There is no bottom to the depths of Trump’s corruption. Every day, it seems, we think that we’ve hit the bottom and then we go lower. His targets today are the USPS and Kamala Harris. The reason behind these attacks is obvious and even very nearly plainly stated by Trump himself as being direct threats to his re-election.
But my concern today is what happens after Trump is pushed out of office on November 3rd — okay this might be too optimistic for some readers but the alternative would turn this into a horror article so I’ll stick to the scenario that seems more likely at this time. Trump is likely to be defeated and presumably by a large enough margin that his inevitable twitter rants about stuff that wasn’t fair will be generally dismissed and the GOP will not back him any more. Again, I’m not counting on this and I implore everyone reading this to do whatever you can to dump Trump — especially those of you in swing states, the only votes that really matter. (Which is a topic for a different post.)
So assuming that all goes according to the current odds, on January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden becomes president, those that didn’t vote for him will automatically distrust him. Biden’s opponents will automatically tear into him and make up stuff to discredit him. None of this is new and has been going on for as long as this country has been around. Although with the advent of cable stations like Fox “News” and the more recent arrivals of nonsense like The Blaze and One America “News” Network, it has clearly gotten worse.
Today, however, I’m thinking about the position of the President itself. Trump has proven that he can do whatever he wants as long as there is a supine party in control of at least one branch of Congress. Trump and his family can personally profit from being in power. Trump can collude with foreign governments to attack his opponents. Foreign policy and domestic policy don’t have results that matter to anything other than how it reflects on the Narcissist in Chief. And in that way, the position of President has clearly and obviously been damaged.
The degree of hypocrisy that the GOP have demonstrated in the last 4 years (or as long as Mitch McConnell has been speaker, really) has also obviously proven that people can say anything they want and their believers will believe them. What is not quite so obvious, however is that even though the believers believe on the surface level, many of them subconsciously recognize the lie underneath. They are now more educated to the degree to which a politician can be duplicitous, deceitful, and a hypocrite and will use that against their opponents as much as it has been used for those they support. And I believe that is going to make things oh-so-much worse in the next 4 years.
For example, Trump claims that the USPS is in a shambles and needs to be reformed and people know that none of that is true but his supporters go along with it. In the future, President Biden maybe claims that the Department Of Education is in a shambles and needs to be reformed due to what Betsy DeVos has done to it. But Trump supporters will have in the back of their heads that maybe Biden is trying to control “big education” to curry favor in the next election and brainwash the children into being liberals — because Biden’s predecessor had done stuff just like that.
And thus the polarization of the country continues to worsen. The faith in those elected to office is further eroded. Only supporters of the people elected will believe anything that is said. I was not a fan of George W. Bush and I think much of what he said was twisted and misinformed but I didn’t have the sense that it was completely made up for his own personal benefit. Now that Trump has shown that’s a thing that can be done, will people be able to trust any of his predecessors? How can we repair this damage?
