I don’t like remembering December of 2016, but I think we all remember the SNL skit where Hillary Clinton showed up at the homes of electors and tried to convince them to vote against Donald Trump in the electoral college. One could certainly laugh at the skit, and one could even empathize with the shock many people felt after Trump won- I mean, he got less votes and won the election. If you go back and watch the speech, even Trump looked shocked when he came out to declare victory. The whole thing was surreal at the time. It was still absolutely batshit that people though the electoral college would be faithless enough to defeat the candidate they pledged their support to. It was a super long shot in 2000 when Al Gore needed less than five, and that wasn’t happening in 2016.
The problem with this is that it never ended though. People thought the Russian interference in our elections and every other scandal “would be the end of him.” When he was defeated in 2020, they wanted him punished for the very real wrongs he had done. Even now, they hope there is some early way out. The truth is that there never was. The even more real truth is that for most Americans, it was never really a priority.
I came across a tweet that angered me quite a bit. It’s tone deaf. There are truly a class of people in Washington who think that the top concern of most people is imprisoning Trump. You can read it here:
Basically the thought here is that Joe Biden, after receiving 81 million votes, should have made it his priority to prosecute and jail the guy he just defeated. Not stop Covid, revitalize the economy, expand health care, invest in green energy, or really any of the stuff he told people he would do. Never mind that the crimes committed in New York and Georgia were state crimes, never mind the need to investigate whatever involvement Trump actually had in January 6th, never mind that the Florida case hadn’t even happened yet, never mind that while Mueller found that Russia did interfere in the 2016 Election, there was no two party conspiracy, and never mind that neither impeachment ended in a conviction- lock him up. Look, do I think he did a lot of this stuff? Yes, and he was convicted in a state of doing it. The idea that someone was going to lock him in Leavenworth and we’d never hear from him again was nuts though. That locking the guy in Leavenworth, or Minersville, or whatever other crazy place you wanted him locked up in, should have been the top priority, well that’s just insane.
Yes, I’d love it if Donald Trump was gone from American politics. The reality though is that he’ll be gone when he’s done being President- which the Constitution clearly says will be January 20th, 2029, but don’t get too comfortable with this Supreme Court. In all seriousness, Trump and Trumpism will probably only be gone when the American people are ready to move on to something else. They will. They moved on from Obama, from Clinton, from Bush, from Reagan, from Nixon, from Eisenhower, from Truman, and even eventually from FDR’s politics (he of course was dead).
I stopped watching cable news a few years back, almost entirely, and it’s the best thing I ever did. I built a nice following on Twitter and other social media a few years back for my political opinions, but the truth is that I think that world is too segregated from normal society now. People only talk to people like them, then think the world is like them. Most people are much more mad that groceries and gas cost a lot than they are that Trump says mean and insensitive things. No, he’s not being hauled off to The Hague, or impeached and removed, or prosecuted, or any of that. Most people don’t care either. If you tell them this is your priority, they think you’re nuts. This is truly a level of strange that I think has infected most politically active people.
Apocalypse Vibes 