Did you ever wake from a dream and begin to wonder if your fleeting memory of it was something that really happened or just a product of brain sorting information. That happened this morning at 4:00 a.m. when I was convinced for a few minutes that I had sometime rearranged the shelves at my local Kroger to put different items on a shelf, sorted by color. Like so many bookshelves in Zoom backgrounds lately where people store their books by jacket color. (I am certain this habit is on a checklist for psychotic disorder by the way). That feeling of is this real or is this just my brain has been a dominate feeling for the last four years and has increased in the last few weeks. All of that is the result of a President who appears to not understand the job, the Constitution or even reality. The stress is real and at times frightening.
A good example is the fact that reports suggest that the President of the United States, having lost reelection, help a meeting with a conspiracy theorist lawyer and a former general who admitted to lying about illegal contacts with a foreign government. The agenda, how can the President use the US military to overturn his recent election loss. Basically the Commander-in-Chief was plotting a military coup in the Oval Office. How this isn't a 24/7 story is amazing but the same President is absent without leave on so many other big stories. Covid-19 is spreading faster than ever, we have a vaccine so we are looking for hope, the Republicans in Congress continue to hold up a response to the growing and serious economic collapse due to the pandemic, and it looks like Russia has accomplished the largest cyber-attack on our country ever. But part of the reason that it is not dominating the Sunday morning shows is, in part, that we have all grown numb to Trump being Trump. But that is a real problem.
President Trump's inability to accept the election results is damaging to our democracy. (yes we are a democracy as well as a republic) Our antiquated way of electing the chief executive has led to his ability to make tons of challenges to the votes and he continues. He has lost at every level of the judiciary, but continues because there are so many milestones. First it was certification of the vote, done. Then the seating of Electors from each state, done. The meeting of the Electors in each state, done. Now it goes to Congress, on January 6th they will vote to accept the Electors. There is a process to object is at least one person in each chamber of Congress objects to any slate of electors, but there is zero chance that will change anything. Each chamber as a whole would have to vote for the objection. But before that it would have to be called to question with reasons for the objection. When that milestone is achieved I can't think of anything that could put up a road block to Biden moving into the White House.
But we need to look at what the President's recent meeting to ask how he could use the military to stay in power. Go to any election post on social media and you will see dozens of comments of people calling for this. One social media platform, Parler, a right wing response to Twitter, has been litter with people calling for armed people in the streets to stop Biden from taking office. They continue to attack anyone who even suggests that Biden one the election. Even long-time Trump supporters who are coming back to reality get attacked. Fox News was replaced for a minute by Newsmax as the source of information. Newsmax is a conspiracy driven producer of what they call news, but even them are being tossed aside because they acknowledged the the Electoral College results. But what is worse is that some have acted on the delusion promoted by the President that had a former police officer holding a delivery man at gun point thinking he was bringing fake ballots.
Violence should never be the answer to a political dispute. But we have already seen that on the part of some on the right as a group want to kidnap and kill the Governor of Michigan. We see it now with even members of Congress calling for it. We cannot operate like this and just chalk it up to Trump being Trump. Our Republic is fragile when we allow bad actors to have leadership positions and the Republican party has been cultivating people who are bad actors for decades now. Will some of those elected officials who seem to not have a concern about the country but about their own power. They need to be stopped.
There is no chance that the President will remain in office after January 20,2021. But in the mean time he can cause many problems for the incoming administration and the country as a whole. I hope the party will finally put country over party and power. If not we must remember that their power comes from us. We are the ultimate bosses of these people who represent us. Let's make sure anyone who tries to subvert democracy never lives that down.
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