Well, well, well….what do you know?
While the Trump team promised an unbelievable tidal wave of proof of voter fraud, they in fact produced merely a trickle of isolated and mostly irrelevant incidents of voting irregularities before the courts. Many of these were easily explained, and they were largely dismissed both in the literal courts, as well as the court of public opinion.
Of course, Trump and his team never conceded the election, and challenged the outcome of the election not only at every turn, but well beyond any reasonable measures. They still claim that, in fact, although by now, it is an old song and dance, and nobody cares anymore, save for the most loyal among Trump supporters.
Trump’s gimmicks and scams are so obvious, that it is almost embarrassing and tiresome to point them out. Because he obviously lies, but he does so in shameless self-promotion at all times. And some strategies that he subscribes to are pretty obvious ones, as well, while also sharing something else: they tend to be fascist practices. The main one is to blame the other side of that which you yourself are guilty.
Given this, is it any surprise that a high-ranking Trump stooge is being investigated for illegal voting? Yes, Lin Wood, a high profile pro-Trump attorney is apparently in deep water for, of all things, voting illegally. All of this outrage over alleged massive voter fraud, while producing only isolated incidents of voting irregularities all over the country, many of which were dismissed by the courts. But it turns out that maybe they should have been investigating one of their own, as he is now being involuntarily dragged into court for illegal voting.
Quelle surprise, eh?
Just par for the course. After all, Trump has been a scam artist par excellence. I do not believe that he is a “very stable genius” or one of the great presidents in history. Quite the opposite, actually: I believe he easily qualifies as the worst president in American history, by far. However, one thing cannot be denied: Trump is a master of self-promotion, and he knows how to shrewdly get the most for himself in any situation. In that, he may be better than anyone else has been in history. How tens of millions of Americans could not see that this would not be good for the country, and that it escaped them that a shallow, narcissist with absolutely no political experience would not be able to scam his way to a successful presidency, remains a mystery. Most people who truly saw Trump for what he was knew only too well how disastrous his presidency would prove to be, and how it would hurt the country not just for the four years of his presidency, but for many, many years to come.
Now, with Trump having lost the election convincingly, he is possibly doing more damage in polarizing the nation than he even managed to do, somehow, when he actually still had the top political office in the country. Leave it to Trump not only to prove capable of doing that, but to do it with enthusiasm and arrogance, and with the obviously false claims that this is good for the country.
After the months and months of relentless claims of massive voter fraud, both in the months leading up to the election, and then the months following Trump’s defeat. Since Trump could never, ever admit to the possibility of him losing an election fair and square, he paved the way for the excuses to come once he actually did lose the election, even though he could never offer a shred of substantive proof to convince anyone who seriously scrutinized these baseless claims. The courts dismissed them. Election officials dismissed them. Most serious Congressional politicians dismissed them.
About the only people who did not dismiss these allegations would be the cult following of Trump’s most loyal supporters. For everyone else, it was pretty obvious that Trump and his team did not have a serious case. Also, Trump’s own behavior betrayed the fact that he must have understood that he lost. After all, if there’s one thing that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt to be true of Trump, it is that he needs attention. He loves being the focal point of the news headlines, to the point where it hardly seems to matter whether the news is good or bad, so long as it is about him. Yet, for a full week after losing the election, Trump seemed almost to go into hiding, not making any public appearances or speeches. He was even relatively quiet on his Twitter accounts.
Indeed, the same phenomenon would repeat itself in the days and weeks following the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, when Trump was impeached for a second time, and then, two weeks later, when he officially became a former president.
All of this really indicates that, in fact, Trump is only too aware that he lost this election, and lost it fair and square. When you are such a horrible president that a record turnout of well over 80 million people come out specifically to make sure and vote you out, then you know you are a loser.
And that is what Trump undeniably is: a loser. He hides it fairly well, at least in the eyes of many. He boasts and brags, and shows off his supposedly incredible wealth. He is apparently good at getting some people to believe that he is, in fact, a winner unlike any other. If you believe him, he is a self-made man, who turned a modest loan of $1 million into a financial empire. If you believe him, he had the Midas touch, and his empire reached across the globe. If you believe him, then he decided to step down from this enormous run of success and luxury for love of country, so that he could do for the country what he did with his financial empire. If you believe him, then he largely did exactly that, and the only ones who do not see, or who refuse to see, are liberal snowflakes and the biased media, who have it out for him. He insists that no one has ever been treated as unfairly as him. Indeed if you believe him, then you also feel that all of this is true, and you also believe his claims that the powers that be were determined to get him out no matter what, and so the election was rigged against him. If you believe him, there was no way that he could lose in a free and fair election.
Viewed from the angle that Trump and his followers want to see it from, Trump seems like a huge, uniquely American success story. Here was a man who never tasted failure, who worked hard and kept achieving greater an greater things. Eventually, he won the White House, despite being the one with far and away the least political experience. Then, he largely fixed the country's problems. If, that is, you believe him.
The problem for Trump is that not everybody believes him, and they use these stubborn things known as facts to support their argument that, in fact, this man is nothing but a fraud. A charlatan. They will point out that a "modest loan" of one million is a lot of money today, but was an absolute fortune back in the day. And they will also point out that, in fact, Trump seems to have gotten a whole lot more than that when he was young, as there are records showing that he "earned" an income of $200,000 per year at the age of three, just as he might have been mastering walking and talking. They will point out that Trump made a lot of money in part by refusing to pay people their fair share when the time came, and he also transparently made a huge portion of his fortunes through scams, that he was a con artist par excellence. They will point out his numerous bankruptcies, and the most blatantly obvious failed business ventures, including Trump Casinos, Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, and the most infamous and obviously fraudulent of them all, Trump University. They will point out that Trump seemed to always owe a ton of money, and that declaring bankruptcy time and time again was not so much "gaming the system," as he suggested. It was clear failure, time and time and time again.
And there reached a point where he likely could no longer borrow money from banks here in the United States, forcing him to rely on foreign banks. Trump has $100 million, which affords him the illusion of being incredibly wealthy, although not nearly the billionaire that he claims. But what really undermines the notion that he is some tremendously successful billionaire is that his debts total over $400 million. In other words, he is broke, and it appears likely that he has run out of banks and other institutions willing to lend him money. Which could explain why he wanted to stay in the White House, where he has certain legal protections from having the untouchable status as the sitting president. Once he would no longer be the president, he likely could and would face legal actions.
Also, there were always questions from the first regarding Trump's apparent loyalty to Russia, which is why it always seemed like Putin and Russia liked him a little too much, as well. He always seemed a little too eager to please them. Many suspected that they had something over on him, and there was trashy speculation of golden showers at some Moscow hotel. The specifics about Russia's seeming hold over Trump remain a mystery, although recently, a former KGB spy stated that, in fact, Russians felt that Trump could serve their purposes as far back as four decades ago, and actively tried to recruit him to serve their desires. Sure enough, Trump seemed willing. No wonder the Russians seemed to so desperately want Trump to reach the White House. It suited their purposes. Some recent journalism by Craig Unger underscored why the Russians ultimately began to focus on Trump, and how their gamble paid off in a big way. Here, according to an article by David Smith of The Guardian (see link below) is how this situation with Russia specifically recruiting Trump came about:
Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”
“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
Hardly sounds like a winner to me. In fact, it sounds like a loser. And he has reached a point where even his abilities as a gifted scam artist unlike any other in history no longer will help him enough to maintain the illusion that he wants everyone to believe. But in fact, he is a far bigger loser than this. Because you see, since he became president, he has been occupied with losing unlike any previous president before. The economy, which had been going strong since well into the Obama presidency, kept going strong, at least in terms of market numbers. The only thing that changed was that Trump gave himself all of the credit. In fact, while those numbers are strong, tens of millions of Americans have lost their health insurance and filed for unemployment, even though he had campaigned on the promise that he would create a national healthcare system that would be good quality and affordable and cover everyone, just like he also claimed that he would be the greatest job creating president in history.
The country's reputation is similarly tarnished around the world, as our obvious mishandling of the coronavirus crisis underscored just how far the country has fallen, and this was for all of the world to see. As if that was not enough, he pulled the country out of numerous international agreements, often times resulting in near universal condemnation. He came across as a racist numerous times, and this also was not by accident, as he seems to have blatantly used the xenophobia which he instinctively seemed to suspect existed and turned this into his most solid base of support, and which helped him get elected into the nation's highest office. But in the process, he polarized the county like no one before in our history. He destroyed the Republican party, effectively making it the de facto Trump party. And he destroyed much of the good that still remained about our nation. Our democracy itself feels more fragile than ever before. We took several steps towards becoming a dictatorship under his presidency, separating immigrant children from their parents, and setting up overcrowded and dirty detention centers that much of the world viewed as concentration camps in everything but name only. Environmental regulations went out the window, and big polluters had a field day. Oh, and through it all, he gave still more tax breaks and incentives to the very wealthiest Americans (which included himself). We had accumulated $19.9 trillion in national debt over the course of nearly four decades when Trump took the oath of office. Four years later, he had added over $5 trillion. That's right, he added a quarter of the original amount to our national debt, after promising to pay off the national debt in eight years.
There were in fact many promises which he never kept. Some of them, like the healthcare system and the job creation and the national debt have already been mentioned. But he also broke his promise of transparency, and also of divorcing himself from his businesses to avoid conflicts of interest. In fact, the staggering level of blatant corruption was often astonishing, and led to Trump being the only president in American history to be impeached not merely once, but twice. His poll numbers were generally lower than any other president when he entered, and his disapproval numbers were at a record high when he left office. No wonder that after all of this, the country was in a hurry to get him out of office, and especially to avoid another eight years of such disastrous, clearly incompetent rule.
So when I say that he is a loser, I mean it. But here's the thing: it is not just Trump who lost. The country was the biggest loser as a result of the Trump years. It is now much worse off than it was four years ago, and on numerous fronts. Again, our long cherished democratic institutions have been damaged after four years of relentless attacks upon them. Our economy is in shambles. Tens of millions now have no health insurance, and once again, and many cannot afford the high cost of healthcare in this country. We still have far and away more people than any other country behind bars, although that is not specific to Trump. Our reputation around the world is completely tarnished, and we are no longer trusted. Much of this is the result of four years of Trump in the White House.
The shame we should collectively feel for putting such an obvious, transparent loser in the White House should be with us for many years, even decades. And it likely will define us for generations to come, unless someone even worse than Trump gets in and overshadows all that he did.
Below are the links to the two articles I used in writing this particular blog entry. The first one by David Smith of The Guardian is where I obtained the quotes used above, while the second one is about the pro-Trump attorney now facing legal hot water for illegal voting:
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy by David Smith, 29 January, 2021:
Pro-Trump Election Conspiracist Lin Wood Under Investigation For Illegal Voting by Stephen Fowler, February 2, 2021:
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