These days, it seems to be popular to just blatantly believe what we might want to believe is true, rather than allowing the facts to impact our grasp on reality.
One recent example: a recent poll has revealed that 66 percent of Republicans do not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election legitimately.
After all that we have been through, and after four years of utter nonsense and national embarrassments, during which time Republican President Donald Trump failed to crack 50 percent approval rating even once, they somehow still allow themselves the conceit to believe that the only way in which he could possibly have been defeated is if there indeed was the massive voter fraud that Trump warned about.
Trump, of course, is a con artist on the grandest scale. His scams are now the stuff of legends. Yet the greatest scam of all was how he managed to convince just barely enough people – mostly rabid and overly gullible Republicans – to think that he would make a very good president. They believed it, and believed him when he talked the big talk, but then, instead of following that up with doing the heavy lifting required to be a great president, he relied on making absurdly exaggerated claims of greatness and spending the rest of his time playing endless rounds of golf on one of his privately owned golf courses.
Of course, Trump also knew that he was likely going to lose the 2020 election. And not being a man-child lacking even an ounce of any kind of modesty, he made excuses for why he would lose. So he offered his great big lie: the only way that he could possibly lose the 2020 election was if there was some massive voter fraud.
How do we know it is a lie? Well, if there was evidence of any kind of massive voter fraud anywhere near the scale that Trump and his cronies were claiming there would be or was, then they would have obviously presented that in court. Instead, they offered not a shred of proof. In fact, in court, they made it abundantly clear that they were not making any kind of a case for massive voter fraud. It was only once outside of the courts – and out of the danger of being held legally accountable for lying – that they opened their big mouths and whined about how, supposedly, they had been cheated out of the election.
Here’s the truth: Donald Trump lost. He barely officially won the 2016 election, in what was then considered a stunning result, something that many loyal Trump supporters seem to have forgotten. And again, he was a historically unpopular president. Remember, he lost the popular vote in that election by 2.7 million votes. And the opposition geared up in a big way to prepare for the next elections. The midterm election in 2018 gave the Democrats back control of the House, and a number of state governments. Then, the 2020 election completed Trump’s failure, as the Democrats kept the House, won control of the Senate, and most importantly, of course, they won the White House.
Trump is a loser. That sentence seems to shock some people, but he is, and as a nation, we lost because he won the presidency in 2016. It is one thing to talk the big talk, and we all know that Trump can talk. There is little evidence, however, that he can actually do anything more than talk. During his brief – yet somehow entirely too long – four years in office, he severely weakened the nation’s environmental laws, destroyed alliances with traditionally friendly nations, seriously eroded the Constitution on a daily basis by relentlessly attacking the media and censoring news that he deemed inconvenient (this was particularly true when it came to climate change). He claimed that he was a historically great president, but showed little evidence of this. And he went to extraordinary lengths to avoid taking any kind of responsibility for whenever things went wrong, which they often did.
After all, his loyal supporters, as well as Congressional Republicans, let him get away with everything. They let him break his promise to build the border wall, and to make Mexico pay for it (“Mark my words,” he promised during the 2016 campaign). They let him lie about a national debt that he said he would pay off after eight years, even though, in fact, he added 25 percent to it in just those four short years while he was in office. He promised that the world would respect the United States once he was president. Instead, he was literally laughed at to his face in front of the entire world during an address to the United Nations and was ridiculed with balloons and stunning protests around the world almost no matter where he went. He claimed that he would be the greatest jobs creating president ever, but the facts bear out a far more sober truth. He said that he would set up a national healthcare plan that would be affordable and would cover everyone, and then did not so much as lift a finger to try and actually create such a system. And who could forget how he promised that, once in office, he would be too busy to play any golf. Then, he seemed to barely find time for anything but golf once actually in power.
It was one failure after another like that with Trump in charge. Trump had promised during the 2016 campaign that, once he was elected president, that the country would just win and win and win. In fact, he said, Americans would grow so tired of winning that he would beg him to stop, and that he would refuse, and would just keep winning.
Remember that?
Who knew that he had apparently only misspelled whining? Yes, whining was one thing that he did tirelessly, relentlessly, during his four years in the Oval Office. And indeed, most Americans did grow very tired of all that whining, and urged him to stop. But he was true to his word, for once, and refused to stop whining.
Yes, his supporters empowered him to lie and get away with everything, and they wanted so much to believe that he was better than he was, that they allowed themselves to believe it, while the rest of us shook our heads, and either laughed or cried at how ridiculous our political realities had become.
Trump, as I said, is a loser. He was no great businessman, only a hack. Oh, he was able to, pardon the expression, trump the system for a while. Declaring bankruptcies numerous times in order to get away with things. Of course, you do that enough times – and Trump did it a number of times – and people start to finally catch on to yor gimmick. And let us be clear that a gimmick is all that it was. It does not take some special genius or business acumen. What it takes are no scruples or shame, and the sincere desire to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for just long enough when you manage to cheat them.
This is what Trump does, and that is what he is. He is a man born into enormous wealth and serious business connections from his family. There was a ton of money and luxury to be enjoyed, but it took a shrewd and remorseless businessman to build that kind of a financial empire. And Donald Trump wanted to please the man who built it, his father. He wanted to get the approval of this man, but in order to do that, he had to show no signs of perceived weakness. Whether or not he repressed any real humanity and empathy inside of himself, or whether this was lacking to begin with, is largely immaterial.
He set out to build his own financial empire, and this he did, using the money and connections that were available to him from the vast family fortunes. And he pursued this without bothering with tiny matters such as fairness or a sense of decency. He pursued his own, narrow interests, and took a perverse pride in doing harm to others in order to benefit himself. That became his entire lifestyle, and his way of conducting business. Being an opportunist, he found a way to become a celebrity, and then squeezed everything that he could possibly squeeze out of this, too. That is how he came to be a television personality, and if he was not already very famous to everyone in the country before The Apprentice, then he certainly became well known to everyone because of the show.
Then, rather stunningly, Trump found himself able to manipulate this, too. As he had managed to transform himself from a business tycoon to a local New York personality, and then become a national celebrity, he somehow then managed to make yet another transformation, like a chameleon.
This time, he became a politician.
Not a very good one, it is true. But he did not need to be, because he was rich and famous. Many people admire those things, and that alone will take you far, if you allow it to. And Trump is nothing if not resourceful – even perhaps truly brilliant – at manipulating things like that to the maximum.
So despite bungling his way through so much of the 2016 campaign, and despite not having any actual concrete plans to make the country as great as he promised, he did not need any of these. He put all of his chips on tapping the undercurrent of xenophobia and a simmering anger among working class (almost exclusively white) Americans that he cynically used, as well as bullying other candidates in the Republican race.
Fast forward to the part where he shocked the country by securing the Republican nomination, then stunned the world by winning the presidency. We know how he got these, despite not being a gifted politician. Bill Clinton? Now there’s a gifted pure politician. Hard to imagine what he would be, where his life would have gone without politics. But Trump? He is no politician. And if he had never been elected to the White House, he would still be pulling the same bullshit that he had been pulling throughout his entire life.
But he won the freaking presidential race, and then, predictably, he tried to pull his gimmicks and scams while serving in the nation’s highest office.
And we will be paying and paying for a long time to come.
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