2020 really WILL be the most important election of our lifetime
I continue to be confident that the American people will treat our first orange president like a pumpkin and toss him out in early November. We have never had a more divisive president, and that says a lot. The economy is going great guns, but it's hard to make a coherent case that Mr. Trump has any right to claim responsibility for it. On the other hand, the evidence continues to accumulate that his retro affection for tariffs and trade wars have hurt the economy rather than helped it.
The world's leaders- and the world generally- are literally laughing at him behind his back- and no, the video of NATO's leaders doing so at the recent NATO summit was hardly the first time it had happened. When the world laughs at Donald Trump, it laughs at America. Oddly, his vocally patriotic supporters seem oblivious to the fact that the nation they claim to love has become the world's laughingstock. And they seem oblivious to Mr. Trump's pronounced preference for dictators and authoritarian governments over democracies, and what seems a clear pattern of favoring the interests of a hostile foreign nation over those of the country he is supposed to be leading.
He's destroyed our alliances and his impulsive, reckless approach to decision-making has been prevented from leading us to disaster only by the intervention of a rapidly-diminishing cadre of grownups who actually knew what they were doing and have managed to contain him. What a second term without that buffer of competent subordinates to come between our loose cannon of a president and disaster might look like doesn't bear thinking about.
And Donald Fredovich is, after all, the first president in history never to have cracked 50% in Gallup's approval polls. Something like a third of the country remains oblivious to all this, insulated from reality by the same bubble of delusional, wishful thinking in which the president himself lives. But I find it difficult to believe that the voters won't set things at least somewhat right again next November.
On the other hand, I found it difficult to believe that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, and then that the least stable and most unfit presidential nominee in our history could have been elected in 2016, but it happened. And despite his consistently disastrous poll numbers (in the face of which his delusional supporters not only continue to insist that the American people are behind him,
the man remains viable in the battleground states and another geographical fluke might very well make him the first president to serve two terms after being rejected twice by the nation's voters.
Threading the needle to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote won't be easy. But it could happen. If a man like Trump could win the White House even once, anything can happen. Now that he's been impeached (an inevitability, Trump being Trump, which I predicted from the night he was elected), he will be acquitted in an openly rigged trial by an openly and frankly biased jury of senators. No particular effort will be made to conceal the farcical character of the coming trial; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell openly states that the jury is coordinating the conduct of the trial with the defense. And I can't emphasize enough my utter confidence that a majority of the American people will reject Donald Trump in 2020 just as it did in 2016.
But will it "take" this time? Other factors have kept the economy humming right along (and yes, the president's reductions in Federal regulation doubtless helped a little) despite Mr. Trump's insistence on pursuing the historically discredited path of trade wars and tariffs. And we continue to face an odd set of circumstances in which a president who is far from being competitive among the American people generally remains very much so in a combination of states sufficient to give him a majority in the Electoral College anyway.
Nor, given the high bar the Constitution sets for its own amendment, is the Electoral College apt to be scrapped any time soon despite its current status as a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of our presidential elections. The consequences of a second Trump term are likely to be dire, and most of us know that. Yet although I can't help but see it as unlikely, the chances of our having to endure one are large enough to be frightening.
For an obviously unfit man to be elected twice despite being rejected twice by the voters in itself would make it clear that our system has broken down. But I would go a step further. Donald Trump has been a lousy enough president and is so obviously in so far over his head that if enough Americans vote for him to allow him to achieve even a second victory in the Electoral College, having a constitutional anachronism like the Electoral College frustrate the popular will two elections in a row might well be the least of our problems.
If Donald Fredovich can muster even enough votes to pull that trick off a second time, there will be room for serious questions to be raised about whether a fifth of our way through the Twenty-First Century the American people are still capable of self-government. Not, of course, that many of us on the left as well as on the Trumpist right would see that as necessarily a problem.
We hear every four years, like clockwork, that the upcoming election will be the most important in our lifetimes. Well, this time, it really will be. It will be a test of whether a minority of extremists, bigots, authoritarians, and tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorists can exploit a weakness in the Constitution to hijack the American government not just once, but twice- and perhaps do it again and again in the future.
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