When pundits start talking about Trump’s chances in 2020, this is the kind of thing that runs through my mind. He won’t be running in 2020, I can say that pretty confidently. What I can’t say is whether there will be a United States that we recognize by then if things aren’t done to change the direction we are currently heading in.
Postscript
My belief that facts long-ignored would win out in the political arena proved to be ill-founded just like my fear that the United States would not survive the Trump presidency. Mercifully Trump lost in 2020 anyway. My in-law wanted to bet me a thousand dollars that my predictions were wrong, and the predictions were wrong, but their predictions were also wrong. As wrong as their understanding of who or what the Trump presidency was and his chances of staying in office beyond his fluke of a first term.
That was the kind of conversation that was in my mind when I wrote:
…the kind of mindless insistence that their team was always right no matter the situation and that liberals were clueless whiners who needed to figure out how to lose properly on exhibit in that almost forgotten Facebook thread was exactly the thing that motivated me to write about how Hillary wasn’t the problem in the first place. What I should have recognized and been writing about at the time was the hopelessness of convincing people who knew that Hillary and liberals were the problem of anything at all.
President Trump is making it so people can work and better themselves and get off the coattails of the government. I do not understand how anybody could think putting people back to work is a bad thing. Obama on the other hand closed down factories and put millions of people out of work and on food stamps.
An In-Law
None of them know Donald Trump. They demonstrably still don’t know what he is. While I didn’t do better than the average human at predicting the future, I stand by my assessment of Trump’s business practices, which have been vindicated and will be further vindicated as time moves on. His crimes were many before he entered the White House and his crimes in the White House dwarf the crimes of any other president in history. His supporters still don’t know these facts even though they are readily available to anyone who looks for them.
These same wilfully ignorant people would of course try to storm the capitol and lynch their Vice President for attempting to certify the existence of objective reality by admitting that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. They don’t recognize any reality that doesn’t conform to their preconceived notions of the proper order of the world around them. All you have to do is believe hard enough and what you want comes true.
Whether the in-laws would consider the current political situation a loss or a win for them or myself would be hard to determine, especially since we aren’t speaking anymore.
Part of that conversation on Facebook was turned into:
I have cribbed some of the other text from that lengthy and wide-ranging comment thread for other articles that I’m still working on. Still working on, two years later.
By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.
The First White President by Ta-Nehisi Coates
