If there is another reason for this country to abort Donald Trump, it is how he has managed to turn this country into the United States of Trump. What he has done is either turning this country into something tens of millions of people “love”—or into something they hate; there is very little middle ground to be found. The soap opera of Trumpworld has kept the country off-track in dealing with pressing domestic and foreign policy problems, so long as the focus remains on Trump and the outrages he is perpetrating on the democratic process. This continues in spite of the fact that Michigan lawmakers reiterated that they would abide by state law and recognize the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, and U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann on Saturday dismissing Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuit in scathing terms:
Claims Plaintiffs’ only remaining claim alleges a violation of equal protection. This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent…That Plaintiffs are trying to mix-and-match claims to bypass contrary precedent is not lost on the Court… Assuming, as this Court must, that Plaintiffs state a valid equal-protection claim, the Court finds that Individual Plaintiffs have adequately established an injury-in-fact. However, they fail to establish that it was Defendants who caused these injuries and that their purported injury of vote-denial is adequately redressed by invalidating the votes of others. The Trump Campaign’s theory also fails because neither competitive nor associational standing applies, and it does not assert another cognizable theory of standing…The Trump Campaign has not offered another theory of standing, and therefore, cannot meet its burden of establishing Article III jurisdiction. To be clear, this Court is not holding that a political campaign can never establish standing to challenge the outcome of an election; rather, it merely finds that in this case, the Trump Campaign has not pled a cognizable theory…Defendants’ motions to dismiss the First Amended Complaint are granted with prejudice. Leave to amend is denied.
We know that people like Rudy Giuliani are naturally egotistical, and Trump only provides them with a context to express their true selves, something that is seldom particularly attractive. But others, like Kayleigh McEnany—Trump’s press secretary/campaign advisor—seem particularly intent on melding mind, body and soul with him. One may suspect that in private Trump is quite the seducer, perhaps promising monetary benefit for loyalty; the alternative is that people like McEnany are completely mindless vessels who lack the capacity of recognizing or accepting concepts like reality, facts or even the simple truth.
How else to explain the frustrating, nonsensical fantasies of someone like McEnany? “We’ve got to continue fighting this, and the federal courts are the path and, hopefully, up to the Supreme Court, because voter fraud is real, and they seized on a pandemic and created an electoral epidemic -- one that was inexcusable, a system that should never have happened.” What she is saying is that while Trump is losing his attempt to overturn the verdict of the people on the state and district court level, he and his “team” will continue the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, hell or highwater. McEnany insists that the courts cannot ignore that 74 million people voted for Trump—and seemingly asking the courts to ignore the fact that 80 million voted for Biden. Judges all over the country are refusing to just hand over the country to Trump just because he doesn’t want to be a “loser”; what he doesn’t realize is that there is a difference between losing with grace and behaving like a sore loser: the former suggesting dignity, and the latter rendering one merely pathetic.
Yet Trump and his “team” continue to fight on with their laughable claims, which represent the true “fraud.” Even those infamous 234 pages of “affidavits” claiming fraud in Detroit do not “prove” anything; half of them are “assumptions” and “observations” of something someone found “suspicious” without actual knowledge whether what they saw was illegal or not, and the other half is just complaints from Republican poll watchers and others about the supposed “limitations” placed on what they could see. Many of the complaints were not even actual affidavits, and all were vague about actual allegations of “fraud,” because perjury and making false claims in this matter would be a federal offense.
The threats by the Trump campaign to take this all the way to “top” is not just a desperate bid to overturn the will of the majority who are tired of Trump and want to leave him in the trash bin of history, but evidence of a sickness in a large part of the American psyche that will not accept the fact there is not just one “valid” concept of country that exists. Many people are frustrated by the fact that the concepts of morality and ethics have been perverted beyond all recognition not just by the Trump administration, but by his so-called “Christian” supporters, especially evangelicals—and to have such hypocrites as these “steal” the election may be far too heavy a blow for democracy to recover from.
I suspect that in the end, if Trump’s case actually does make it all the way to the Supreme Court, enough justices will simply refuse to hear the case, recognizing the threat to the very foundation of Constitution and democracy being posed by Trump, but until then we will continue to be subjected to outrages against reality by the likes of Giuliani and McEnany. They are like those people afflicted with dementia you see roaming the streets shouting at no one in particular; you know they are “crazy,” but you should know enough not to engage them, because they are impossible to reason with.
No comments:
Post a Comment