As I write, the election remains undecided. Joe Biden appears to have won the states needed to give him the Electoral College victory, and he’s millions ahead in the popular vote as well. I was hoping by now he’d be the official president-elect, but I’m going to have to be patient a while longer. Meanwhile, I’ll share a couple of election-related thoughts.
— Paul
Trump, in a tweet posted on November 27, 2016:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
Trump, in yesterday’s White House press conference:
Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking to them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late.
If, perhaps, you think I’m quoting selectively or inaccurately, or taking casual remarks out of context, I provided links so you can check my work.
Trump never lets anything go. Every crack-brained notion he’s ever had lives on in his brain. He doesn’t grow. He doesn’t learn. He doesn’t change.
His earlier claim that millions of people voted illegally was every bit as shocking and repulsive as the things he said last night, but in 2016 no one took him seriously because the election was over when he said it. This time, though, we’re still counting votes. He didn’t just go on national TV to undermine an election in progesss, he literally declared votes that don’t go his way illegal, and seemed to be calling on supporters to storm vote-tabulation locations and overturn Biden’s victory.
In case I wasn’t clear: he flat out said votes for Biden are illegal. That my vote is illegal. And yours. Jesus H. Christ, has any president ever done anything like this?
Trump opened his press conference last night with such a shocking barrage of lies the three major TV networks and all but two cable networks (Fox News and CNN) quickly cut him off (MSNBC shut him down after just 35 seconds). This, after giving him nearly four years of unlimited airtime, covering and normalizing every single thing he’s said and done, no matter how off the charts. That they’ve only managed to grow a pair now that blood’s in the water shows how spineless our much-vaunted “free press” has become.
Well, long as I’m looking things up, here’s what Hillary Clinton actually said at the “LGBT For Hillary Gala” fundraiser in New York City on September 9, 2016:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
Couple of things. It’s all of ’em, Katie, not half. I used to believe Americans of good will outnumbered the deplorables by a wide margin; this election has peeled the film from my eyes and I see now they account for nearly half the population. As to whether any of them are redeemable, I suspect not. Another stupid thing I used to believe was that when the segregationists of the 1950s and 60s died out, newer generations would be less racist, but that turns out to be a load of shit as well. Deplorables are like the poor, who shall always be with us. And how can anyone say they don’t represent America? They’re as American as anyone else, and more representative of our history than modern progressives.