Trump, Outdoing Himself, Undoing Democracy

OF ALL THE HORRIBLE THINGS Donald Trump has done since entering presidential politics in the summer of 2015, and they are so numerous as to be essentially innumerable, the absolute worst, arguably, is his denial of his election loss to Biden in 2020, and his continued insistence that he in fact won. Two terrible aspects of this stand out. One, that simple, factual revelation of the facts clearly show that the big election lie was a well orchestrated, very intricately planned conspiracy by Trump and his cohorts to steal the election from Biden, and secondly, that the lie was from the outset so transparently obvious, that nobody should have even considered believing it for one moment. Instead, nearly seventy five million people beieved both dishonest words (we won), most of whom still do. In effect, the conspiracy now consists of tens of millions of co cospirators, a few instigators in the inner circle, and tens of millions of bad citizen co conspirators throughout the United States. Fortunately, Trump himself, and many of his inner circle of conspirators are now indicted and preparing to stand trial for their election crimes. Unfortunately, there are about seventy five million bad citizens in this country who should also be on trial, but are not, and never will be. It all started with Trump, but those who now, more than two and a half years later, still refuse to call the lie a lie, are themsleves no better to Trump, having reduced themselves to his level of criminality by their cooperation with his. Two weeks before the election, according to sworn testimony given by Ivanka Trump, her father said to her: "No matter what happens in the election, we'll just say that we won. Fuck it". Case closed. It really should be that simple. Instead, the very foundtions of American democracy have been shakened and maybe irrepairably broken. It has already become more the norm to question election results, to claim voter fraud, and to demand one vote recount after another, needlessly, even without any real evidence to the claims of fraud. The cost to taxpayers for doing this is enormous. It is enormous financially, and enormously costly to democracy itself, which is at best a tenuous form of government heavily reliant on the acceptance, belief, faith, and support of the electorate. We can expect this suspicion of election results to continue, to become the "new normal" as we like to say. Of all the trained experienced election workers on the job working the voting places in 2020, more than one half of them have left their election worker jobs, fearful of attack by disenchanted voters. Their fears are very real, and very justified. Attacks on poll workers, both verbal, written, and physical, have increased dramatically since Trump started the process with his big lie, perhaps the most devastating lie in history, certainly in American history. Throughout the U.S.,there is a lingering, residual, chronic shortage of poll workers, and positions are of necessity being filled by new, inexperienced workers. New workers in any profession make more mistakes than experienced workers; going forward, we can expect the number of human mistakes in the voting process to proliferate, inciting even more complaints of voter fraud by losing candidates. Ironically, before Trump's big lie, the actual instances of human mistakes in national elections, indeed in all elections, was miniscule, too few to even mention or worry about. Now, that may be changing, as if in some sordid manner the purveyors of the big lie are bringing about the fulfillment of their own false prochecies. A good psychiatrist or hypnotist could probably prove that nearly all of the folks who claim that the electio was stolen from Trump really do not believe it, and never have, but are trapped by their own enthusiasm for their cult leader Trump, by their pride, and by stupid choices into clinging to the false claim,as Trummp himself is similarly trapped into continuing his lie. Over the coming years, history will record Trump's big election lie, and the social phenomenon it spawned, as among the most nefarioius episodes in American political history. Whether the damage done can and will ever be fully repaired is another matter.