It’s 2020 so of course the election has turned out to be as complicated, contentious, and drawn-out as possible. And I personally have come out of it emotionally broken. The election has now been called for Joe Biden and while that is of great relief to me, I can’t help still being massively disappointed. Look at those numbers for Trump. Not only did Trump make it a close race in the states where it mattered but he actually improved on his 2016 vote tally. How is this possible?
In 2016, Trump’s inability to lead was largely unproven or unknown to the greater electorate. While he clearly was a disgusting human (“locker room talk”), it was possible for some to overlook that in the hopes that an outsider perspective was worth it. Trump was also running against a woman many saw as an unlikable insider — a hugely unfair disadvantage for Clinton but reality among the general electorate nonetheless. And the stupid e-mail problem — especially the announcement the week before the election by Comey is hard to believe even looking back now. At the time, the 2016 election result was a painful for me — realizing that Clinton’s imagined problems were worse than Trump’s obviously very real problems, I didn’t understand why 63 million people were duped. And of course, those duped were proportionately more concentrated in the states where it mattered to swing the Electoral College to Trump even though Clinton won the “popular vote”. Also, many people likely stayed home and didn’t bother to vote for Clinton because they figured she was certain to win. That amounted to what seemed like a perfect storm of nonsense that accidentally elected Trump. And yet, we’d be stuck with Trump for 4 years — or at least until he did something stupid enough to get impeached. And at the end of 4 years, people surely would have seen him for the charlatan he is.
I was wrong about Trump doing something impeachable mattering. But over those 4 years, Trump proved just how awful a person he was over and over again in ways I couldn’t have imagined. He defended white supremacists (fine people on both sides), he used his position as president to try to bully a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his likely political opponent, and he has mismanaged a pandemic such that a quarter of a million Americans are dead now. As for his opponent, despite the best efforts of the greater Democratic primary to choose somebody who would lose to Trump, Rep. Jim Clyburn got the Democrats back on track with Biden who’s main problem was a combination of being as old as Trump and too centrist to be interesting. In other words, about as perfect a candidate to oppose Trump as you could find.
Therefore in the election this week, I wanted to see the country vote for Biden and Democratic senators by a overwhelming majority to humiliate Trump and force the remaining GOP senators to separate themselves from what Trump had stood for and how he had operated. And with Democrats in the majority of both parts of Congress and the Executive branch, we’d finally be able to get around to passing legislation and improving lives for a majority of Americans. The greater the rout against Trump and his cronies, the more proof there was that Trumpism was a fringe view of the country and the faster they would all just go away. It would also indicate that the 2016 election was a fluke and/or newer younger voters outnumber the older conservative voters.
The polls in advance of this election were pretty clearly showing Biden leading, not just in the popular vote but in the swing states too. I had a hard time understanding how Trump was even polling in the low to mid 40s given the circumstances. And likewise his approval ratings were inexplicably still in the 40s. Surely given the state of things, his approval and final vote tally would be lower than that. I figured that the election was going to be even more lopsided than the predictions and polls showed with Trump winning only the states that reflexively vote Republican and all the rest of the country would vote Biden.
It’s hard to overstate the emotional pain I felt Tuesday night watching election results come in. Sooo many more people voted for Trump than I thought would. I knew about the Red Mirage/Blue Shift and had been mentally preparing for it. But everything was so much closer than expected. I saw that 4 more years of Trump was a real possibility. Election night results were way more skewed toward Trump and the GOP in general making the Red of the Mirage way brighter than expected and the Blue of the Shift dimmer and slower to take effect. Could those Blue Shift votes really be enough to beat Trump?
We now know the answer to that question is “yes”. And yet, holy election tally, Batman, look at those numbers for Trump. He is currently at 70 million votes. That’s 7 million more than in 2016!! How can anyone look at Trump and his record and think they want 4 more years of it? Especially when the alternative is milquetoast Biden? Okay, there will always be certifiably crazy people who would vote for anyone but 70 freakin million (or “fm” — a new measurement of voters) people?
70fm people think that Trump is better on race relations than Biden
70fm people think that Trump is better at international relations than Biden
70fm people think that Trump’s LGBTQ+ views are better than Biden’s
70fm people think that the economy would do better with Trump than with Biden
70fm people think that Trump is better at handling the pandemic than Biden
By now we are all familiar with the claim that “that’s not who we are as America” but with 70fm people actually voting for Trump, it is nearly half of us. That is not a number that can be dismissed as not who we are. From now on when we hear people say “that’s not who we are”, we need to internally translate that as “that’s exactly who we are and it is embarrassing and the person saying this is being aspirational, not literal”.
I get that there are people who are just Republican voters and always vote for whoever is sporting the “R”. And Biden is not a Republican. Trump certainly doesn’t act like one but since he chose to apply that label to himself, he automatically gets the backing of people who just vote for the “R”. But in this election, surely some of those normal “R” voters could have taken a slightly wider view of the situation and seen that not only Trump wasn’t an actual “R”, but he was downright dangerous. At least some of those 70fm people?
How could so many people not see the actual truth of what Trump has done? How is it that reasonable people can be duped by Trump into thinking that either he hasn’t done what he has or that the alternative is worse? The one thing Trump is good at is lying. It’s actually kind of impressive in a sociopath sort of way how he has no problem just continually doubling down on a lie. He attacks the foundation of truth so that then all statements are equally void of veracity.
“You think the sky is blue? No it is purple. What’s wrong with you that you can’t see that it is purple? Who taught you that the sky is blue? You can’t trust teachers and scientists because they are liberal elites who look down on you. Your parents were probably fine people but if they told you the sky was blue, it was because of their teachers and scientists. It goes way back but we are saying it like it is now — the big beautiful sky is purple. Anyone that says otherwise is our wrong and is trying to undermine us. We need to join together to fight this enemy of our way of thinking.”
Now rather than being stated about something that is still universally believed to be true, imagine this tactic being stated about something a person wanted to believe. Like immigrants are taking jobs or that a virus isn’t as bad as it seems. Then it’s pretty easy to see how Trump can convert an ordinary weak-minded individual into a cult follower. Or even just sway an ordinary conservative leaning voter to be on his side at least for an election.
And this is where my main pain is right now. There are 70fm people who need cult deprogramming and/or a reality check that just isn’t going to happen — at least not in an instant. Exposing Trump as a fraud and criminal will help eventually. But we all know that his most fervent followers really would be fine with Trump shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue so any truth that is exposed is obviously going to be part of some fake news agenda, right? Since we have people right now believing that Tom Hanks is secretly trafficking children, then it is way too much to hope that the cult leader’s exposition will change any minds.
Ordinarily, extreme political viewpoints are not welcome in political compromise. And ordinarily, those views are fringe and easily dismissed. But what happens when those viewpoints become normalized into a more mainstream view for conservatives? You still ignore them even though it is now tougher to do, and hope that sanity will prevail in the long run. If it doesn’t, then compromise is not possible — there’s no point in sacrificing the soul for the sake of reaching an agreement.
Specifically, for example, if Trump is gone but the Senate remains with a conservative majority, as appears to be the case now, and the Senate wants to push forward with anti-LGBTQ+ policies, emboldened by the 70fm people that voted for Trump, should Biden and Democrats meet part way and only take away some LGBTQ+ rights? No. Should Democrats be willing to only partly dismantle the Affordable Care Act? No. Should we only go part way to fighting COVID-19 with half measures like states can choose whether to be safe or not? No.
So for all those who say this is a time for the country to come together, I agree. But for those who say it is a time to learn to work with each other, I disagree — at least when one side is starting from a fringe viewpoint that has only recently been normalized. When the views of some are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, pro-Christian to the detriment of other religions, and/or unsafe during a pandemic, that’s not a valid starting point. Those views are invalid in their entirety. You can’t start there to have a valid conversation. It’s time for some tough love (or maybe just tough noogies) to get this country back on track to pre-Trump days.
Also, keep in mind that until Trump is either dead or in jail, his loud mouth is going to be chirping from the sidelines. Twitter will be able to more freely censor him when he isn’t the President but there’s no question he’s going to be on TV in some capacity — annoyingly making money off his outsize persona of which we were all victims. Reasonable people are going to need to tune him out entirely and not let his nonsense factor into any discussions. If the GOP Senate is seen as being cowardly to do what is right due to Trump’s outside nattering, their malfeasance needs to be spotlighted.
So how am I broken? How does this impact me? I’m generally a pretty positive person and believe in democracy and differing viewpoints and listening to others, etc.. But when 70fm people vote for Trump despite what he’s done for 46 months, it proves what I have believed to be true isn’t as true as I thought. It is shockingly easy to manipulate people into voting against their own best interests and coupled with a broken political process (unrepresentative Senate and Electoral College), the failings of our Democracy and indeed any democracy are clear and frightening. My positivity and belief in democracy is broken and I’m not sure that it can or should be repaired. It hurts.
Here are some articles that I’ve read over the past week that make me at least somewhat less hurt — not that it diminishes the the problem but at least I know I’m not alone in my pain and views.
“This election was a reflection of who we are as a country” by Michael Gerson at The Washington Post
“What does this election say about our country, and our disconnect from it?” by Mark Arsenault and Rebecca Ostriker at The Boston Globe
“How do we fix this?” by Yvonne Abraham at The Boston Globe
“Trumpism is here to stay” by Ishaan Tharoor at The Washington Post
“America is battered, but a somewhat happy ending is in sight” by George Will at The Washington Post
“Whether he goes or stays, Trump has done damage that can’t be forgiven” by Colbert King at The Washington Post
