Lying For The Win

When you’re Trump, with little positive to run on, your paths to reelection are few: preventing as many Democrats as possible from voting, and attacking your opponent. When the opponent is Joe Biden, you’re mostly limited to lying: your specialty. (Also, you have your son-in-law help a bipolar hip-hop artist to run, to suck Black voters from Joe. And welcoming, while denying, Russian help, as before.)

Biden, Trump tells us, will “take away your guns. Destroy your Second Amendment. No religion. No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns…” He also babbled about buildings with no windows, destroying “our great, beautiful suburbs,” and confiscating all guns, “immediately and without notice.”  

Whatever the theology that God and the Bible can be hurt is, it’s not Christian. Maybe Jerry Falwell, Jr, who suddenly has time (and who knows what else?) on his hands, can clarify. In the meantime, let’s consider the desperation that engenders such bull…oney, and what it says about the disdain Trump has for his voters.  

When he speaks, it’s impossible to know whether he’s lying or delusional. Either way, it’s alarming, and ought to disturb everyone. Nothing Trump said is true. Whether or not he believes it, he expects his supporters will, and he’s not wrong about thirty-five-percent of our population: the mask-refusers; the hoax-believers; the Sturgis-goers and store-employee abusers. The choosers of Q-anon acolytes for Congress. 

The question is whether such preposterous prevarication will cause still-sane Republicans (?) finally to acknowledge Trump is dangerously unfit for the job. To cast a vote for country instead of party.  

It was Ronald Reagan who started us down this road of economic fantasy and scientific ignorance, but it took an amoral conman like Trump to hasten its predetermined dénouement: unable to face difficult challenges, begetting the death-throes of America’s former greatness. If he isn’t the sole cause of our national decline, he sure figured out how to profit from it. Doing so, he eliminated the opportunity to control the pandemic; an easy job for better led, less selfish countries. 

His nonstop dissemination of ignorance has also made it impossible for America to do the much harder work of mitigating climate change. Thirty-five-percent ignorant is enough to take us all down.  

He’s demonstrated his disqualifications daily, for months. Latest was his fund-raiser/news-conference/lunacy at his gaudy Bedminster club, so exclusive that ninety-nine-percent of his supporters would be hustled out faster than an ethical inspector general. There, he flaunted his and his rich pals’ refusal to mask or distance; waved it like the Confederate flag for which he professes love, announcing the pandemic is going away even as it rages on. 

The rarefied air was filled with his lies. About mail-in voting. About Democrats ending signature-verification. All while modeling pandemic non-compliance for his tractable throngs, so welcome at his rallies and so unwelcome at Bedminster.  

Later, Trump rolled back regulations on methane: the most potent of greenhouse gases. Why, in the name of whatever god he thinks Joe Biden will beat up? Who thinks that’s anything but deadly to us, and a gift to oil executives?  

Yet another example of his destructive desperation is hiring a hitman to snuff the Postal Service; a big-donor, inexperienced pal who’s disallowing overtime, removing mail-sorting machines, ordering slowdowns. Unable to stop states from adopting mail-in ballots, Trump chooses to prevent them from being delivered. Chief economic adviser Kudlow just called voting rights part of “a liberal wish-list.” 

The whole “losing money” argument is ridiculous. Like our military, the post office is a government service, not a profit center. This is purely about suppression of Democrats’ votes. Trump admitted it. It’s another impeachable moment.   

Finally, stonewalling economic rescue negotiations, Trump issued not-really executive orders, pretending inaction was Pelosi’s and Schumer’s fault. Mostly empty suggestions, they do, however, begin defunding Social Security. One assumes even Trumpists use the Postal Service; plan on Social Security, too. But, sure, vote for him, because … what? Because you agree BLM is a terrorist organization? It’s cutting off your face to spite your nose.  

But Trump’s not always wrong. Praising the Q-anointed woman Georgia Republicans just nominated for Congress, who warns of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controlling the world, he called her “a future Republican star.” If Republicans stick with him and people like her, he got that absolutely right.  

Postscript: If Mother Pence lets Mike be alone near a woman, the VP debate will be must-see TV. 

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