This Is Your President

• They (Central Park Five) admitted their guilt.  They’re guilty.  The (2002) settlement was a disgrace.
• Barack Hussein Obama was not eligible to be president of the United States.  He is not a citizen of the United States.  He was born in Kenya.  He won’t show us his birth certificate.  My investigators have looked into it, went to Hawai’i to find the records, and what they found is shocking.
• Grab them by the p*$$&.  If you’re a star, they let you do it.
• The election process is rigged.
• Crooked Hillary should be in jail for what she’s done.  Lock her up!
• They’re (Mexican undocumented immigrants) rapists.  They’re bringing drugs.  They’re bringing crime.
• I am the least racist person you will ever meet.
• This was the largest inauguration day crowd in history, period.
• I’m a very stable genius.
• I know nothing about Russia.
• No one has been harder on Russia than me.
• I know nothing about David Duke.
• Crooked Hillary won in 2016 only because of millions of illegal immigrants who voted for her.
• Where is my African-American?
• Barack Obama gave millions of dollars to Iran.
• The Obama Administration spied on my campaign.
• We will repeal and replace Obamacare. We will provide great health care.
• We will protect people with pre-existing conditions.
• Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.
• There is a lot of blame on many sides, on many sides. There were very fine people on both sides.
• Ukraine should investigate the Bidens.  China should investigate the Bidens.
• Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.
• No one has done as much for Black people as I have.  With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.
• You never talk about terrorism from the Alt-Left, Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
• This (CoVID) is their new hoax.
• This (CoVID) will decrease to zero, it will just go away.
• You just want to wear that mask so you can be politically correct.
• No one could have known how difficult it was to deal with CoVID.
• I had CoVID, now they say I’m immune.
• No one could have seen this coming.  It’s a situation no one has seen before. It’s unimaginable, unique.  No one could have been prepared or known what to do.
• Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.
• We have won this election.
• We won Florida. No one thought we would win Florida. And then we won Texas.
• If you count the legal votes, we won this election easily.  If you count the illegal votes, the Democrats are trying to steal the election.

The people of the United States of America held an election on Tuesday, November 4.  Because of a combination of the CoVID-19 pandemic and the resultant concerns that sprang from the inevitability of long lines of voters in close proximity and with limited personal protection in a time of a deadly contagion, two key provisions were made: early voting in person (a week or more in most states) and voting by mail.  The result was an unprecedented voter turnout which, through the combination of early voting, mail-in ballots and heavy Election Day voting from the country’s urban centers and moderate-to-liberal enclaves, appears to have turned out the sitting president, Donald J. Trump after five days of frantic ballot tabulation and counting.  While several states were close enough to trigger review and recounts of the votes, and the Electoral College must meet in December to officially declare a winner, the results as of Saturday, November 7 seemed to clearly award 273 electoral votes to Democratic Party nominee Joseph R. Biden to 214 for Trump, with several states still undecided but leaning toward Biden as well.  When the counting is finally complete, Biden could exceed 300 electoral votes, far surpassing the 270 needed to claim the White House.

Trump, predictably, objected to this result, threatening to demand recounts and to file lawsuits against the conduct of the election.  After having claimed victory halfway through the vote count when he was leading in most states but had not yet secured the required 270 Electoral College votes, his boasting turned to angry accusations and rage-tweeting when the urban centers of many of these states, notably Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia, reported their vote counts and his advantages in these states were reversed, insisting that this turn of events must be due to voter fraud, which of course served his purposes since he had accused the entire process of corruption, from the mail-in ballots to alleged computer glitches in these key “battleground” states.  By Saturday, November 7, as the major media outlets were anointing Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice President-elects and their backers packed the streets of major cities across the country in jubilant celebration, Trump was fuming in the White House, refusing to make the traditional concession speech, and his son Donald Jr. was urging him to wage “total war”.  Trump backers on the streets, in the press and on social media furiously vented their anger at the corruption of the system in denying this transformative president who was “sent by God” to save the nation from the godless liberals of his rightful place as the Leader of the Free World.  The vote totals were once again, as they had been in 2016, due to the votes of illegal immigrants, or dead people, or votes that were stolen from the rightful recipient, the Heroic President Trump.  Because, who wouldn’t vote for such a Great Man who is Making America Great Again?

But what does one make of a public figure who, as he craves and accumulates power over his perceived subjects, is regularly described (and often documented) as the following …

• serial liar
• tax cheat
• authoritarian
• race-baiter
• misogynist
• xenophobe
• proud ignoramus
• grifter
• science-denier
• anti-environmentalist
• self-dealer
• petulant child and
• apparent sociopath

… who makes a habit of these behaviors?

• takes credit and never takes blame
• demands loyalty and is himself loyal to no one
• uses the official levers of power for his personal promotion and enrichment
• reinforces his negligence in response to the CoVID pandemic (“It will go away, like magic”) with malignant interference (super-spreader rallies) and propaganda (“You’re wearing that mask to be politically correct”) against the advice and efforts of those fighting for people’s lives
• manipulates meteorological data with a sharpie (“The hurricane will strike Alabama”) so he will appear to be factually correct
• pioneered the term “alternative facts” to cover the 20,000-plus lies he has been documented telling in office
• demonizes the press (“the enemy of the people”) in an effort to turn the populace against the last true watchdogs of the powerful
• shoves heads of state aside (Prime Minister of Montenegro) to take a place in the front of a group of world leaders for a photo op
• uses public facilities (White House, Fort McHenry) for partisan campaign rallies
• directs his military to alter their accommodations, at greater expense to them, so they can use his corporate facilities at increased profit for him
• suggested injecting bleach at a coronavirus task force press conference
• hires an unqualified Postmaster General to kneecap the postal service to discredit it as an option during a deadly pandemic
• bullies, threatens and rage-tweets to manipulate others and then whines that no one loves him
• even to this day refuses to admit defeat or that he ever, ever made a mistake (“I take no responsibility”)
• has the nerve to say, to a Black Woman’s face (NBC’s Kristen Welker), that he is “the least racist person in this room”, a claim he has made several times, usually to a person of color
• assails Black Lives Matter and Black protesters as “thugs”, “socialists”, “communists” and “terrorists” while he encourages right wing White vigilantes that run over protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that gun down protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin and that plot to kidnap, put on trial and execute a sitting Michigan governor for her efforts to stop the spread of CoVID, and
• leads chants of “lock her up” and tells his attorney general to arrest 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama for treason as more members of his own Cabinet, organization and inner circle are tried, convicted and “locked up” in prison than any president in history, including Nixon.

The tragedy here is that the person I just described is considered by close to half of the voters of the United States (and too many “Melanated Non-Afrikans”) to be a worthy “leader of the free world” and representative of their values in spite of, or perhaps because of, all of the above.

And this point has nothing to do with Biden.  His history as a legislator, which includes a number of bills that, in retrospect, are considered to have done great damage to the Afrikan-American community (the 1994 Crime Bill was a major one, though many Black officials, business and spiritual leaders and voters backed it as well), has been repeatedly cited by his critics and those who still cling to the possibility of a successful Trump challenge to the 2020 election results.  Biden has apologized for those policies that he supported that have caused damage to the Black community, though he has yet to reverse that damage; meanwhile, Trump admits to no mistakes and doubles down on even his most cruel policies.  Trump makes his intent clear with both his words and his deeds.  And close to half of the voters in the United States still want more of the same, and angrily cry foul when the election results seem to deny them four more years of Trumpism.  Regardless whether their post-election vote challenge is successful or not, this is the essential fact of the 2020 presidential campaign.  And it is a damning indictment of the “soul of the nation” the battle for which Biden and Trump have engaged.

America nominally passes the test of “democracy” only because the winner of the popular vote (Biden, by 4.2 million and counting) also appears to have won the slave-era, landowner-centric “Electoral College” (273 electoral votes, and counting) and with it the office of President of the United States.  But in the intelligence test of “American Exceptionalism” and the morality test of being the “greatest country in the history of the world”, the nation that has inspired its harshest critics to call it the “United Snakes of Amerikkka” fails miserably.  Here, regardless who wins the White House in the end, it has brought back the title of Ugly American, and while the election of Biden and Harris may marginally reverse or slow the worst descent into fascism of recent memory and forestall the harsh judgement of history, the voice of some 47% of the electorate clearly shows that too much of this country still embraces that title, and the venal racism and cruel mendacity that go with it, enthusiastically.