So, the big day is nigh. Another 4 years of Trump, or four to eight years of Biden and whoever actually runs his administration?
Trump’s domestic record has been pretty bad. The economy was doing well before Covid-19, but his complete bungling of the response has thrown millions into poverty and enriched oligarchs. It was possible to control Covid, countries from New-Zealand to Vietnam have done far better jobs.
In terms of civil liberties Trump is even worse than Obama, which is saying something. Environmentally he’s a disaster (he just opened up an arctic reserve to roads and thus logging and mining, not his first such action.)
He hasn’t started any wars but he has ramped up droning and other types of bombing, again over Obama’s already insane levels (which were increased from Bush Jr’s.)
In foreign affairs, Trump has pursued a relatively unilateral policy, trade wars and so on. I don’t agree with all of it, and I think he’s pushing the US towards a cold war with China, but while Biden will be more multilateral, he will also push for a cold war with China (China’s not going to submit to American rules the way DC wants, so insisting it does means splitting the world in two.)
Biden’s very aggressive on foreign affairs, and is more likely to start a new war than Trump. He will be better environmentally though not enough to matter a great deal (his vow to not restrict fracking makes that clear), marginally better on civil liberties but will certainly continue the crack down on Black Lives Matters and other protests.
He will do better on Covid and he will give States relief and not try and cut States off from money the way that Trump is doing if he doesn’t approve of State actions.
While Biden is better on the environment and climate change it’s not enough to change the trajectory of runaway climate change, and he does block the possibility of a good candidate for longer than Trump, since the presumptive next candidate is Kamala Harris.
Both Trump and Biden are senile, but Biden is more likely to let other people run things.
Trump has been doing a fairly significant purge of the civil service over the last year, Biden will end this, and I think that’s overall good. His neoliberal apparatchniks are bad, but they are better than Liberty U grads, though that’s the lowest bar imaginable.
Biden’s likely staffing makes clear this is status quo ante—back to Obama, perhaps a bit more progressive in certain areas.
Because Biden is just status quo ante, he will not change the conditions which lead to Trump, and the next Republican candidate is likely to be a disciplined right wing “populist” and far more dangerous than Trump
As for the campaign, both sides have engaged in voter suppression (Dems against Greens) but the Republicans have engaged in far more of it, and I consider this a red line.
Summary: Biden’s better for most Americans, but definitely not all. He buys people time to make preparations, where Trump will continue the slide much harder. Trump is probably better for non-Americans in countries America is likely to invade, but only marginally. Iranians, for example, will do better under Biden.
Personally if I were American I’d vote for Biden if I were in a swing state, and third party if in a non-swing state (most of them.) In terms of future political activity, I’d probably look into the Democratic Socialists of America; more of the serious activists I respect call that home now than any other party.
Results. There’s no question Republicans are planning on taking this to the courts, preventing ballots from being counted whenever possible and so on, so this may not be determined soon. If it isn’t a blow-out, Trump will declare victory (like Pete Buttigieg did) and fight it out.
As for who will win, polls favor Biden. If you want the argument that the polls are wrong, this is a good version.
I don’t know, I gave up election prediction a while back, I’m bad at it now that I follow politics closely. I do think the odds are with Biden. But if it’s marginal the Republicans will steal it unless Americans take the streets in DC and force them not to.
Best of luck to all, Americans and not. Neither Biden nor Trump will be a good President, but may the one who will do the least harm win.
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Keith in Modesto
I still read, on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet, people making the argument that we can “push Biden left” after we elect him to the presidency and that getting Trump out is the priority right now. I think you can make a reasonable argument that Biden is preferable, but I think it’s foolish to put any hopes into the possibility of really pushing Biden left. It’s more straight-forward to frame the election in terms of which enemy one would prefer in the White House. And then urge other leftists to start preparing now for fighting whichever enemy ends up winning the election.
Thomas Golladay
A pox on them both. Morally speaking, vote for neither and throw your vote to the Green Party. Don’t stain your hands with these fools.
Overall better we get Trump and he burns the house down so thoroughly that Ike Republicans and FDR Democrats can re-emerge and work together on a pro-life, pro-gun, infrastructure heavy investments, debt relief, and retrenchment by pulling our military from abroad and back home and spending less on wars and more on healthcare.
The next step is a new constitution that has proportional vote of parties to a Unicameral Senate that has real teeth and can’t be gerrymandered or bought.
Otherwise, Civil War till this country is purged and renewed by hitting rock bottom.
Either way stock up today. Its going to be a rough ride.
Ché Pasa
Our political and governmental systems are not amenable to a Leftist paradigm. Biden is not a Leftist, nor was FDR. The Democratic Party is not Leftist. Any Leftist movement is crushed, smothered at birth or marginalized into oblivion, often enough simply bought off. This a key reality that seems to be impossible for many Americans to grasp. If rightists in power merely call their rivals and opponents “radical leftists,” they are then so defined, even when the truth is they are at best only slightly less radical rightists.
The touching faith in the standard American electoral politics to bring forth a heroic Leftist figure to lead us into the future is misplaced. The electoral process cannot do that. It won’t do that. But it can certainly inspire hope that One Day victory will inevitably be ours. By then, unfortunately, whatever we set out to gain will be all but forgotten.
As for Biden. We’ve seen the last few days the Trumpists raising a ruckus with their “caravans” blocking traffic and “escorting” Biden campaign buses. Police do not intervene. Note, the mere existence of the potential threat is enough to cause the Biden people to back away, back down, and cancel whatever it was they were going to say or do.
This is likely what we’ll be facing throughout the Biden regime (if there is one.) Rightists will control it as absolutely as if Trump had been granted another term.
Plague Species
Spot on. The FBI and the police are getting, and will continue to get, a kick out of it to the point they are effectively aiding and abetting it. Never forget this when and if the table turns. The enablers are as guilty if not more guilty than the perpetrators themselves.
Trump decries Comey, rakes him over the coals of public opinion, when Comey did the unprecedented and helped hand Trump the election in 2016. Despite Trump’s ingratitude, they, the FBI, continue to lick his ass. They are malevolent scoundrels who hopefully will get their comeuppance when this all explodes in their faces and the table turns.
What a joke. Biden wants to unify the nation. You can’t unify these cowardly creeps. You demolish them. Gut them. Disembowel them. You remove them from the realm with extreme prejudice. There is no other way to deal with them. They’re terrorists through and through — the homespun variety. Sanctioned by the Deep State. Supported and enabled by the Deep State because the Deep State is inherently fascist by its very nature.
Stirling S Newberry
Biden should win it – if only because the media live here. But there is a lesson here – about 40% of people are scammers and 80% are losers.
Plague Species
Oh yeah, sure, because poisoning the remaining potable water supply via fracking is pro-life. Because growing the economy by flooding the marketplace with throwaway garbage is pro-life. Because forcing ghetto mothers to carry their welfare fetuses to term so said fetuses can grow up and buy their guns illegally at gun shows so they can take them back to the ghetto and shoot each other up is pro-life. I can go on and on. The list of contradictions related to those who claim they are pro-life is endless.
StewartM
As for who will win, polls favor Biden. If you want the argument that the polls are wrong, this is a good version.
Which quotes the Trafalgar Group, which won’t share its methodology and has a rather poor track record, as does Rasmussen. Neither of these polling outfits have a particularly great track record (and as a Chinese proverb says, ‘even a blind pig finds an acorn now and again’; you have to look at their overall record, not just the times they were right). And it mentions the bogus Hunter Biden laptop story, which is almost certainly bogus insofar as described. Besides, like the Righties going after Billy Carter in the 1970s, who held no political office but who tried to cash in on the fact he was Jimmy Carter’s brother, the last time I checked Hunter Biden wasn’t running for office either. That means the Republican hit men came up blank finding dirt they could use on Joe Biden (well, there is dirt, in public, but they and their base like *that dirt*), just like they did on trying to find dirt on squeaky-clean Jimmy Carter.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/
This survey of the track record of major polls refutes some of the claims made in that article. For instance, some of the polls with a Democratic bias are also online and not in-person so any ‘shy Trump voter’ should have no angst in answering. But moreover why should Trump voters—you know, with big yard signs, flags flying on pickups, be “shy”? He’s prez after all. Trump voters are the least shy people I know. As I have also said, pollsters have tried hard to now correct for education level and may in fact be understating Biden’s lead.
As for the ‘good Trump economy before CoVID’ any honest appraisal was that the ‘good Trump economy’ was just as shitty for most people as the Obama economy during his 2nd term, and the ‘lookie at the stock market!’ of course ignores the fact that both administrations handed Wall Street trillions of FREE MONEY. The one signature item in Trump’s policy, his tax giveaway to the rich, may have raised taxes on more lower-earning people than he cut, due to the removal of the individual deductions (if you had a household with more than one person plus you, your taxes went UP, not down).
The biggest reason ‘the polls may be wrong’ may be the ones the Republican authors don’t want to tell you, and that’s 1) vote tossing and vote destruction, 2) voter suppression, and 3) those wonderful closed-source voting machines that lack any audit trail and whose leadership backs Republicans–as I have said, it would be trivial to write code that only would kick in on an election day that would flip 1 % of the vote, well within the margin of error of nearly all polls, but yet still swing important states and election. As I have also said, I think a lot of the Republican hostility to vote-by-mail is that it uses *paper ballots* and does an end-run around such machines. That is a far bigger concern, and if the Ds are serious, they should make this one of their priorities if they win. Make voting a *right*, not a privilege, and insist all vote tabulations have secure and transparent audit trails.
I held my nose and voted not for Biden, but for continuing to have free elections, which we will lose if Trump continues a lot faster than if he is ousted. The US becoming a Wall Street autocracy would drive both the US, and the world, down faster by every metric.
Plague Species
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-lashes-out-after-fbi-announces-investigation-biden-bus-incident-n1245728
What a hoot. As if. The FBI is directed by William Barr. This is not an investigation. Instead, the FBI will reward these traitorous patriots and offer them a job as agents if they aren’t already agents. If they’re not, agents that is, they may as well be.
If the FBI was serious and had any integrity and principles whatsoever, Trump would have been arrested and prosecuted long ago. Instead, he’s the Criminal In Chief who can do whatever he wants and I mean WHATEVER. He’s the ringleader. Arrest him. Now. Anyone else encouraging these traitorous terrorists as Trump has done all along would have been in federal prison by now, but not Trump. He’s immune. The FBI and the DOJ got Putin’s orders. Touch McDonald Trump and Navalny will be your fate.
What a bunch of traitorous pussies. Capitulating to Putin. I never thought I’d see the day Catholics and Communists were in bed together fornicating all the live long day, but that’s precisely what the union of Barr and the Roberts’ Court with Vladimir Putin is. A match made in hell. It’s pornography. It’s sex, in effect. Instead of Debbie Does Dallas, it’s Barr And Roberts Do America Communist Style.
gnokgnoh
Plague, you are on a roll. The metaphor is brilliant.
Che, how do you define left? What do you consider the Democratic Socialists?
kråke
We can count on the Biden corporatists to assume a plague is a plague. That is a not insignificant distinction.
They will, of course, be shortly informing us that the price for a mask mandate, better hospital funding, and a tailored application of the DPA, is just a wee bit of austerity.
GlassHammer
My prediction is “the most annoying outcome is most the likely outcome.”
The American zeitgeist appears to be set to “suboptimal and irritating” not “catastrophic and crippling”.
So the outcome will be a prolonged court battle over a landslide Biden victory.
This will be followed by a push for Biden’s impeachment over the Hunter influence peddling. After that a market correction (due to the demand gap we never dealt with), an insufficient stimulus bill is passed, followed by an austerity bill, and a rushed vaccine which may or may not work.
A Republican takes the Presidency in 2024 but it won’t be Trump.
Howard
I greatly admire your writing. But the past tense of the verb “lead” is “led.”
Also, unless something has changed recently, DSA does not present itself as a party, so they are not (yet) an option on the ballot anywhere in the US. All my friends, family, and acquaintances are five-alarm Biden supporters, but here in Texas I voted Green.
js
The thing about a right wing leader worse than Trump emerging is of course it could happen, but I think the demographics are against it. Millenials will be the largest voting block, Trump and Biden as well were never candidates they would have chosen. I don’t think the right has as much traction there as with some older voters.
Ché Pasa
DSA makes some leftist noises but they’re not a leftist party. At this point, they’re not a political party in any case. Greens have historically promoted some leftist policies, but too often in elections, they serve as Republican cut outs and spoilers (wittingly or not.)
The United States does not have a viable political Left and has not had one since the Red Scares of the 1950s. Which makes the latter day Red Scares focused on Putin and Russia pre- and post-2016 election ludicrous. It’s always been absurd. But there you go.
A real Left in the United States would focus on the needs and aspirations of the working class (after first defining it to be inclusive rather than limited to a sub-segment of workers) in opposition to the overhearing power and wealth of the Overclass. Yes, class focused, making clear distinctions between classes rather than trying to mollify the upper classes in pleading for the lower orders.
No more pleading. Demanding, and when refused, taking.
Risking and fighting rather than game playing and compromising.
A real Left would long ago have re-imagined the United States from what it was becoming — a neo-liberal oligarchy serving the rich and least needy — to what it needs to be.
And what it needs to be is so far from what it is that the United States cannot be reformed. The crisis this time is immediate and existential.
The virus hits mostly poorer black and brown Americans, and because of that, the mostly white Overclass doesn’t care. They can afford whatever they need for themselves. The economy serves that same mostly white Overclass and it exploits everyone else. Poverty is endemic, like disease, and it cannot be eradicated through common economic policies — which serve the rich, after all.
Workers are exploitable and expendable, and so many are so deep in debt, anything at all can force them over the edge — and that shouldn’t be the case, and it doesn’t have to be the case. Debt can be canceled, and contrary to Yves Smith, it doesn’t have to mean being subjected to onerous tax liability (which is another topic altogether).
And so on…;-)
anon
Biden lucked out big time with the pandemic. Trump would have had a sure win if COVID-19 had not happened or if not for his bungling of his response to the virus. I am in a swing state and reluctantly voted for Biden because Trump is so repulsive and our lives are immediately at risk with his COVID-19 response. Had it been a normal year I would have almost certainly voted for a third party candidate or written in another Democratic candidate I preferred over Biden.
RobotPliers
js wrote: “The thing about a right wing leader worse than Trump emerging is of course it could happen, but I think the demographics are against it. Millenials will be the largest voting block, Trump and Biden as well were never candidates they would have chosen. I don’t think the right has as much traction there as with some older voters.”
I don’t know. I think a savvy right winger could scoop up a big share of the youth vote by ornamenting his/her platform with major elements of the progressive platform, absent some third rail issues (eg abortion). The promises and verbiage can be the same, but the intentions and actions will be what matters, who benefits and how will be key. The electorate is mostly low hanging fruit right now, the promised future is either the past or an unending present. Someone who comes along and promises a different future, that at least *appears* to work, could win in a landslide.
Chicago Clubs
Biden seems like a fairly sure bet to me, but so did Hillary so who knows. I know he’s polling better than she did, and a lot fewer people hate him, but I am not putting down any money on this thing. Who knows what shenanigans will be pulled (by the Republicans, I mean, not Russia). I actually think Biden will be worse than Obama. That’s the trouble with lesser evilism in my mind: the lesser evil has no incentive to get better and seems to just continually get worse over time, so it’s just a matter of how quickly you want the place to circle the drain. Why bother.
NR
Robot Pliers: Unfortunately, the current state of the country is such that if a leader comes along who improves the lives of 60% of the people, he will have enough support that he will be able to do whatever he wants for–or *to*–the remaining 40%.
KT Chong
It’s a difficult vote, but I voted early for Biden. I think it’s really the first debate that ultimately made up my mind, and pundits like to say presidential debates don’t change minds. (FYI: Trump lost 14 points in a poll after the first debate.)
What’s done is done, this is the last thing I’ reading about politics. I’m just gonna play video games until the day after the election.
different clue
I also voted “for” Biden for my version of the reasons Ian Welsh has laid out here. 4 more years of the particular disintegration and breakdown which the Trumpublicans have started and ramped up may not be survivable.
Whereas the JoeMalaBama Bidenoids will have to get their particular kind of disintegration ( more a resumption of the JoeBama-era decay and decline) ramped up over 4 years. And that gives us 4 years to plan for “something else in parallel and in the meantime”.
Different groups of people will all be pitching their special beloved “something elses”. Every “something else-ist” will have a pitch and a spiel, and they will all be pitching and spieling. That’s fine. We can listen to the pitches and spiels at our leisure and see if we want to take up and apply any little thing we hear. But any spiel-pitcher who demands that I join his or her little action group is a waste of my time and an aggressive seeker of stealing my brain for herm’s own aggrandizement. As such, I will rudely reject the importuning of such pitch-spielers.
someofparts
In a few years Ian should have a Who Made it Out thread. See who got out and how things are going.
NL
“The economy was doing well before Covid-19”
Started chuckling and then laughing after reading this. Could not bother reading the rest of the fantasy…
I am sorry.
Hugh
“Biden lucked out big time with Trump. Trump would have had a sure win if Trump had not happened or if not for his bungling ”
Fixed it for you, anon, but agree with you about the virus.
NR, American politics for the last 40-50 years has been about how the top 10% rules/screws over the 90% rest of us.
different clue
@someofparts,
” In a few years Ian Welsh should have a Who Made It Out thread.” IF there is still an internet.
IF there is still a power grid. IF there is still power.
People who feel they will just DIIIIEEEEE without computer internet-of-some-kind access should think about how to stay in computer touch with eachother when there is no net of any kind.
There will still be stand-alone computers for some years more. How will people catapult the digital samizdata from one stand-alone computer-user to another? Floppy discs by courier? Little hard drives by trained long distance dog-teams? Hand to hand? Little thumb drives by carrier pigeon?
KLing
Paul Cockshott has an interesting take:
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/the-us-crisis/
\”The old US constitution was modeled on the Roman slave owner’s oligarchy. Going beyond it a new democratic revolution could borrow other ancient models and apply them to new circumstances:
It could demand the replacement of the state constitution with one in which there are no elected officials but all executive bodies run by citizen committees of citizens chosen by lot like a jury. Only that can overcome class, race and sex bias at state level. Only this can displace the professional political elites and Professional and Managerial Class from control of the state.
It should take up the old Black Panther slogan of ‘All power to the people’. There should be no laws or taxes unless approved by plebiscite. Power of innitiative by the people.
It would abolish the police. Law enforcement would be by a citizen militia. There would be an obligation on all citizens to serve in militia and carry and bear arms on duty. Duty by roster. Payment for hours spent on militia duty at current police rates of wages. Exemptions for those over 55, nursing mothers, the disabled etc.
A limited professional detective corps could be retained to investigate crimes. They would not be armed and would rely on the citizen militia if arrests had to be made.
Abolish the judiciary. Courts to sit only with juries chaired by foreperson of jury. This can be presented as a completion of the republican tradition, since judges are a relic of English feudalism. The ancient republics had juries but no judges.
All the above draw on prior traditions either from ancient democracy, Swiss democracy, or the more radical US republican traditions. They transform the legislative, executive and repressive arms of the state into a direct democracy. This kind of transformation makes the use of repression by the state against citizens much harder. The extension of democracy would be opposed by the propertied and managerial classes of both parties, but would be in the interest of the bases of each party [as] purely political/constitutional demands.\”
Willy
While I can see him fleeing the country (for “business reasons” of course), the rest of us will still be stuck with millions of Trump chumps. They may still want their Qanon and superspreader rallies, with or without buses.
ttu
Surprisingly few comments.
A. Biden likely I think not because of polling so much as early voting turnout. That is mostly-this time-an anti Mr Trump vote. This means we get, in someone else’s words, “a somewhat less steep angle of decline”.
B. No left party. True, though not always so. But I would argue that institutional players are better at reform than ideological ones. This means unions, and so forth: this system can be responsive to well-organized and adroitly placed pressure. Not terribly glorious. But at least somewhat possible.
C. Climate catastrophe (and other afflictions ala SARS and antibiotic resistance) are about to loom over everything owing to what is starting to look like a runaway reinforcement change. It will matter the moment the real estate market collapses which is the moment the insurers walk away from mortgaged real estate. No insurance=no mortgage=no market. That is around the corner as it is already happening in Fla. & Cali. Alternatively, FEMA will eat every spare dollar. Yes we will try to prop it up, and we will. Until we cannot, or, and it’s the same thing, the oligarchy thinks the US has become Mexico and parks its cash and kids elsewhere. Still, it will arrive. Personally I think it will be difficult for us to admit that pretty much everything-socio-political-economically that is-since WWII has been a mistake.
JVC
Is the general consensus here that regardless of who wins, a leftist/left-leaning person/anyone that\’s not a m(b)illionaire living in the US should be trying to move abroad? My partner and I had already thought so if Trump wins, but now I\’m thinking a Biden win just makes it sliiightly less urgent.
different clue
@ttu,
We really , truly, and this is no joke, need a way to get all the manmade global warming deniers to buy land and/or investments in the near to mid-near rising ocean flood zone. The money they would spend on seaside and sea-near properties would help the current climate-realist owners of those properties to flee inland and up hill with some money to buy any old dwelling opportunity away from the rising tide.
And if the Denialists were right all along, they can have their well-and-truly-earned last laugh on the rest of us. And if the Realists were right all along, the Denialists will get what is coming to them.
If I had the background, connections, skills, etc. to create and launch a plain vanilla investment fund of whatever kind, I would do so. The purpose of the fund would be to invest in well run/ well managed businesses which would have stayed successful but for man made global warming. And I would call it the Climate Skeptic Fund. I would pitch it as being directed to people who are “skeptical” about “GoreBull Warming” as they like to call it. It would be an invitation to put their money where their mouths are. I would pay myself a decent but not exorbitant salary or percent or whatever. It would not be about helping the skeptics get aboard the iceberg before it melts , if that is what is going to happen . . . NOT about fleecing them in the meantime. If the iceberg failed to melt, the last laugh would be on me. But I would count on the iceberg melting, hopefully with every single skeptic safely on it.
Thomas Golladay
https://delawarevalleyjournal.com/stigall-pa-dems-making-their-voters-see-and-vote-red/
This is what will put Trump over the edge. Uncompensated lockdowns on small businesses turns them against you.
@StewartM
We will see tomorrow which polls were right and should be listened to, and which ones are forever out of business.
As it is, Trump will carry Florida and North Carolina, sweep up Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and seal the deal.
Thomas Golladay
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/yes-there-is-a-hidden-trump-vote
On the fourth, we’ll see if the shy Trump Vote is real and turns the election firmly in Trump’s favor.
If they do, 538 will be out of business, and Trafalgar and Norpoth will be the people who are listened to.
In addition, the Democratic Party will fracture. Both the Woke Left and the Neoliberal Left will be utterly repudiated at the polls and the Democratic Party’s future will be the Louisiana Democrats who aren’t woke or neoliberal and can get the Republicans to defect.
BlizzardOfOzzz
I wouldn’t mind. Under the circumstances, those soon to be worthless investments must be very cheap, certainly far cheaper than solid but unglamorous inland properties without a coastal view and beach access. Oh, what’s that you say, property markets are a science-denier? Well, just wait 10 years, that will show them: by the year 2000 we’ll all be underwater.
different clue
I knew I’d get a nibble, if I dropped a hook and kibble.
(I could of been a poet, an I want you all to noet).
someofparts
Here is something heartbreaking and unsettling. Long interview with Frank Luntz. Toward the end he is literally in tears over what he is hearing from people and where he thinks all of this is heading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii9DCfTUiUw
This one is especially creepy. It looks like the face of Christo-fascism to me. It’s what Biden’s bad faith will usher in. This guy could be our Ahab. From what he says it sounds like we will get a preview of what is coming by watching what the Supremes get up to during a Biden administration.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising
If the link doesn’t work, it is the interview w/Josh Hawley on the 11/2 episode of Rising.
Joseph
We must elect Joe Biden so we can start the important work of getting Joe Biden the hell out of office.
Plague Species
You’re going to need another post tomorrow entitle The Day After The Election. Trump has become death, the destroyer of worlds. Maybe he always was — he was just laying in wait for the zeitgeist to manifest. And it did. The perfect storm coalesced to foist his ascendance.
https://youtu.be/7VG2aJyIFrA
On Morning Joe this morning, they interviewed the New Hampshire Chair of the GOP who happens to be a part of the Lincoln Project. They asked her how so many Republicans could have hitched their wagons to the monstrous Trump. It’s a legitimate question that deserves an honest answer that will never be forthcoming, but then too, it’s a legitimate question as to how the entire MEC (Media Entertainment Complex) also hitched its wagon to the monstrous Trump. In fact, the MEC is as much responsible for Trump’s 2016 election “victory” as anything else what with their free 24/7 publicity for Trump.
The subsequent four years of his term, the MEC did the same, making huge bank off their obsession with him. All the cable news venues coupled with the late night entertainers to include Colbert and Kimmel and Fallon and Meyers, have focused exclusively on Trump to the detriment of everything and anything else. Trump thanks them for their service.
They’re hooked on Trump like meth addicts are hooked on Heisenberg’s Crystal Blue Persuasion. In fact, without Trump, they won’t know what to do. Their skills of original creativity have so atrophied, they’ve lost those skills and without Trump they are nothing. It’s not in their interests for Biden to win this election. In fact, I predict that even if Biden wins and Trump miraculously leaves the White House peacefully, the MEC will continue to cover him 24/7 and once again bequeath him with free, to the tune of billions of dollars, publicity for the next four years in his 2024 election campaign.
edmondo
Electing Joe Biden in 2020 insures President Tom Cotton in 2024. I’m gonna pass.
StewartM
Thomas Golladay
We will indeed see who was right But Trump voters aren’t shy, that’s for damn sure. Their behavior is an offshoot of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
And you’re posting a link to the Delaware Valley Journal about small businessmen being screwed, when it’s *Trump* who mismanaged (i.e., stole) the initial relief package and then the *Republicans* who nixed any further relief?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/523098-slightly-more-voters-blame-trump-republicans-for-failure-to-reach
Seems like that for more people is more a hit on Republicans and Trump.
kråke
Plague,
I live in NH. The old guard, “let’s just screw the poor, but not be too ugly about it” Republicans have held on here a bit longer than elsewhere, but only because the stupid, dirtbag freestaters have been their alternative. And they are showboating, too-zealous clowns. But. They’re almost ascendant now, the Baldasarros, Gerickes, Simmonses, Bolducs and Murphys.
And these people are not even hiding their racist fascism. It’s been a standard of New England politics for almost a hundred years that public religiosity is shameful and bad. It lacks…grace. It’s unseemly. About 50 years ago, being publicly racist was kind of folded in to that tradition.
No more. The country clubbers have lost the ideological war, and its all wolves in wolves clothing waiting to howl.
different clue
Well! When I went to send a comment, I got a 401 Not Allowed! Error screen ( or whatever that number is). I may try again later.