Two versions of America
This is a day when two very distinctive things occurred. This morning, Donald Trump told a conservative radio audience that he will issue full pardons and apologize to the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and assaulted Capitol and Metropolitan Police, causing more than 140 to suffer injuries serious enough to require medical attention. “I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” Trump told a right-wing radio host.
Trump would of course have to run for president in 2024 and be elected to make good his promise. He appears to believe that appealing to an increasingly narrow slice of the electorate will get him returned to the White House. There are fewer registered Republicans than there are Democrats, and an even smaller percentage of the electorate when you include Independents. Political experts estimate that the part of the electorate that slavishly follows Trump and believes in what is now called Trumpism amounts to about 35 percent of the population.
This evening, Joe Biden went to Philadelphia and gave a prime-time speech from Independence Hall on the subject of facing the threats to American democracy caused by Trump’s extremist followers. Referring to them as “MAGA Republicans,” Biden told a national audience that they and the man they follow “represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” Biden took care to note that not all Republicans follow Trump’s extremist ideology, “but there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”
“History tells us a blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” Biden said at the close of a week that saw political polls reveal that “threats to democracy” now tops the list of issues cited as important by likely voters. "You can't love your country only when you win," Biden said in a speech on the anniversary of the January 6 assault on the Capitol earlier this year. "You can't obey the law only when it's convenient. You can't be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies."
Biden appears to be taking off the gloves of bipartisanship he has worn throughout his political career and has decided to take on Donald Trump and what he represents head on.
Trump has gone in the exact opposite direction, promising to reward those who have broken the law with pardons if he regains the presidency.
I’d say the sides have been picked and the line has been drawn and the fight is on.
Let’s keep this in mind:
Comparing weather events in 2022 with the past might no longer be reliable or useful. Pakistan is having a once in 1000 year flood. That odd looking statistic was somehow reached even though they only have weather statistics going back to 1961. Floods, heat waves, all kinds of weather events are breaking records. Those records probably don’t mean anything anymore. We are in a new place.
Similarly, predicting how the midterms will break is probably not relevant anymore if you are using the last few decades as a basis of comparison. We are no longer in a society where the Republicans and conservatives and whites are in the majority.
My opinion, fwiw: the Obamas broke the mold, and then the Georgia U.S. Senate race on January 5, 2021, magically miraculously and stunningly turned the Senate blue by replacing 2 white Republican incumbents with two Democratic challengers, a black and a Jew, in a Southern state.
Can you imagine what the odds must’ve been for that to happen?
Since I don’t believe in long shots that improbable, I think it was a breaking point.
I propose that we consider the United States is moving into a new domain, a society where the whites no longer have control like they used to. The people who support a white society are now the Republicans. Donald Trump lost his reelection bid. That’s hard to do. That moment is an inflection point. Anyone who just takes it for granted that, because of history, the midterms are going to go red, is not paying attention to the signs.
I can’t say I’m surprised that the tide seems to be turning in favor of the blue side. I’ve sort of been half expecting it since early this year. So many pundits and journalists are in denial of what is happening right in front of their eyes: The Republican Party is showing every sign of self-destructing. The internecine warfare is at an all time high. Zero unity. Trump has not been on Fox News in four months. Good chance he’s not going back, because the Murdochs and all their noise outlets have turned against him. Now even Biden is going prime time to attack him and his followers.
The time of whites-first and males-first society is ending in the US. That’s what all the signs are saying. And I don’t think there’s a snowballs chance in hell that Trump is even going to run. He just lost last time. And now all the support and all those media cheerleaders are falling away and disappearing by the week.
Adios Loser.
It appears that people are tiring of Trump and his minions attempting to divide the country and foster hatred on each other.
Hatred is such a limiting, defeating, tiring, exhausting emotion-and I don't wonder that people who used to follow Trump are too tired to do so now.
His narcissism does not allow him to admit people are tiring of him, hence he screams all the time.
Biden is right to take on this hateful dangerous man with the ego the size of Manhattan and the ethics or morals of a snake.
We have to appeal to our better angels and work to get back into that lane. This ain't no way to run a country.
We used to be admired-now we're laughed at and mocked for having allowed a bigoted fool with money run us to ground.
I'm tired of Donald Trump, as are millions of people, Democrat and Republican alike.
The sooner he's in federal prison the better-and our country can come back to its' senses.
It's gonna be a long road back but the longest journey begins with a single step.