While Trump manages to avoid a concession speech, here’s what one of his most vocal boot-licking sycophants had to say:
If we don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede.
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina (R)
Time and time again I had wondered why Republicans in the US called themselves that. But it’s a specific form of republic they have in mind, obviously. Funny — and ironic — how the term coined for US practices abroad returns “home”, eh?
Evidently gerrymandering isn’t sufficient anymore for the Republicans to win and the outdated electoral college from the age of horse coaches being sent to Washington D.C. also doesn’t ensure their victory, despite gerrymandering and other provisions tipping the scale very much in their favor. As can be seen on these projections from the NYT from 2016:
… which I referenced in my blog post four years ago, mere weeks after agreeing with Michael Moore that Trump would win.
This time the popular vote was favoring Biden — the lesser of the two evils up for election, from where I stand — by a bigger margin than Hillary Clinton had in 2016. And it even looks like he got the same number of electoral college votes Trump got in 2016. However, Trump won’t concede.
And even if Trump gets forcibly removed from the White House on January 20th 2021, he will have managed to damage Biden’s presidency before it even started. He will have prevented a smooth transition, will have left a terribly polarized country as his legacy and a projected near-400000 people dead due to Covid-19 by that time1.
Feelings propel fascism more than thought does.
Robert Paxton
That’s if Trump doesn’t concede until then2. Given that Trump’s voter base is the part of the population most heavily armed and given the utter loss of any sense for objective reality by Trump and his sycophants, as well as large parts of their voter base, all bets are off …
I would be less worried if average Americans could pronounce nuclear as nuclear instead of “nucular”, had a notion of the difference between communism and socialism and if Trump didn’t have the launch codes. But then, with those first two things in place the third would not have happened, would it?
// Oliver
PS: Why Biden is the lesser of the two evils you ask? Well, given that from where I stand the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is not a vast divide that cannot be crossed but rather a time period of 10-30 years after which Democrats have reliably adopted previously Republican policies, all that badmouthing of Democrats by Republicans seems duplicitous, stupid and hilarious at the same time. Not last because of the terminology of “liberal” and “socialist” and “left” thrown around in a manner that one could think the Democrats are hardcore Stalinists and “liberal” is a bad thing to be. Well, liberal and liberty share the same root. Go figure why “liberal” is bad in the Republican play book … 🤨
PPS: I consider Biden a senile representation of “more of the same3” and I am undecided about Kamala Harris.