Donald Trump has a very good chance of being our next president. I wrote these same words in August 2016. I’m writing them again in August 2020.
The polls don’t matter. Biden’s 2020 lead is the same as Hillary’s in 2016. Swing states are still extremely close.
Trump has done a great job of riling up his base, using manipulative tricks, exaggerations and lies to try to scare the US into electing him again. He is the Troll in Chief, and it’s working. Again.
His Republican enablers all know that Trump is breaking norms (and the law), taking more personal power and imperiling our democracy.
Yet, they seem to believe that it’s better for them to enable Trump’s consolidation of personal power than to allow the Democrats to gain power, or stand up to Trump, to whatever the cost to the country. To help with this rationalization, they’ve also convinced themselves that two moderates like Biden and Harris are actually to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s not a great candidate. He’s ancient. Uninspiring. I’m not confident a Biden Administration won’t keep telling Kansas to go F Itself, or pander to the far left of the Democratic party. But he’s a moderate. Pragmatic. And he’ll bring logic, science and decency back to the White House. I’m not confident that a Biden Administration will actually solve our problems. But I know for sure Trump and the Republicans will not.
They have proven time and again that they’re for cynical use of social issues to rile up the base, while passing tax cuts for the wealthy and laws that concentrate more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people, making life harder for a higher percentage of people every year. Trump policies will continue to accelerate job losses, as business owners use Covid as an excuse to replace workers with technology. They didn’t drain the swamp. They made the swamp even bigger.
Trump’s has done and will do anything he can to secure validation and personal power. Including empowering the worst impulses in our society: racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, personal attacks, and a “me first, fuck the rest” attitude.
Trump is not the root of the problem. He’s the logical conclusion of where the Republican Party’s scorched earth tactics of the past 50 years have led us. And the Democratic party abandoning working people and selling out to Wall Street and Big Tech.
People in the US believe we have a divine right to progress. That each generation will be better than the last. But history shows us that this is not true. When the elites only look out for themselves and decouple from society, democracy dies.
My friends who are voting for Trump because of lower taxes and lower regulation are voting what they believe is their self interest. They think they’ll do better under Trump. In the short time, they might.
But in the long term, we will all suffer if we take Republicanism and Trumpism to its end game. If we keep worshiping shareholder value with little regard for the society we actually live in, being wealthy in the US will look more like being wealthy in some parts of Latin America, where inequality is so great that wealthy people sometimes have to fear for their safety and can’t do things that wealthy people in the US take for granted today.
Wealthy Trump voters need to ask themselves: Do you really want to live in a country where you have more money, but you can’t spend time doing the things that make the United States great?
The US is still the best place in the world if you are smart, motivated and lucky. But it’s nowhere near the best in the world for the average person. And it’s been getting worse since the 1970s.
We don’t have a God-given right to a high growth economy, a safe place to live and a functioning democracy. We ALL have to work for it. US elites need to stop rent seeking. They need to realized that that they do have skin in the game, even if they think they don’t. We need a society that works for all of us.
Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning. Another four years of Trump will only make it much worse. We’ll have less of a chance to fix things. If you think can’t get worse than now, I’m here to tell you it can. We must do everything we can to defeat Trump.