The last four years with Donald Trump at the helm have been chaotic, to say the least. Who would have imagined it could get worse?
Yet, since the Nov. 3 presidential election, the level of dysfunction in Washington has reached epic proportions. The mercurial behavior of this lame-duck president is not only dangerous to the safety and security of America’s well-being, it may even damage the sanctity of the election process itself.
For the months leading up to Election Day, every major poll had President Trump losing the popular vote by a large margin. Oddsmakers had President-elect Biden with a roughly 75 percent chance to win the election since early October, right up until the polls closed.
To counter this, Trump repeatedly declared the election was going to be “fraudulent” and “stolen from him.”
Donald Trump has a long history of calling elections a scam. In 2012, right after former President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney to win a second term, Trump declared, “fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice,” because “the world is laughing at us.”
This typical Trump quote in mid-September (one of several hundred), tried to delegitimize the election process: “Unsolicited Ballots are uncontrollable, totally open to ELECTION INTERFERENCE by foreign countries, and will lead to massive chaos and confusion!”
Trump knew he was going to lose, and his larger than life-size ego would never let him accept defeat. His defense tactic was to call for his supporters to only vote in person, and not by mail. Trump hoped he’d have a slim margin of victory on Election Day, before the mail-in and absentee ballots were counted and be able to declare victory immediately. And so, he put this foolish approach into play, while trying to stop the vote count.
As the ballot tally continued in the weeks after the election, Trump’s slim margin of defeat grew into a crushing loss. President-elect Biden now leads by almost 7 million votes, and his 306 electoral votes are the same Trump received in 2016, which, you may remember, he declared a landslide, even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million.
Yet Donald Trump refuses to give up and won’t admit he’s lost. How could he, when he’s mocked so many people as “losers?”
His ego will never be able to reconcile the fact that he is the official “loser” of this election. As a result, he will most likely never congratulate his opponent and be gracious in defeat. So how does this all end?
The probable scenario is Trump doesn’t declare defeat, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in some way, does it for him. The President will then most likely concoct some additional conspiracy theories, and immediately go into campaign mode for 2024. Then his progeny will attempt a Congressional run for office and lose badly because they are all vapid con men like their father.
But here’s a possible worst-case scenario: something terrible could happen to America before Jan. 20, because there is a vacuum of power and sensible leadership coming out of Washington.
Far-fetched but not improbable occurrences are the military getting involved in the transition of power, or an attack on America because we are vulnerable (possibly cyber-related). Or maybe there will be an unpredictable Black Swan event, with Trump declaring he will put off the transition until the crisis abates.
Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to rage out of control, because Trump maintains it’s a state problem and not a federal one. Regardless, we are in perilous times until Joe Biden is sworn in.
This historic uncertainty, chaos, lying, manipulation, and onslaught of social media misinformation is destabilizing to the United States of America.
Sadly, President DJT is the champion of it. Let’s all hope we wake up incident free from this national nightmare on Jan. 20.
