Sometimes strange things happen. Sometimes you set out to do something and then completely forget it.
I set out yesterday to write about people who believe in conspiracy theories. I accomplished that in at least setting up the story, but the purpose was to finish with Donald Trump and how he is creating his own theories to excuse his recent loss in the presidential election.
The thing was, though, I wrapped up the story without even getting to the point.
“McFly!? McFly!?”
Yes, it’s a bit of an old cultural reference, but it was just this year I learned that director Robert Zemeckis modeled the bad guy in “Back to the Future II,” Biff Tannen, after Trump.
So if my memory went a little George McFly on me, I suppose it’s understandable. Trump has been assaulting all our senses recently, and I for one I’m thankful I’m far enough from the White House that my sense of smell doesn’t come into play. After all, 74 years old, angry, obese and on a fast-food diet might cause enough flatulence to declare a new Superfund site.
Anyway, Trump is doing everything he can to destroy faith in the election results, but if you think some of his claims through, they don’t hold up.
Here’s one:
“No way did Joe Biden get 80 million votes!”
Well, that depends on how you look at it. There were three types of votes that registered for Joe Biden. First are what used to be called yellow-dog Democrats, people who would vote for the Democrats even if they nominated a yellow dog. Second are those who dislike Trump so much they would vote for whoever was opposing him.
I fall somewhere in there. I didn’t support Biden in the primaries, mostly because I believe we don’t need a president in his 70s. I qualified that by saying if it were a choice between Biden and Trump, the age thing was out the window.
The third type who voted for Biden were people who loved Biden and thought he would be a great president.
That’s how he got to 80 million votes.
And how did Trump get to 74 million? Sort of the reverse of the three earlier categories — hard-core Republican, folks who hate Democrats and those who love Donald Trump. My guess is the last category — the folks I like to call Trumpanzees — only consists of 8-10 million people.
Of course, that’s still pretty scary, especially since there are the folks most likely to be armed.
So when it all fell apart for Trump, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise. He actually did better than he was expected to in the polls, something that will have to be explained at some point.
His approval rating never reached 50 percent at any time in his term, and his botched handling of the pandemic made the situation much worse for the entire country this year.
Yet he insisted through the entire campaign, just as he did four years ago, that the only possible way he could lose was if the election was rigged. Partly this is the way he learned to do things from his father, that if you never admit defeat, eventually you might wear people down.
I don’t know if you remember this line from 2016:
“I love the poorly educated.”
Sure. They’re the ones who fall for his con, the ones most likely to believe his conspiracies.
The worst part of all this is that Trump set up a PAC supposedly to fight the election in court, but that’s a battle that’s already lost. The money also could fund a 2024 race, but mostly it’s money Trump can use as he pleases, and at last count it was $170 million.
So he lives well, and he leaves the country broken.
Lots of people in for a rude awakening.
And a lot of work for Joe and Kamala cleaning up Donald’s mess.