The saddest show on Earth
We are now five days away from expelling a cancer from the White House. This won't be the end of the fight; we'll have to go through a fair amount of post-operative treatment to mend what was broken.
All the major outlets are putting out their final polls. CNN did as well.
In its poll, Vice President Joe Biden is ahead of Donald Trump by 12 points, 54% to 42%. However, in the write-up of its conclusions, this is what stuck out to me:
The poll offers no indication that Trump's four-year-long campaign for reelection has managed to garner him substantial new supporters since his narrow win in the 2016 election. [Emphasis mine.]
We have become so inured to his long farewell tour that it slaps us in the face when we see this in print. Trump hasn't been governing these past four years. He's been doing nothing but running for reelection.
He began, before even being inaugurated, by continuing his hate rallies. And soon after taking the oath of office, he continued to hold his hate rallies.
Hate rallies. Golfing. Tearing apart our country and our alliances. That's all that Trump has to show for four years in power. A chimpanzee with a solid Cabinet could have done a better job at presidenting.
Four years of catering only to his own needs and petty desires. No concern for the common welfare. No attempt to broaden his appeal beyond his rabid base. Even a chucklehead like George W. Bush made a pretense of reaching out to those who didn't vote for him. Trump hasn't been able to even feign interest in the job he fraudulently "won".
Because, of course, he never wanted the job. This was all a con to reset his brand and stave off the wolves of debt. He was going to lose, and be the tribune of the disaffected in a Hillary Clinton administration. And then the planets darkly aligned, and gave him the prize he never wanted. And at least in this regard he wasn't stupid; he knew that now that he had the presidency, his only hope was to keep it in four years' time.
But knowing that, he went about it in absolutely the worst way. Again, he didn't broaden his support. He fed his feral Brownshirts. He fed his own ego. It was all he was ever going to do. With his sociopathic pathology, he was incapable of acting like a human being. Some sociopaths can be charming. Not Trump. His sociopathy is one of extolling his own genius, and going scorched earth against anyone who dared gainsay him. And if "anyone" included a majority of the country he was elected to serve? Well, that didn't quite work out for Hitler; but Trump isn't much of a reader, so that example may have escaped him.
Fascists, by definition, aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. The likes of Hitler and Mussolini wouldn't have won the absolute power they won were it not for the parlous states of their countries. And Trump didn't have that going for him. He merely had Americans' childish desire to change horses midstream. He merely had Americans' penchant for star-fucking, and lifting up to the level of sage anyone who is a celebrity. Most Americans only knew about Trump what they saw on his TV show. And that was enough for 63 million of them to cast their votes for the most unfit man to run for the presidency in modern history.
Five days, friends, and this chapter will be over. Then we have to write the next one, and make sure these past four years are never repeated.