Well fuck me sideways. Our long national nightmare continues.
I thought it was going to be over a few days ago, but approximately 74 million Trump loyalists–120,000 of whom are located in the right places, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania–disagreed with me. And so a fascist will return to Washington in a few months. Said fascist will be angry about his criminal prosecutions and eager to settle a few scores. And he’ll have the means to do it. He’s about to be handed all the levers of power that the President of the United States enjoys, and he’s already shown that he isn’t afraid to abuse them.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t turn this post into a rant. Instead, I want to use that dusty ol’ Poli Sci degree of mine to convey what I think happened in this election and why, and where I think we’re headed in the next four years. Let’s see if I can stick to that and not let my lizard brain take over, because a lot of people are freaking the fuck out right now and justifiably so. I talked a female friend of mine off the ledge the other night; she’s really distraught about this result and worried about what’s coming for women in particular. I’m worried too, not gonna lie, but I think there are also strands of hope that people who are still in shock aren’t focusing on. I passed those on to her and have been doing the same with others. I think it’s better to be the voice of reason right now and support people rather than feed anxiety and join in the freak-out. I have Twitter for that.
So why did this happen? How does someone with all the baggage Trump has, after everything he’s done and said, win a second election in a relatively good economy?
Here’s what I think.
Average Americans are low information voters.
Unlike many other places in the world, unlike Europe for example, average Americans don’t read and are fairly clueless about political issues and the people they choose to lead them. Most Americans don’t read the news and they’re not engaged with current events, politics, or what’s happening in their town, city, or state, much less the world, because they just don’t care. Yes, there’s some laziness involved, but it’s mostly because they’re not vested in things that don’t directly impact them on a daily basis. We live in an individualistic, ‘me first’ society, so average people only care about themselves and their immediate family. That’s what they focus on, along with the activities that take their minds off of the drudgery that life can be sometimes. They give fuck-all about anything else and vote accordingly.
There’s a term for these people: “Low information voters.”
Do you know how many times people I know–family members, ex-lovers, friends–have rolled their eyes at me because I follow politics? They look at me like I just took a dump in their Cornflakes. Why in the world would you do that? How unseemly!
Well, you geniuses, I concede that 99% of the country thinks exactly like you do, but here are the consequences of your lack of engagement with politics and social issues:
- Low information voters, if they vote at all (which is another big problem), vote cluelessly, not based on facts and truth, but rather, based on perceptions, beliefs, and opinions that are biased and typically inaccurate because (i) they only pre-exist in the minds of these people and have never been tested; and/or (ii) they’ve been spoon-fed to them by a demagogue like Trump, their favorite biased news channel, or a friend or relative whom they think understands the issues more than they do, but who really are just reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs and biases.
- Low information voters are easily manipulated by Unreliable Narrators. All you need to do is tap into the right bias and belief, repeat your lie often enough, and you can create your own false narrative about yourself and your opponent that they’ll believe. Once this happens, you could tell these people the truth, i.e., that Trump has been accused of sexually assaulting three dozen women in his life, committed tax fraud, bankrupted four businesses, has ties with the Russian mob that date back to the 1980s, stole classified information from the White House and stored it in minimally-protected locations in Mar-a-lago–a closet, a bathroom, and his office–and not only will they not believe you, they’ll tell you he’s an amazing businessman who loves America, loves his kids, and just wants to close our open borders and cut our taxes.
The willful stupidity and laziness that pervades this Idiocracy of ours makes me want to put my head through a wall because in this Idiocracy, the votes of low information voters count just as much as those of informed voters. This is how a piece of shit like Donald Trump gets elected President twice. Low information voting and political apathy are the original sins in every election that’s won by a demagogue.
I saw your Twitter feed. It’s all politics. (Scrunchy face)
Yeah, it is (with some sports and humor mixed in). Twitter is how I stay informed and engaged in the world in real time. But hey, good luck fending off that national abortion ban because you only pay attention to this shit once every four years!
Inflation is a nasty bitch and it’s killing incumbents everywhere.
COVID shut down huge swaths of the global economy for almost three years. When vaccines started taking effect and the world reopened in 2021/2022, there was HUGE consumer demand, spurred by the fact that we’d all been stuck in our houses for a long time and had a lot of money in our pockets thanks to (i) reduced spending during a pandemic, and (ii) a probably too-big COVID stimulus passed by Democrats under Biden. It was time for us to enjoy life again, so we all started spending money in big numbers. This huge pent-up demand, plus logjams in global supplies after years of historically low consumer demand, created supply shortages everywhere, including the United States. Low supply and high demand caused prices to rise, i.e. inflation. (Basic macroeconomics.) Then, because we live in a capitalist country full of profit-driven corporate assholes, companies recognized this pent-up demand as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only recover their losses from COVID, but also earn historical profits. So even after supplies rebounded, which should have lowered prices, these companies kept their prices artificially high, gouging the living fuck out of consumers and generating record corporate profits for themselves long after the pandemic was over.
There’s only so much a President can do to mitigate this. The fact is Biden did a far better job of lowering inflation and spurring an economic recovery than leaders in similarly-situated countries. Our inflation, as bad as it was for a lot of people, was far worse in other countries and it still is. Everyone was also predicting a U.S. recession post-COVID, and it not only never happened, we had a soft landing with relatively low unemployment and a record-high stock market under Biden/Harris. By any fair measure, our economy is doing incredibly well. In normal times, this would lead to an incumbent’s re-election.
But these are not normal times. More than anything people vote with their wallets, and even though inflation has come down and we’ve handled it better than most countries, Americans have experienced far higher food prices than they are used to for several years now. Average Americans are feeling the pinch of that, even in a good economy with really good employment numbers.
And then there’s this, which few have talked about but I think played a big role too: to deal with this runaway inflation and cool the economy, the Fed–which no President controls–raised interest rates early in Biden’s term, which caused a major shock for home buyers and sellers who have been sucking on the teat of 2-4% mortgage interest rates for 20 years. The Fed’s interest rate increases jacked those rates as high as 7%, putting home purchases out of range for almost everyone, including me. High interest rates, almost no new home builds thanks to COVID shortages, and historically high home prices that are only starting to come down now created a perfect storm of shit in the real estate market the past 4 years. It doesn’t matter if our parents had similar mortgage interest rates in the 70s and 80s, if not far higher, and it’s actually insanely low interest rates the past two decades that are the historical exception. People don’t give a shit. They only care about what’s happening now.
Inflated consumer good prices and skyrocketing mortgage interest rates directly impacted the views and perceptions of all American voters, but especially low information voters, who blamed Biden for all of it whether it was his fault or not. It’s far easier for a demagogue like Trump to throw two-sentence grenades at Biden/Harris, blaming them for inflation and promising to end it–without ever explaining how–than it is for a cognitively declining Biden or your average economist to explain everything I just said above. Seriously, are you kidding? No one cares about the explanations or macroeconomics. Anything that takes longer than 45 seconds to explain to an average American who has the attention span of a fruit fly will not be heard. No, no, it’s all Biden’s and Harris’ fault. That resonates because it’s short and easier for low information voters to process and accept. Trump is a master at this because he knows the country is full of ADD victims who believe soundbites and lies over facts. He counted on that, and it’s paid off for him handsomely twice.
Thanks for getting us out of COVID, Grandpa Joe, now please fuck off because my eggs cost $5 now, and it’s all your fault.
This dynamic has impacted incumbents everywhere, not just here.
People subconsciously are drawn to strongmen who demonize people and demand obedience.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because plenty of psychological studies have been done documenting how the human mind is subconsciously drawn to authoritarians and dictators who require obedience from the masses who put them in power. We are hardwired to submit to authority because it eliminates the need for us to make hard decisions in complicated situations.
Milgram’s Obedience Experiment is the most famous example of this:
Gifted demagogues like Trump know how to tap into this. They’re masters at it, especially when dealing with an individualistic, low information population like the American public. Trump is a mirror for this country. He is showing us ourselves, or enough of ourselves, which is actually a gift that I believe eventually will force this country to change course after we hit rock bottom.
I hit on this in a Facebook post the morning after the election, when I woke up with the same pit-in-the-stomach feeling I had for months after I separated from Ex. and needed to vent:
Average people have an unconscious propensity to blame ‘others’–people who are different from them or other dangled scapegoats–for their problems. Illegal immigrants, Muslims, Jews, African-Americans, Democrats, Republicans, the Deep State. Pick your enemy. Demagogues and fascists win by feeding off of this unconscious default we all have. They demonize specific groups of people and get enough voters or supporters to believe them.
In a low information country like the United States, it’s really easy to do this. Indeed, Trump has exposed how easy it is, and for this we should be grateful to him, because there is a far smarter, far deadlier version of him waiting to emerge in the future if something isn’t done to change our trajectory.
Biden stupidly chose to run again instead of being the ‘transitional’ president he promised to be and allowing a competitive primary process a year ago.
Final point. Biden fucked us at the drive-thru by deciding to run again instead of passing the torch like he promised when he accepted the nomination 4 years ago. I put most of the blame on him for this loss.
Here’s the reality: Trump will end up getting around the same number of votes he got in 2020: 74 million, give or take another 1-2 million votes. Harris is going to finish somewhere between 70-72 million. Biden got 81 MILLION votes four years ago. That’s a 10 million vote reduction that clearly cost her the election. If a fraction of those lost voters turned out in the right places, she would have won handily. Instead, Trump is getting a second term because those people didn’t turn out, and he got 120,000 more votes than she did in the same three swing states that cost Hillary the election in 2016: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Democrats’ job will be to find out why that happened. Yes, it’s somewhat surprising that Trump held all his votes from 2020 and even gained a few, but not when you consider the factors I outline above.
Biden fucked the party by running again instead of allowing Democrats to have a proper primary in 2023, which would have sharpened the pencil, allowed a nominee to get a stronger ramp up to the election, and elevated the best person to run against Trump. Instead, he gave us Weekend at Bernie’s for a fucking year and half, did almost no interviews or pressers, and was physically and cognitively incapable of defending his record and making his own case for re-election to the American public. None of us knew this for sure until the June debate when his weakness and incapacity were laid bare for all to see, but his wife and close advisors surely fucking knew this for a long time. They had to have known. Then his genocidal Gaza policy and refusal to condition or end military aid not only alienated millions of Democrat die-hard voters like me who were never going to vote for him because of this (and may not have voted for Harris because of this), it cost Palestinians and Lebanese tens of thousands of lives in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. More than anyone else, Biden and his ego cost Democrats this election. And now the knives are out, so he can enjoy the fallout and his destroyed legacy after he did a decent job for four years on domestic issues.
Trump may have won anyway, but Democrats definitely hurt themselves in the risk-averse way they and Biden approached this election. In many ways, fairly or unfairly, this election result was more a repudiation of Biden than it was an approval of Trump.
So we need to ask, why did Harris get 10 million fewer votes than Biden? Books will be written, but here are my guesses:
- Inflation, discussed above.
- A compressed 3-month time period to campaign after he withdrew in July.
- A colossally stupid decision by her campaign to try and attract moderate Republicans by campaigning with people like Liz and war criminal Dick Cheney, instead of ginning up her base like Trump did.
- Her obstinate refusal to move away from Biden on Gaza and her decision to send insanely biased pro-Israel politicians like Bill Clinton and Ritchie Torres to condescend to and insult Arab voters in Michigan, many of whom have lost family members in this war, a few days before the election. I firmly believe all of this cost her a win in Michigan, which has a large Arab population and was one of the swing states she needed to win. I also believe it depressed turnout in other places, which contributed to her loss. Conversely, she only pulled 6% of people who are registered Republican, the same number Biden did in 2020. Republicans vote for Republicans, you stupid fucks. They don’t vote for reasonable facsimiles of Republicans, and you lose as many progressive votes as you gain by doing this. Hillary did the same thing. Stop fucking doing this and you might actually win a close election if you’re not a white male.
- Misogyny and Latino machismo. She lost Latino votes from Biden in big numbers, especially male Latinos, who still have strong machismo cultural tendencies that predispose them to vote for men, not women, especially a strongman who uses so much orange bronzer to cover his decrepit, pasty white face that he looks like them most of the time. Yes, I’m stereotyping here, but I don’t give a fuck. Democrats need to stop taking Latino votes for granted and drill down on the Latino demographic, which is more complex and diverse than people understand. Among other things, voting Latinos who came here legally, work hard, and follow the rules do not like illegal immigrants, even if they’re Latino. In fact, I’m of the view that they unconsciously look down on illegal immigrants and want to run as far away from them as possible because this validates their choices and their personal American experience. I see the same thing in my Italian-American family. They can’t stand illegal immigrants. They all came here legally and expect others to do the same. Bottom line, Democrats need to stop pandering to the rights of illegal immigrants, pursue a stronger border policy, and face this issue head-on if they want to win. You can support human rights and respect their desperation without sounding like you want to lay out a welcome mat to invite criminal behavior. Giving illegal immigrants default rights in particular incenses a lot of people, including voting Latinos. Democrats need to deal with this.
- Getting absolutely clowned on small social issues like transgender rights, which impact a miniscule percentage of Americans, but which Republicans have effectively spotlighted and elevated to use as a political cudgel against Democrats, to cast them as unfair and ‘too woke.’ I’m for transgender rights and protecting the asylum rights of illegal immigrants–in fact I’ve represented the latter before–but there’s no way these issues should be as prominent as they are on the Democratic platform, and there’s no way Democrats should be discussing them so prominently on news shows, which feeds this narrative, instead of pivoting to something else. They are getting destroyed on these things. It’s all my Republican friends want to talk about because Fox News and Newsmax are feeding them outrage bait night after night. Democrats need to deal with this too.
That’s a good enough list for now. There are other factors that will come out after Harris’ political autopsy is done, but this is just what I think. The good news is that even where people didn’t vote for Harris, they voted for Democrats in down-ballot races. This is interesting and suggests that a lot of people still support a Democratic agenda, but they blamed Harris for things for which they didn’t blame their Senate and House candidates. I think that relates to inflation and/or Gaza, but we’ll see.
Still, Democrats are losing Senate control and may lose the House as well. This means that even though Trump won by razor-thin margins in key states, he is going to have a unified Congress to pursue his agenda for at least the next two years, until the midterms.
This is uh… troubling.
So where do we go from here?
I think one of two things will happen. In the first instance, I think Trump will do what he said, or most of what he said, go after his enemies, round up illegal immigrants in house-to-house searches with existing law enforcement agencies or one he’ll create himself, pursue investigations against political enemies (mis)using the CIA, NSA, DOJ, and possibly even our military, which he’ll have the power to manipulate and all the knowledge he acquired in his prior four years on how to do this effectively, and continue to try enrich himself. He will pull the plug on the Ukraine War and allow Israel to effectively annex the West Bank and Gaza, completing its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
He may support a national abortion ban, which Republicans have a fair, though not realistic possibility of passing now. I tend to doubt he’ll expend his political capital on this though, because he’s secretly pro-choice and doesn’t need to win re-election, so he can tell Republicans to fuck off on anything he wants, and I think this will be one of them. They may not even have the appetite for it themselves. I think Trump will be talked into pursuing a huge chunk of Project 2025’s agenda, which includes privatizing Social Security and eliminating or gutting critical federal agencies, including the Department of Education, the FDA, and the EPA, whose power was already undercut by the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning Chevron, which stripped federal agencies of their presumptive expertise on regulations under their purview, and instead gave decision-making authority to federal judges who lack similar expertise and many of whom, like three Supreme Court justices he installed in his first term, are appointed by the President of the United States. Alito and Thomas likely will retire, and thanks to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation, we’ll get younger and shittier versions of them who will outlive us old fucks and impact the lives of our children for 20-30 years after we’re gone. If we’re really unlucky Sotomayor’s health will decline, and Trump will once again have the power to appoint three justices during his term. This would mean that this deeply corrupt and unethical man single-handedly appointed 2/3 of Supreme Court Justices whose unreviewable decisions impact every American every single day.
This is my optimistic prediction. My pessimistic one, which I admit is far less likely, is he goes full-on authoritarian, declares martial law based on some convenient excuse (like the George Floyd protests), dissolves Congress, takes full control of our military thanks to his compliant Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and CIA/NSA Directors, all of whom he’ll have the power to appoint to ‘acting’ positions that don’t require congressional confirmation. Under this scenario, he’ll Putin himself and stay in power (and out of jail) until he dies in office.
Do I think this is likely? No. Do I think it’s possible? Oh yes. He will have the power and cult following in his party to do this. If he gets enough of his loyal lackeys in control of the military and all the guns, tanks, and planes at its disposal, he can literally do anything he wants. Picture January 6th with the cops and National Guard on the side of the rioters instead of defending our institutions. That’s the worst case scenario to me. I give it a 25-30% chance of happening before the end of his term.
C’mon Tim, give us some hope! You can’t leave us like this, you morbid asshole!
Fine. But the trade-off is you lazy, self-absorbed, low information motherfuckers need to start following politics and the news more–and not by watching cable news for fuck’s sake, READ something for a change–and you also need to stand up and be heard when he starts targeting the weak and unrepresented out there, which he absolutely will. Deal?
Here are some hopeful bones for you to chew on.
He’s fucking old. He’s 78 years old, and he’s hiding his medical records for a reason. I think he has some serious medical issues, and there’s a decent chance he doesn’t live out his term. Of course that means we get that fraudulent piece of shit J.D. Vance as President, but let’s deal with one disaster at a time, shall we? At some point, all those Big Macs, Diet Cokes, stress, and his Adderall addiction are going to kick in and end this nightmare. The guy was also shot and nearly killed a few months ago and that will have a major psychological impact on anyone, even him. So I think he’s old, tired, and under immense stress right now. This may take some of the fight out of him, but it also creates a vacuum for manipulation by advisors who have a political agenda that I hate, but aren’t fascists, give or take Kash Patel, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Mike Flynn. He’s physically and mentally weaker this time and he’s going to decline at some point just like Biden did.
He can’t run again. He’d be 82 if he tried. If fortune decides to smile on us for a fucking change, he’ll be in a wheelchair or drinking his dinner by then. If he goes the martial law route, he’s going to have major opposition from half, if not more, of the country. How do I know this? Because the closest version of martial law is what he tried to pull on January 6th, and he was universally condemned for what he did. In many ways, January 6th should give us some comfort, which is ironic.
His last administration leaked like a sieve and had a ton of infighting. I expect worse this time. This would be good news because the more they leak, the more they fight internally–which is how he’s managed anything he was in charge of in his life, from Trump Org. to The Apprentice to the presidency–the weaker they’ll be and the less damage they’ll do to the country. I expect a ton of whistleblowing and more congressional investigations. He’ll probably get impeached again, not that this matters at all in this joke of a country.
There will be no surprises this time. He has a track record and has pre-announced everything he wants to do.
There are checks and balances in our government. For now at least, we still have a mostly independent judiciary and a Congress, even if it’s dysfunctional and only consists of 400 dancing monkeys. It still exists, and Democrats still have the filibuster, which some myopic dumbfucks were urging Biden to eliminate when Democrats had the power to do so. It’s a good thing they didn’t because it protects the minority from being steamrolled by the majority. This doesn’t mean Republicans won’t try to eliminate it to pass certain pieces of their agenda. They may try, but this likely would mean that the policy at issue doesn’t have wide support, which carries political risk. Eliminating the filibuster to pass a national abortion ban for example would be a major political act that would cost them votes in the future. They may not want to risk this.
Back to my main point, if Democrats and sensible Republicans haven’t prepared for this imminent Trump disaster in the four years they had to do so, whatever is coming is on them. Democrats still have the power to obstruct Trump’s agenda, and they should take every opportunity to do so. State governors also have a lot of power to blunt some of the things he wants to do and file court cases to stop his executive overreach and run out the clock. It’s all about running out the clock now, one day, one resistant act at a time.
Finally, the biggest silver lining is that there’s another election in two years. By that time, everyone–even low information voters–will have seen that Trump’s promises were just hot air, inflation hasn’t declined significantly, interest rates are still high, and illegal immigrants are still coming, even after he divides families, locks kids up in cages, and goes full-on Gestapo in every blue state. Trump will have passed a tax cut that will benefit corporations and people like me (yay!) but will not have done shit for low and middle class earners and will also add to the deficit. We will have handed Ukraine over to Putin and very well may be embroiled in another war with Iran (I really hope not). All of these are issues Democrats can run on in 2026 and 2028.
In short, assuming he doesn’t impose martial law and go full-on fascist before then, I expect him and Republicans to get fucking pounded in the 2026 mid-terms. He’ll be a lame duck after that, with a limited ability to pursue his agenda the last two years. This means that the real damage he’ll do will be in the first two. If we can survive that tornado, things will start to turn around afterwards, and the pendulum hopefully will swing back to sanity.
At that point, we’ll all have a chance to Make America Great Again.
If it’s still here.
