The term Faustian bargain may soon get a new definition. Rather than referring to the famous play, the words, “See Trump: Destruction of GOP” may become the new exemplar in the dictionary for the concept of a situation where the downside eclipses the upside of a given proposition by quite a lot. It’s 48 days until Election Day and Donald Trump is getting understandably rattled. Every day he sees a new poll and it’s trending towards Kamala Harris. My God, just yesterday the famed Selzer poll in Iowa found that Harris had closed the 18-point gap that Joe Biden had to four points. Any closer and it’s statistical tie time. So with that background, this latest social media outburst will not surprise you in the least.
At least it’s not “cease and assist,” like he had a few weeks ago. That’s some improvement. But wait, there’s more. Now he’s planning to sue the post office and challenge mail-in ballots.
Trump has long objected to both mail-in balloting and early voting because it is heavily favored by Democrats, where Republicans tend to vote on election day. After the 2020 election, he lobbied state legislatures around the country to either ban the practice or make it more restrictive. RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump said last March that Trump intends to push for a federal statute to ban all early and mail-in balloting if he is elected president. Now Trump has moved on to his next plan, which is to use a pretext for a lawsuit to toss all or some mail-in ballots.
Last week, the National Association of State Elections Directors sent a letter to Trump’s Postmaster General appointee Louis DeJoy expressing concerns that protocols and regulations that govern election mail are not being followed and training of workers has not been done. The USPS issued a short statement that everything is fine and their concerns are unwarranted. You can read more about that here.
Democrats have long expressed dissatisfaction with DeJoy as Postmaster General. But the bipartisan Board of Governors for the USPS has refused to remove him and President Biden has steadfastly refused to call for his firing. […]
“You know, it’s very interesting. I read the other day that the Post Office is saying how bad it is. The Post Office is critiquing themselves, saying we’re really in bad shape. We can’t deliver the mail … And I’m saying to myself, how can they be taking the vote – they are saying they’re in very bad shape. That they cannot deliver the mail well. And we’re relying on them. I said, you know, we ought to go to court and we ought to bring a lawsuit. Because they’re going to lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully, or maybe just through incompetence … We have the Post Office saying they can’t do the job. So, wouldn’t you have to make a change?”
First of all, the Post Office is not saying they are in bad shape. They have stated that they are fully prepared to handle all election mail efficiently and properly. It was state and local elections officials that expressed concerns. Second, it is clear that Trump is planning to use the incompetence, or intentional sabotage, of his own appointee Louis DeJoy as the pretext to challenge the election results.
But then Trump went on to suggest that the Letter Carriers Union, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris, may tamper with ballots because they are opposing him:
Root: The US Postal Service Union endorsed Kamala Harris. So how do you trust an election … you got mail-in ballots trusted into the hands of people that just endorsed Kamala Harris? How do you know this is going to be a clean election?
Trump: Well, they’ve always been a very Democrat union. That’s the way it is … it’s always been very Democrat. Anytime you have mail-in voting you’re going to have fraud.”
This brings us to the point of how all of this is going to end. Trump will claim that the election was stolen because those are the breadcrumbs he’s been dropping for years now. He can’t participate in an honest contest and win or lose. He can’t lose. If he wins everything is on the level, if he loses there was massive cheating. That’s just how it is with him.
He will do a Roy Cohn on Election Night and declare victory, no matter what happens. Even if Harris wipes the ground with him (which is conceivable, even in this polarized day and age) he’ll claim it was fraud on a massive scale, a plot of James Bondian dimensions.
And yes, I see the obvious question: when he loses in 48 days, will he plan to run again in 2028? We can’t say. The answer to that question is going to involve an analysis of the entire election picture, who won what seats, who is in control of which chamber. And in many ways it’s a moot point.
Because this is the paradigm, the template, the blueprint for how things go in Trump world. He’s a terrible candidate, the worst, but when he loses it’s not for that reason: No, he only appears to lose because of massive cheating. In fact, he’s a universally loved figure, admired worldwide and won by a “landslide” a favorite word.
And this is Trump’s legacy. He will be known throughout the rest of American history as the candidate who lacked the basic adulthood to run a race fair and square and admit when he lost. Trump may never “leave” politics, he will simply fade away into irrelevancy as what’s left of the GOP figures out what to do next.
So, all the military that have to vote absentee and elderly people are all cheating, right? Not to mention that during the pandemic mail in voting was both safe and convenient. He can’t go away soon enough. So far his desperate measures only seem to be hurting him with public opinion, but this issue I’m not sure about the effect.
It will be stollen, like the bread…
Trump wants the same deal ALL fascist dictators have…hold ‘elections’…win EVERY SINGLE TIME…without campaigning.Sweeeeet!!! Oh and imprison those who don’t like it.
if Trump loses, well then he can run in 2028 from the penitentiary.
Oh for f*ck sake shitty britches-you’re losing because A) you showed everyone just how f*cking incompetent you were during your four years of squatting in the oval, B) you continually bitch, whine and moan about your last election, which you lost freely and fairly, people know you lost it and are sick of your bitching about it, and C) you have no new ideas/policies outside of the proj. 1825 nonsense which, rather than exciting people into wanting to vote for you and hillbilly boy, makes even your former followers run away from you. On the plus side, you have basically destroyed the g.o.p. whose policies made it possible for you to put on the ass-hat or racism, bigotry, and misogyny and dance around in it, so there’s that.
In sum “… Trump may never “leave” politics, he will simply fade away into irrelevancy…” True, but his rat cunning and reptilian faculties are befuddled, whilst projecting how he’s “… getting understandably rattled..” by a most excellent and clinical prosecutor, Harris.
Hopefully, he’ll fade away like McCarthy, except he’ll be in prison and forgotten.
It hurts to lose and the hurt is worse when the loss is public and in what for one is an important situation. Next March will be the 50th anniversary of my last high school basketball game. I was talking with Coach recently and as it has a few times in the past the subject came up. After all this time I’ve never gotten over that loss. I never will.
However, we lost and if wasn’t because Herrin cheated or the refs were biased their way (the game was played on their home court) or anything like that. We lost because we didn’t play well enough. Our best player tried to be our entire offense, shooting the ball almost as soon as he crossed the half-court line. Our teamwork broke down. As a result we wound up losing to a team we’d have beaten 99 times out of a hundred. THEY played a very good game. We played a lousy one and that’s why we lost.
And it’s why I’ve never gotten over it and never will. It would have sucked big time to lose to a team of equal talent that played just a bit better, because one can always look at a specific play or two that would have changed the outcome. Such is the nature of competition. But in the end you have to accept that you got beat. Coach agreed with my analysis that had we won that game we’d have gone on to win the Sectional. And then gotten whupped in the Super-Sectional by East St. Louis – one of the top few teams in the state. Two of their starters had great careers at top Division I schools and one played alongside Larry Bird in that famous “Magic vs. Bird” 1979 NCAA title game. So while it would have sucked losing the Super-Sectional I could have been a grown up and not only congratulated those guys but wished them well at the State finals.
Sometimes you lose. And sometimes it isn’t even fair. But frankly it’s best to at least publicly say congratulations to the winner and move on. That’s something almost all of us have had to do in our lives. But it’s something Trump is INCAPABLE of doing. If/when he loses in November rest assured he’ll start running for 2028. The only question will be is if the GOP overall is FINALLY ready to push the flush handle on the fake gold toilet at Mar A Lago.
Well written and 100% true!!! I believe the Republicans will dump Trump after this election. Trump can always start his own party like the Truth Social. His magarats will love it!°
The Johnson County (Kansas) Election Office recently reported that more than a thousand ballots for the Primary Election in August could not be counted because they arrived after the three-day grace period or had no postmark. This information was sent to postal officials who apparently had no comment. We have early in-person and mail-in voting more than two weeks before an election.
Louis De Joy. The man behind the ruination of the Post Office. I still don’t know if my overseas ballot arrived for the 2020 election (via registered mail). From then on, I had to pay express mail and it still took extra long to arrive.
Irrelevancy followed shortly thereafter by incarceration.
I still wear my “ITMFA” T-shirt which was originally “Impeach The Mother F**ker Already”
Then I substituted “Indict” for the first word, followed by “Incarcerate”
Never goes out of fashion.
Interestingly, when I read “CHEATING” in Trump’s post, I immediately read it as “CHEATING ON ME”. Like all dictators, deep down he feels people only vote against him because they’re cheating on him with “unworthy” rivals like an unfaithful wife sleeping around on him; and if as Hitler claimed the people are “feminine” and the rival is a woman they’re making it symbolically worse with the “tribadic vice” by voting for her. There’s always an “insanely jealous husband” undercurrent to dictatorship with the people as the collective battered wife and plebiscites as tests of marital fidelity. He talks about it like a rigged game (it’s supposed to be rigged the “right” way like his beloved pro wrestling and his glorified game show) but emotionally he feels it as the unforgivable sin of adultery.
That’s how I understand it at least.