The Reality of the Trump Situation

Just a few thoughts

The above photograph is of a refrigerator magnet that I purchased from Five Below about a year ago or so. It shows a boy smiling and giving a thumbs up while being eaten alive by a great white shark. The tagline on the bottom reads “STAY POSITIVE!” That's a perfect metaphor for what's going on in America now after Election Day.

It's probably going to take awhile to process the fact that there are a sizeable amount of Americans—including my fellow white women—who would rather vote for a convicted felon who attempted to violently overthrow the US government on January 6, 2021 than vote for another candidate because she is a woman of color. Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz had ran a flawless campaign that expressed joy and provided a positive vision for the future and most voters chose a man who talked about taking revenge on his perceived enemies and accusing Haitian immigrants of eating pets.

All of this could've been avoided. Donald Trump was impeached for the January 6 riot. Had he been convicted he would’ve been prohibited from ever holding office again. But Senator Mitch McConnell blocked that one, despite the fact that he could've been killed on January 6. So Trump walked free.

After Donald Trump left the White House the Republican Party allowed him to remain the leader of the Republican Party, which is something that usually isn't given to ex-presidents, especially ones who lost the last election. The GOP could've exalted younger members who have a promising political future ahead of them while ignoring Trump's insistence that he's still the boss. But, no, they still kowtowed to him every chance they could get.

Then there's the Justice Department. One of the few criticisms I have of Joe Biden is that he appointed Merrick Garland as the head who did…nothing. That's right, nothing.

Initially the Justice Department focused on prosecuting the lower-level rioters, which got some criticism early on. I initially defended Garland because I thought he was doing the classic tactic of going after the peons first, get them to confess in exchange for a lighter sentence, then go after the upper levels until, eventually, you go for the kingpin where, by that point, you have all the evidence you need for a conviction. That tactic has long been used to take down the Mafia. I felt that people needed to be patient and Trump will get indicted for his role in the January 6 riot sometime between late 2022-mid 2023.

Boy was I wrong! Garland ended up doing nothing to go after Trump, which left him free to run for president again and win.

I have to give a shout out to Colorado, Maine, and Illinois for trying to keep Trump's name off of the ballot based on his inciting people to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 while citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution that says that those who previously held public office but engaged in insurrection were prohibited from seeking public office. Unfortunately Trump got the Supreme Court to strike down those efforts, which definitely put a damper on other states from even trying the same thing.

And there's the corporate-owned mainstream media's role in all this. I’ve already written extensively about it here, here, here, and here so I'll just say that if Donald Trump becomes a full-blown dictator and decides to shut some of them down on a whim, they shouldn't come crying to me about it. They could've educated their audience as to what kind of man he really is and where he stands on policy issues but, instead, they treated him as fun entertainment that's designed to increase ratings and profits. So, no, I'm not going to bother protesting if Trump decides to shut down The Washington Post or CNN. It would serve them right.

There was also this leftist push to withhold votes from Kamala Harris and to either vote all blue in down ballot races or vote for Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket. This push was to protest the US supporting Israel despite the horrendous bombings that Israel is currently perpetrating on the Palestinians in Gaza. I admit that Joe Biden was more supportive of Israel's bombing of Gaza than I would like but, based on everything I've read, it sounded like Kamala Harris would've been more open to cutting back on supplying weapons to Israel. Also withholding votes from Harris or voting for Stein would've benefitted Trump, who is even closer to Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden is and he has openly advocated Israel bombing Gaza even more. Both Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner see bombing Gaza into oblivion as a golden opportunity to rebuild Gaza as a vacation beach resort for wealthy guests. I found this opinion piece by Joe Mayall on why he felt that withholding votes from Harris was the wrong strategy for leftists to take that would ultimately benefit Trump. He was right about that. It also includes his strong criticism of the Green Party.

There is one thing about this election that I was proven right about is this: both Donald Trump's birthplace of New York and the state where Trump had opened and bankrupted three casinos, New Jersey, had rejected him for president for the third time in a row, which is not surprising given the fact that they really do detest him.

On that note I'm going to make another prediction: Jill Stein will slink away from politics once again and we won't be hearing much from her for the next few years. At least the self-proclaimed “only anti-genocide candidate” can live off of her investment in Raytheon, one of the largest defense contractors in the world who has made the weapons used on the Palestinians in Gaza. The US Green Party will once again not bother spending the off-election years with building that party on the local, county, and state levels by running candidates in those elections because they only care about running candidates for president. There's a reason why I previously wrote about why the US Green Party is so messed up and how Jill Stein's involvement has only exacerbated things.

I will also predict that this election will end filmmaker Michael Moore's side hustle as an election soothsayer. He had gained this reputation back in 2016 when he was one of the few public figures who accurately predicted that Donald Trump was going to win that year when nearly everyone else had treated his candidacy as a joke. He based it on the fact that he lives in Michigan and he listened to the locals who were enamored with Donald Trump. Since then he has been brought on news shows during election years where he accurately predicted that there would be a blue wave in 2018, Joe Biden would win in 2020, and there wouldn't be a red wave in 2022. This time he predicted that Kamala Harris would win and he even confidently said that Trump is toast. He got it wrong. Maybe he needs to go back to filmmaking.

I'm lucky in that I live in Maryland, which is a blue state that not only went for Kamala Harris but it is about to send its first African American woman to the Senate—Angela Alsobrooks. I’m hoping that the state, county, and local officials will do whatever they can to mitigate the worst excesses of the incoming Trump Administration. I’m going to focus my efforts more with local groups than with national protest movements or political campaigns.

I still have memories of the two years that I attended the annual Women's March on Washington. (You can see the photos I took in 2017 and 2018 in my Sagittarius Dolly blog.) I quit participating in the Women's March after the second year because of the controversy surrounding the organizers of that march. But if they call another Women’s March after Inauguration Day in January, I’m going to skip it because I think it will be a total waste of my time. Especially since a huge number of my fellow white women had voted for Trump despite the fact that he had placed enough justices to overturn Roe vs. Wade and he was named as a rapist in a court of law.

I'm just going to focus on working with local groups and trying to survive a second Trump Administration as a free woman for as long as I can.

I'll continue with debunking Kremlin propaganda as much as possible. Twitter/X has become a great resource for finding tankies and vatniks to highlight in this Substack since Elon Musk tends to promote the biggest such accounts on its algorithm. I feel awful for Ukraine because they have just gotten screwed since America has just reelected a close ally of Vladimir Putin. I only hope that Europe steps in to help because I think all further military aid to Ukraine will be gone after January 20. Otherwise Ukraine will once again become part of Russia and it's highly likely that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will end up dead.

I wish I could offer you something more inspirational but I just don't have it in me at the moment other than this song from Monty Python's Life of Brian, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

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