Thank you HCR, now I know who to blame for killing democratic representation in America.
The third fucking president.
Way to go Jefferson! You slave-raping cracker-ass motherfucker
12 Likes
I hope this means that there’s a contempt charge for DeJoy?
8 Likes
[quote=“milliefink, post:1014, topic:155762”]
In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.[/quote]
Just a reminder:
(Snope report provides add’l details.)
9 Likes
My point quite exactly. As currently counted, more than 67 million voters are of the opinion that, yes, this person is the right person to be The Leader of The Greatest Country on Earth, so fuck me.
Also, fuck all of us.
This is serious. Even if the shitting president doesn’t win, and yes, I still hope that happens, those voters don’t cease to believe this.
Because they did not stop believing it even though literally hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens are already dead.
Fuck me.
14 Likes
November 4, 2020 (Wednesday)
Counting continues in the 2020 presidential race. There is a lot I’d like to say about what this election looks like, but I will wait until we have a final count. Remember: the fact that polling officials are taking time to count the ballots is a good thing, not a bad one. And there is no reason to think election officials are being anything but careful.
Apart from the vote tallies, there have been some important indicators in the past two days about our political system.
First of all, much of Trump’s power during his term has come from his ability to dominate the public narrative through threats or rumors. From his insistence that he had hired detectives to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop, he has gathered power by warning that something untoward was looming just over the horizon. But yesterday, after all the hype about expected violence at the polls, there was remarkably little trouble.
Trump’s attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, as the Department of Justice sent an email to federal prosecutors telling them that, while the law prohibits sending armed federal officers to polling places, it did authorize them to monitor “voting fraud” by sending armed federal officers to the places where election officials were counting ballots. About a half hour later, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”
But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.
Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.
Today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who caught the coronavirus when he helped to prepare Trump for the first presidential debate, told ABC News, “There’s just no basis to make that argument…. There just isn’t. All these votes have to be counted that are in now.” Among others, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Republicans all, echoed McConnell and Christie.
Still, last night Trump’s campaign sent out an estimated 9 million texts to his followers claiming the election had been stolen and asking for money for lawsuits to fight the apparent outcome. Today, Trump and his supporters flooded Twitter and Facebook attacking election results, prompting critics to urge the social media outlets either to take down the posts or to shut down the accounts spreading the disinformation.
The Trump team’s tactic appears to have worked, though. Today, Trump supporters gathered outside the TCF Center in Detroit, a city that is 79% Black, to complain that there aren’t enough Republican poll watchers to oversee the ballot counting, which they think is tilting artificially toward Biden. Tonight, supporters gathered outside Arizona’s Maricopa County Elections Office, where election officials are counting ballots, yelling “count those votes!”
The officials are, indeed, counting the votes. And U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., is following up on the failure of the United States Postal Service to comply with his order to make sure no ballot was left in a USPS plant on Tuesday. Sullivan made the order after civil rights groups learned that 300,000 ballots had been scanned into processing facilities but not out of them. After 5:00 on Tuesday, an attorney for the Justice Department told Sullivan that the USPS had its own system and thus would not comply with the order.
Today, Sullivan brought USPS officials into a hearing to explain their actions. The official in charge of handling ballot processing, Kevin Bray, told Sullivan that the lack of an outgoing scan on the ballots likely meant they had been removed by hand for faster delivery. He could not tell Sullivan how many ballots are still in the system. Sullivan ordered him to provide that data by 9:00 tomorrow morning. The hearing will resume at 11:00.
For his part, Biden, along with running mate Senator Kamala Harris, gave a brief statement today celebrating yesterday’s demonstration of American democracy and praising the 150 million people who voted in the election despite the pandemic. “Here,” he said, “the people rule.” He explained that he was not claiming victory- yet- but that he and Harris expected that when the votes were counted, they would win. He called for Americans to lower the temperature and come together as a nation. “We are not enemies,” he said, and “the presidency itself is not a partisan institution. It’s the one office, in this nation, that represents everyone.” He reminded listeners that counting ballots was at the heart of our democracy. “We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied.”
Another news story dropped quietly yesterday while people were distracted with the election. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report challenging Acting Director Chad Wolf’s actions this summer when he sent law enforcement officers from the department to Portland, Oregon. The report challenged the deployments’ legality on a number of fronts, and concluded that the issue is open, unresolved, and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, an ally of senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, rejects the inspector general’s findings.
Trump insisted in his campaign rallies that stories about coronavirus were simply attacks on his candidacy, and on November 4 we would no longer hear about the pandemic. Sadly, today brought us not to silence, but to a new record: the U.S. had more than 100,000 new infections today. At slightly before 7 pm EST tonight, the number was 104,004 cases. Infections are spiking, and public health officials expect the rise will continue unless we address it.
11 Likes
There’s a nest of those Chads, apparently?
Whatever the outcome of that election, this will certainly bring the health sector to it’s knees.
Just do the math. It’s all there. We can predict the number of hospitalisation. Of ICU units needed. It’s all there.
Fuck this.
6 Likes
im a pessimist by nature. i can easily see people blaming this all on biden down the road.
not that it matters really. the most important thing is getting a sensible national response going to protect people as best as can be done at this point.
still it’s going to be annoying.
5 Likes
Sadly, the health sector never got off it’s knees from the summer peak. More nurses have died in less than 1 year of covid combat than in 4 years o WWII combat. The medical personnel we are losing cannot be replaced quickly enough. The field hospitals being set up are all well and good, but we cannot staff them. ICU nurses and docs take years to train, and inexperience costs lives. Even in primary care we are losing folks. But don’t let us interfere with the “freedoms” of MAGAts to cause superspreader events. 
14 Likes
November 5, 2020 (Thursday)
And still, we wait.
Ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election continues, although it sure looks like Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are going to win.
What has stood out today is the degree to which Trump and his team have governed by creating their own reality. Now that that image is being challenged, they are flailing.
Knowing he would lose the popular vote, Trump intended to win by arguing that Democrats had “stolen” his victory. Before the election, he talked about the dangers of mail-in ballots, setting up the idea that they would somehow be fraudulent, although there is no evidence of that. He expected—correctly, as it turned out—that mail-in ballots would be heavily Democratic while Republicans would vote in person on Election Day. That set up a scenario in which the election results on November 3 would give an advantage to him, but as the hours wore on and the mail-in ballots got counted, the Democrats would gain ground. So he talked repeatedly of ending the count on the night of November 3, although ballot counting has always taken days.
He planned to challenge the counting of the mail-in ballots in the courts, all the while telling his supporters that Democrats were stealing his victory. If he could gin up enough chaos, he could buy time to throw the results into doubt and, perhaps, get the Supreme Court to enter the fight. There, he hoped for victory with the help of the three justices who owed him their seats.
He planned to subvert the election, staying in power thanks to his extraordinary ability to control the narrative, making people believe things that are not true.
The only thing that could stymie that narrative was overwhelming turnout from Democrats. To make that impossible, Trump’s team arranged to keep voters from the polls in places like Florida, and Texas, and enlisted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to delay the mails so ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted.
But, in the end, their plans could not completely suppress those Americans fed up with the Trump administration. As I write tonight, Biden and Harris are winning the popular vote by more than 4 million votes, and the numbers are rising. If it weren’t for our antiquated Electoral College system, this election would already be over, decisively.
Instead, we are still waiting on the outcomes in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska.
The unraveling of Trump’s plan to claim victory has been mesmerizing.
Until Tuesday night, everything seemed to be going according to plan. In the evening, Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, a victory certainly helped by the disfranchisement of 1.5 million ex-felons, whose voting rights Floridians had voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to restore. Florida’s 29 electoral votes made it look like Trump was on track to win, opening up room for him to declare victory even though many of the states he would need to win for real were still counting. If he could claim victory early on, any later correction would look like the election was being “stolen.”
But before he could take a victory lap, the Fox News Channel called Arizona for Biden long before anyone else did. Arizona had been a Trump state in 2016, so this meant a flip and undercut Trump’s claim to a commanding lead. Trump was furious. He and his aides worked Twitter and the phones, trying unsuccessfully to get FNC to retract the call and, when that failed, to discredit it.
As Trump fumed, the Biden campaign was watching its candidate’s numbers tick upward—again, as expected—and Biden gave a short statement Tuesday night saying the campaign felt good about where it was, and encouraging patience as election officials counted all ballots.
Trump then made a statement at 2:30 am Wednesday morning, claiming victory, demanding that officials stop counting mail-in ballots, and promising to take the election to the Supreme Court to decide. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”
But key Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, noted that a number of Republican Senate candidates ran more strongly than Trump did, meaning they no longer need him. They have clearly decided that Trump is no longer useful to them, and they went before television cameras in the morning to contradict him. They said that all ballots should be counted.
Since then, the president has been flailing. His legal team has been filing lawsuits to challenge ballot counting, but the suits are frivolous, and keep getting thrown out. They are designed not to win legal points, but rather to do what Trump has always done politically: create a narrative that makes his supporters believe something that is not true. So, for example, his team has sued to have Republican observers in ballot counting areas, only to have to admit to a judge that they already have observers there. They are not righting a wrong; they are trying to set Trump’s supporters up to believe a lie.
Remember when, during the impeachment hearings, the Republicans dramatically stormed a hearing to demand they have access… when, in fact, members of the committees already had access and had been attending? Then, as now, it is all about creating a narrative.
By Thursday, Trump’s surrogates were escalating their attacks on the election process. The usual suspects—the Trump children, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and so on—have tried to cast doubt on the election, insisting that election officials should not be counting mail-in ballots that were cast on or before November 3… except in Arizona.
Some were even more explicit about overturning our democratic process. Trump legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon told Lou Dobbs on the Fox News Channel: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court- of which the president has nominated three justices- to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.” Former White House chief strategist Steven Bannon went further, calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded “as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone.” Twitter banned Bannon permanently.
Tonight, Trump addressed his sliding fortunes with a statement that will go down in the annals of the American presidency alongside Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech trying to regain control of the runaway Watergate story. In front of a wall of flags, speaking a low voice and tripping over his words at times, he rambled through a wild attack on the election, claiming it was being stolen from him. MSNBC cut away from his remarks almost immediately, noting they were lies; ABC News and CBS News made it about five minutes. Fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted: “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he’s ever given.”
It felt Shakespearean, like the desperate attempt of a man who has lost control of the narrative to try to claw it back, even as we all know it’s gone beyond all recovery. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, it was “sad and truly pathetic…. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over. But he just hasn’t accepted it, and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”
In the wake of Trump’s statement, more Republican officials condemned his attack on democracy. Then, tonight, 19 former U.S. Attorneys, all of whom served under Republican presidents, released a statement condemning Trump’s “premature, baseless and reckless” attacks on the election process. “We hereby call upon the president to patiently and respectfully allow the lawful vote-counting process to continue, in accordance with applicable federal and state laws, and to avoid any further comments or other actions which can serve only to undermine our democracy,” they wrote. Perhaps more significant is the fact that Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier told his audience that “We have not seen the hard evidence” of the fraud Trump’s campaign claims.
Tonight, the Secret Service sent reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware, to surround Biden in a protective bubble, in anticipation of what many expect to be a victory speech some time tomorrow.
10 Likes
This cannot be overemphasized. We will never know how much this impacted Dem turnout. As it happens, looking like it was not enough to affect the Presidential race, but what damage was done down-ballot? What impact was there in making it so Dem voters had to work so much harder to get their vote counted? As we finally clear this hurdle, much as I hate to say it, we can only afford to take a breath as we get ready again for run-offs in GA and off off year elections in some states (like here in VA) to consolidate and extend our gains, or move toward throwing the bums out, depending on where you are. This was exhausting, but it is only a beginning.
12 Likes
Texas got screwed by voter supression. It’s redistricting for next year. Between not gaining a dem majority in the state house and the cenus being done during a pandemic and cut short, we aren’t going to be able to fix the GOP gerrymandering. It’s fairly certain the state was undercounted and those undercounts happened in places like the Rio Grande Valley, which lean democratic. It might be even harder for us democratic Texans during the next statewide election (2 years). As soon as this pandemic is done, we (including me) need to start in person out reach to get more voters registered.
ETA: I am exhausted too. But also ashamed of my disengagement in previous years. We need to fight. I need to fight.
7 Likes
7 Likes
Obviously, that was good, but it’s not as if FOX has turned a new leaf (or has switched to a carefully considered, Murdoch-sanctioned, new strategy:
5 Likes
November 6, 2020 (Friday)
And still, we wait.
But not really, because the outcome of the 2020 election for the American presidency is clear. The Democratic ticket, headed by former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, is ahead in the key states of Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Biden does not need the electoral votes of all of them to put him over the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. It appears mathematically impossible for Trump suddenly to retake control of those states.
Tonight, with Harris beside him, Biden spoke to the nation. He acknowledged it is frustrating not to have a declared winner in the election, but urged people to be patient as election workers count every ballot: a process at the center of our democracy. He promised that he and Harris are already at work, receiving briefings on the coronavirus pandemic and the faltering economy, and that the country had its work cut out for it with those issues, along with climate change and systemic racism, but that we could solve them if we work together. Once again, he called for unity and promised to govern for everyone, not simply for those who had voted for him.
Biden had intended to make a victory speech, but the media seems oddly reluctant to call the election. That reluctance is odd enough that people are speculating as to why, suggesting that media administrators are afraid of the president’s fury or eager to milk the cliff-hanger situation for viewers. My own guess is that, with the president lashing out at what he insists without evidence is a fraudulent election, they are determined to have all the votes counted before making a final call.
For Trump is, indeed, lashing out: at his lawyers, his aides, election officials, and his opponents. He is allegedly having a hard time believing he lost.
He clearly intends to continue reshaping the government while he retains the office of the presidency: in the three days since the election he has gotten rid of the leaders of the three agencies in charge of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, the regulation of natural gas and electricity, and aid to foreign countries. Administration officials did not give a reason for the ousters, but it seems clear he is purging the administration of officials he considers insufficiently loyal.
Trump’s supporters are also having a hard time believing he lost. A top campaign official used his own texting company to send out thousands of text messages telling supporters that the Democrats were stealing the election and urging them to rally in Philadelphia to protest. Two heavily armed men drove from Virginia and showed up Wednesday to attack the counting center in the city.
Supporters have also forced an election worker in Atlanta, Georgia, into hiding after a right-wing YouTuber posted a video of him throwing away a piece of paper and claiming it was a ballot. The video, along with the worker’s personal information, went viral. According to Richard Barron, the elections director for Fulton County, the worker was, in fact, properly discarding an instruction sheet.
This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.
Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.
Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.
The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump. That deadliness might, in the end, create common ground with the Democrats who urge mask wearing and social distancing. “I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive,” Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials told the AP.
On October 25, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House was no longer going to try to control the pandemic, but was instead going to focus on finding drugs and a vaccine to treat it. Tonight, it came out that Meadows and four other White House aides have contracted the coronavirus. The people who knew were told to keep it a secret. Meadows has been participating in White House events this week—including a gathering on election night—without a mask.
Addressing the right-wing media’s construction of a false narrative for its supporters seems crucial to restoring sanity to the country’s politics. How that might play out is unclear, in part because Trump’s extremism seems to be driving a wedge into the right-wing ecosystem. Limbaugh and Jones are following Trump, but QAnon, which promised that Trump and the military were in control and that Trump would ride to victory, is suddenly adrift. Believers thought he would bring “The Storm,” which would destroy the pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party. But now, Trump is losing and “Q” went silent after the election until tonight, when it simply told followers to stay strong.
In contrast to Trump’s true believers, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is turning on the president. The New York Post is dismissing the Trump family’s claims of a fake election, and the Fox News Channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden on Tuesday, undercutting Trump’s ability to claim a premature victory.
Tonight, looking directly at the camera, Laura Ingraham gave a monologue on her show about how Trump should leave the White House with grace and become a party kingmaker for the future. Ingraham appeared to be talking to Trump supporters, but it was clear she was talking directly to Trump himself.
10 Likes
I mentioned this on a different thread, but here’s more detail.
As much as I want to see 45 perp-walked out of the WH and fitted for an orange jumpsuit, The country might be better off if he resigns and takes a pardon from Pence. Why? Accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt, and comes with strings attached. He would be compelled to cooperate with investigators/prosecutors as they unravel the various criminal activities of his family and administration over the last 5 - 10 years or face jail for contempt.
One of the few things that could unravel The alternate reality that so many Americans live in is if 45, a broken shell of himself, testifies on TV about his own crimes, taking down his family and his closest supporters with him. How many GOP politicians can he take down? A dozen? More?
And it won’t necessarily be the crimes that turn his supporters away. It will be hearing exactly how they were taken by this broken and beat-down con man. This loser.
It won’t be every supporter. There would be rabid supporters who will listen to the Alex Joneses and believe things like “It’s not Trump - it’s a body double. Look, he’s not even orange!” But for a major ratio of the 70 million, it will be like waking from a bad dream. Sure, a lot of them will remain bigoted assholes. But they won’t be his bigoted assholes anymore.
4 Likes
As a nation, we have to stop letting people like this take the easy way out. We cannot offer a slap on the wrist after he’s set us against each other, broken every convention or rule he disagreed with, enacted policies that led to a staggering number of deaths, sent agents or followers to do us bodily harm, and engaged in corruption at every opportunity. He did all this for power, glory, and profit.
His followers, who supported all of that and continue to enable or act on his supremacist agenda every day, need to see him on the receiving end of “regular” law and order. I put that in quotes, because he’s still never going to take the kind of treatment he asked his blue lives rally attendees to dish out. They believe they are exempt from the consequences of their actions. Watching 45 go through multiple trials should serve as the ultimate lesson. If their Dear Leader goes to jail, acting as he wishes might lead to the same result for them, too.
I really doubt 45 would cooperate by testifying as you described. He won’t admit he did anything wrong unless he thinks pleading ignorance will work. He’s a petty, spiteful, and vindictive person with a huge ego. When he’s in public view, he wants to be seen in the best possible light. He’d never agree to be seen as a snitch or a loser on TV. Instead, he’ll try to get back at others in the GOP through his usual means - nuisance lawsuits, tell-all stories/books, and financial backstabbing carried out by whatever supporters with influence he has left.
10 Likes
I agree with you, for the most part. The pardon wouldn’t affect NY state charges, anyway. But it could actually be the most expeditious way to see him in jail. If he refuses to cooperate, next stop is jail - no appeals, no appeals of appeals, no SCOTUS case that takes half a year to get to. Just straight to jail until he’s ready to produce the documents or testimony required.
8 Likes
The probability that this guy goes to jail is not null.
But that’s the best I can say about it.
6 Likes
November 7, 2020 (Saturday)
Today at about 11:30 am, the media called the 2020 US presidential election. The winners are the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and his running mate-- the first woman elected to the vice presidency-- California Senator Kamala Harris.
It is a new day in America.
The last four years have been a struggle for the survival of American democracy. That struggle has been no less fundamental than the Civil War or World War II, for all that our people died not from foreign artillery but in hospitals and under the knees of police officers.
A majority of Americans spoke up this week to reclaim our fundamental values: equality before the law and equality of opportunity. This was a huge win. The Republicans did all they could to disfranchise Democratic voters, yet as of tonight, Biden and Harris are ahead by more than 5 million votes, with more votes still to be counted.
This victory, the defense of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” belongs to everyone who refused to let right-wing talking points go unchallenged any longer, who called their congressional representatives, who wrote letters to their local newspapers, who filled out a ballot, who ran for office. It belongs to everyone who stood up for America as a land of freedom and possibility, rather than a land of carnage.
It belongs to you.
If there is anything the last four years have taught us, it’s that we are our own saviors.
The struggle to protect our democracy is not over, not by a long shot. Already Trump’s supporters are insisting that the vote was rigged and the election stolen, and they are vowing to fight. Popular right-wing media hosts are egging them on. Meanwhile, Trump’s term does not end until January 20, 2021, and he will almost certainly use that time to take revenge on those he blames for his loss, that is: us. The next two months are going to be rocky.
While this election saved democracy for now, the forces that gave rise to Donald Trump’s presidency have not been vanquished. America is still under siege by oligarchs who are trying to take control of the country. They win supporters by spinning a false narrative that feeds fear and fury to drive ordinary Americans apart. And, as we now know, 70 million voters are open to their narrative, even if it means children torn from their parents, half of the country demonized as anti-American, a lawless administration, a deep recession, and more than 230,000 Americans dead.
For my part, I believe that the way to defang this cabal is by rejecting its lies and returning fact-based argument to the center of our national conversations. Going forward, I will continue to do my part to make that happen.
But whatever the future brings, there is no doubt that today is ours. After four years in which we have indulged the worst of our nation, we have voted to reclaim the best.
Thank you all for this day.
18 Likes
