I haven’t posted in a while and the pause has been enlightening. Despite rhetoric from both parties and the media, it seems that nothing has really changed in the past several weeks. Surprises are surprisingly few.
National poll numbers are still the media’s focus and they are still beyond irrelevant. The swing states will still decide the Electoral College and that’s all that matters. The margins are tight in most of these states and they will get tighter. Much tighter. There will be no blow-out. No surprises here.
Biden chose Kamala Harris as his VP. Yep. I suggested a Biden/Harris ticket back in May of 2019. It’s a good ticket, but it’s not a surprising ticket.
McConnell, Graham & Company are still making excuses for a last-minute Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, despite their arguments against exactly that same action when Obama nominated Garland before the 2016 election, despite the fact that a lifetime appointment to our nation’s highest court deserves more than a political show vote, and despite the simple fact that Ginsburg is… wait for it… still alive. A Triple Dick Move. Impressive, but not surprising.
Trump has taken the natural advantage of being the incumbent President and has stretched it well beyond what anyone in either political party has ever done before. Trump has unapologetically used the free media coverage afforded to White House “press briefings” to conduct taxpayer-funded substitutes for his campaign rallies. He has even been so brazen as to use the White House as a partisan prop during the GOP convention. This should surprise absolutely no one.
Trump continues to be quite content to misuse the full power of the Presidency to win re-election. After the U.S. military essentially told him to pound sand when he threatened to send active duty troops into U.S. cities, Trump switched to using the Federal Protective Service within the DHS – significantly augmented by outside contractors (read: mercenary soldiers) – for the broad purpose of protecting federal interests. In essence, Trump has claimed the right to deploy his own private Delta Force anywhere on American soil that he so desires, disregarding any objections from the associated state or local governments – which are, of course, exclusively under Democratic leadership. Trump hasn’t even attempted to camouflage the purely partisan nature of the para-military deployments. Will anyone be surprised when such forces are deployed to polling locations on election day?
Trump continues to stoke racial divides in the country, presumably because he thinks that’s his best path to victory in November. Consider for a moment, in isolation, the President of the United States hailing as a hero a 17-year-old kid that drives 40 miles from his home to confront protesters in another town and ends up shooting three of them, killing two, with a military-style weapon that he could neither legally own nor carry at his age. Now consider how different Trump’s reaction would have been if the teenage vigilante was black instead of white. Surprised? Yeah, me neither.
People are getting really tired of COVID-19. It’s tough to sustain panic-mode for months at a time. Unfortunately, COVID-19 isn’t at all tired of infecting people. It hasn’t gone away. The impacts of school re-openings and Labor Day activities have yet to be recorded and it won’t be pretty. For those of us residing in states where Friday Night Lights is a way of life, it will be downright ugly. Trump, of course, continues to be the voice of reason and caution that we’ve come to expect. Exactly as we’ve come to expect.
- Trump has personally involved his administration in talks to start the Big Ten football season (but not the other conferences). Of course, it’s entirely coincidental that many of the Big Ten schools are in swing states.
- Trump wants to rush FDA approval of a vaccine before the election despite a history of failures when vaccines were rushed into use. [In 1955, the first polio vaccine was rushed and given to over 200,000 children before being pulled. About 20% got some level of polio from the vaccine. Hundreds were paralyzed. Ten died.]
- Trump claims that the 190K COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are overstated since many of the dead had other health conditions – ignoring the fact that this group includes people with non-fatal conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. It includes pregnant women. It includes the entire elderly population.
Trump’s callousness toward suffering and death continues to be unsurprising.
The GOP is now the Party of Trump. While that happened long ago, it’s now official. The formal GOP platform takes no positions on any issues at all. Zero. Instead, the one-page document notes that “The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump … therefore, be it resolved that Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” So. They now want whatever Trump wants without even the pretense of any principles or any moral core.
The GOP once stood for something and the party elders knew how dangerous Trump was. Now they just don’t care. For better or worse, all Republican politicians have now welded their careers to Trump and the time has passed for any of them to show independence. Of course, for his part, Trump could not be less interested in the political fortunes of anyone other than himself. This is the typical dynamic between a cult’s leader and its followers. Everyone across the political spectrum should be mournful that a once proud political party has been reduced to sycophancy. No one should be surprised.
The future GOP is also the Party of Trump. The 2024 Republican hopefuls spent their 2020 convention speeches kissing Trump’s ass. Pence, Haley, Don Jr., and Pompeo all displayed appropriate allegiance to the leader of their cult. The latter was the first sitting Secretary of State to ever address a political convention and he iced that cake by doing it while on a taxpayer-funded trip abroad. Damn. The Republican Party is all in on a bluff and, unfortunately, that’s just not a surprise bet.
I fully expect a whole lot of additional crap to happen before the November elections. I just doubt I’ll be surprised by any of it.