If You Think Trump Can’t Win this November, You Haven’t Been Paying Attention
- Aug 6, 2020
- 8 min read
Hi all. Time for another dose of depressing dystopian blogosphere from yours truly. Today’s terrible topic; The Election. I’m sure many of my fellow democrats are sitting back and breathing a sigh of relief as they see poll after poll showing Biden ahead nationally and doing well in key battleground states. We all are having a good time watching Trump make a complete ass out of himself in interviews as he bumbles around for chart figures trying to make himself look good in the face of the worst pandemic this country has seen in a century, made exponentially worse by his doing. We think “Yea, he’s done. We got this in the bag. No way he’ll get re-elected.” Hate to burst your bubble, but nothing is in the bag with this election. Especially with Trump, who basically is revealing his only tactic to try to win this election: Cheat.
First, the polls are going to tighten up. They always do as we get closer to election day. And most people are waiting for some type of “October surprise” to show up. And with many forces vying to make sure Trump wins, both domestic and foreign, there is probably something that will show. It’s not like Biden is a top tier candidate. The best he’s got going for him is he’s not Trump (or Hillary). He’s sure to have some skeletons in his closet that’ll coincidentally be leaked just in time for the election so it’s fresh on everyone’s mind.
Speaking of “both domestic and foreign”, that leads me to point two: Russia is attacking the US again and trying to get Trump elected. They were emboldened after suffering no consequences in 2016 for their attacks, and now that Mitch and Co. in the GOP senate have bafflingly decided to do no action to bolster election security this time, even after Democrats have had bills on Mitch’s desk for that purpose for years now, Russia has free reign to be even more aggressive in their tactics.
There’s bots and Russian influencers all over social media, trying to stir up trouble and controversy at every turn. Trump has welcomed this interference, and the GOP has shown they will not act to stop it. Russia may get more aggressive, attempting to successfully hack election machines at key battleground states, and I wouldn’t put it past GOP governors in certain states (lookin at you, Florida), to turn a blind eye or to even help them along in that endeavor. This is conjecture at this point, seeing as how there was no evidence Russia managed to hack machines during the 2016 election. However, the evidence that they had a concentrated social media campaign to disrupt the election and get Trump elected, and are doing it again more aggressively in 2020 with little effort from GOP lawmakers to stop them, is overwhelming.
“The U.S. intelligence community is preparing to disclose more information to the public about foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election, top senators said Monday, as Democrats continue to push the Trump administration to detail Russia’s intentions.
Their assessments came after senior officials, including Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, briefed senators in a classified setting in the Capitol on Monday about foreign efforts to meddle in the campaign, in addition to other issues related to election security.”
So, Russian hacking and October surprise, two strikes in Trump's favor. But now we are at the big guns; election hacking from our own domestic sources. Trump is trying to make sure that most people can’t vote this year, at least most Democrats. It’s clear as day when at every interview, he’s crying about how terrible mail in voting would be. He’s even using campaign dollars to sue the state of Nevada for expanding mail in voting:
And that’s not all he’s doing for mail in voting. Trump also cites the USPS as being woefully unprepared for the amount of mail that’ll come for the mail-in voting. But of course, Trump doesn’t mention anything his administration is doing to help the USPS in that regard. Isn’t his administration in charge of the USPS and can do many things right now to help them deal with the millions of votes that will be casted by mail? In fact, much like everything else, this issue Trump is complaining about happening is something he very much is trying to make happen.
Enter his PostMaster General, Louis DeJoy. His entire list of qualifications to run the USPS? He donates a shit ton of money to Trump’s election. He even has some conflict of interest in the fact that he has millions of stocks in USPS direct competitors:
“DeJoy and his wife, a Trump appointee to the Commission on White House Fellowships who is his nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Canada, own $30.1 million to $75.3 million in assets in Postal Service competitors or contractors, like UPS and the trucking company J.B. Hunt. Although DeJoy likely had to divest these conflicting assets, his ethics agreement and personal financial disclosure statement are not yet available on the Office of Government Ethics' website for the public to confirm.”
Of course, in a normal administration, this fact alone would have disqualified him from being PostMaster General. But I mean, Trump lackeys being in charge of areas of government they have vested interests in seeing fail? Take your pick, that’s basically Trumps’ entire administration. Weren’t we supposed to see a swamp drained or something?
It’s entirely clear DeJoys mission is to make sure the USPS is as dysfunctional and inept come election day as Trump is crying it will be. Already, Dejoy has enacted sweeping changed under the guise of “cost cutting”, which has resulted in numerous delays of mail, months before the election:
“DeJoy...approved changes that took effect July 13 that the agency said were aimed at cutting costs for the debt-laden mail service. They included prohibiting overtime pay, shutting down sorting machines early and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.
The new policies have resulted in at least a two-day delay in scattered parts of the country, even for express mail, according to multiple postal workers and union leaders. Letter carriers are manually sorting more mail, adding to the delivery time. Bins of mail ready for delivery are sitting in post offices because of scheduling and route changes. And without the ability to work overtime, workers say the logjam is worsening without an end in sight.”
This effect is having a cascade of slowdown for the USPS. They don’t finish delivering the days’ mail by 5pm, no OT you bring it back. The next day you deliver the previous days’ mail and that days, but by 5pm you stop, and there’s even more of a backlog. By November the backlog of mail will be insane. And this is all so clearly by design from DeJoy and Trump. They want the USPS to fail and they want the majority of votes and mail in ballot applications to be delayed.
Why does Trump have such a hard on against Mail in Voting, you ask? Trump knows overwhelmingly that the people for mail in voting are going to be the people more worried about getting COVID if they go in person to a voting location. You know, well informed people who have some intelligence and realize the virus is a threat; Liberals.
It’s so completely transparent why he’s fighting mail in voting everywhere he can, I’d say it’s laughable his supporters defend this tactic, but then I realize that of course they do. To Republicans, the ends always justify the means. Winning is what counts, it doesn’t matter how much you lie and cheat to get there. As long as the liberals lose. Some Republicans may cry about voter fraud or some such, but deep down they all know they just don’t want the minorities to get to vote. It’s been the GOP playbook for the past few decades now, and if they haven’t been cheating this whole time, they probably wouldn’t control most parts of the government or even win most elections.
From thinly veiled tactics of forcing voter ID laws which disproportionately affect minority and the impoverished (aka, democrats),
to purging the voter names out of the books right before the election,
to gerrymandering districts so bad it looks like Michael J Fox drew the borders,
to shutting down polling locations in majority democrat areas on voting day,
Republicans and their constituents have demonstrated time and time again that they don’t actually want a free and fair election for every US citizen. If that were the case then we would automatically be enrolled to vote at 18 and voting would be a national holiday, or at the least be on the weekend. Both sane and sensible proposals that are commonplace in most 1st world nations. Both of these things and much more, including strengthening the security of our elections, have been put in Bills proposed by the Democrat run House, but shot down by the GOP because they know the easier it is for more Americans to vote, the harder it is for them to stay in power. Minority rule, indeed.
This was all bad enough before Trump took office. Now that he has been in office four years and has lambasted our democratic institutions at every turn, GOP officials, lawmakers, and governors are even more emboldened to use their dirty tactics to swing the election in their states. If Trump wins, what consequence will they face? The courts are more and more stacked with Trump lackeys, important rich people don’t face consequences anymore, Trump himself will of course back any play they make to get the election in his favor. Expect all of these voter suppression tactics to be turned up to 11 this election in the battleground states.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Trump and Republican Governors across the nation take a sudden about face about the dangers of COVID just in time for the election. By then it’ll be even more widespread and the death toll will be over 500k due to our governments continued inaction, and forcing schools open. It’ll be an easy justification to shut down more polling sites and other tactics like even delaying the election, as Trump tried to float earlier this week, by then in the guise of a “national emergency”. And it’ll be an emergency entirely of Trump's own making. And expect nothing but outcries and lost votes to result as punishment.
All of these deaths by a thousand cuts leave me very very nervous for November. Even if Biden eeks out a win, Trump has shown he’s willing to do enough muddying of the waters to decry any result as fraud. He’ll whine and sue and say it was all rigged. He did it even when he won in 2016. And his supporters and the GOP will eat it up and it’ll be a rough time to make it to January 20th.
But that, of course, is the best case scenario. Just as likely in my mind is all of these reasons above I listed adding up to hand Trump a stolen victory. He only needs a few states to go his way. It’s not locked in the bag at all. What do we do to avoid this eventuality? Don’t get complacent. Don’t let the polls fool you. Get out there and vote for Biden. Make sure you are signed up to vote in your state
and KEEP checking that you are signed up,
especially if you’re in a state used to purging votes like Florida, Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Most states are allowing expanded absentee voting this year, aka Mail in voting. Sign up for it NOW so you can receive your ballot. And when you do, take your ballot to your local voting office to drop off yourself. Don’t rely on Trumps’ USPS to be anything but crippled this election. Cut them out of the equation and deliver the ballot yourself if you can. And yes, vote for Biden. I don’t care if he’s a creepy old grandpa or that he’s lost a step, he will lead a competent administration and his policy proposals are the most liberal of any President ever elected. No, they won’t all happen, but our nation can survive four or eight years of Biden. I don’t think it can survive another year of Trump, much less four.
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