it’s what “everyone wants.” (And why weren’t women’s reproductive rights more of a catalyst? I can’t answer that.)
And how does a hard-working hardscrabble popular Democrat Senator in Ohio lose to a nobody? These are high levels of insanity.
Let’s just say it: this is all about White people in America looking at an inevitable future where they are no longer solely in charge and wanting to keep the old order in place for as long past its due date as they can. And maybe expand it by making it Christian too, despite the constitution. They’ve succeeded for now. Remember all those photos of mostly all white mostly all men standing around Trump in the Oval Office? We’re going to see a lot of those again. (for some reason the only non-white group Trump doesn’t seem to have a problem with are non-Muslim Desi, but that’s a different story.)
History will march on.
Eventually — sadly, not in my lifetime I don’t think — diversity or whatever you wanna call it since that’s a “bad word” will prove to be not such a scary thing and everybody will wonder why so many people were so scared of it.
I’m also a little sick of the Democrats who today are saying Harris failed because she didn’t pander to them meaning their individual concerns personally. They are just as heartless as those who voted for Trump.
Also, the people who are saying Elon Musk just bought the country for $44 million are being glib but not altogether wrong. This could be the source of some morbid amusement, because Trump clearly despises Musk on a personal level. But now he owes him. And Musk’s Silicon Valley armageddon-loving overlords. He really owes them.
Finally, I think the sole thing we don’t have to worry about is Trump killing much of Biden’s massive infrastructure spending and investment in American manufacturing. Certainly not to the extent he spent most of his first term dismantling almost everything President Obama had accomplished just because it was stuff Obama had accomplished, and didn’t really get anything “of his own” done because of it. No, he’ll just take credit for everything Biden did that he couldn’t. Especially since most people don’t know Biden did it in the first place.