Trump admits that he wants to suppress the vote!

The hardest part of the heartbreak of being a Cubs fan in 1969 wasn't the Cubs losing. It was watching them lose creatively while reminding myself over and over that they were, in fact, the most talented team in the National League and perhaps in MLB, and that it would be ok.

And then, another routine ground ball went through Don Kessinger's legs...

The Trump Administration has been a similar kind of a trainwreck.  I had no compunctions about voting for Evan McMullin four years ago despite my disdain for Hillary Clinton because I believed (correctly, it seems) that 2016, like 1976, was going to be a "poison pill" election in which the winning candidate would inevitably be defeated four years later.  That would especially be true, I thought, in the unlikely event that Trump won, because unlike a plurality of Republican primary voters (and, it seems, a majority of Republicans since then), I'd actually paid attention to the guy.

I knew that Mr. Trump was a crackpot conspiracy theorist who was as ignorant as a post about history, the Constitution, economics, and pretty much any other subject a president has to know at least something about, but who thought that he had all the answers and would inevitably refuse to listen to those who actually did know about those things. I knew that he was a bad businessman who, despite the hype, had run literally every company he ever ran into the ground, who would be wealthier today if he had simply invested the inheritance he got from his father in the stock market, and who had a record of catastrophically bad ethics which, if it continued in the White House, would be impossible to conceal. I knew (as surely anyone who watched the Republican debates in 2016 also must have known)  that he is incoherent and frankly not very bright.

The guy was going to be such a huge and obvious trainwreck that the only question was whether he would be voted out of office in 2020 or impeached and removed from office before that, or even removed under the 25th Amendment for incapacity. The man was and is a clown, whose single talent is a gift for self-promotion.

Well,  I was right. But I didn't count either on his base being so deeply in denial or Republicans generally being so partisan that they would refuse to acknowledge these things once they became patently obvious. Yet that is precisely what has happened. The guy just keeps doing and saying catastrophically dumb things that would have been disastrous for literally any other political figure in my lifetime- and getting a pass for it from a third of the electorate!

I imagine this is how Cassandra from Greek mythology- who was given the gift of prophecy, but with the catch that nobody would ever believe her- must have felt. Every single fear I had about Donald Trump has been vindicated and in spades. I have learned, though, that the Republican Party is a party of sycophants and bootlickers with neither principles nor backbone and that I'm better off out of it.

But what can you do when the guy comes right out and says blatantly stupid, dangerous, or self-incriminating things- and nobody but his opponents is even willing to acknowledge it? Intervenous Clorox, anybody?

Well, he's done it again. In the midst of a pandemic in which his own negligence and denial have killed tens of thousands of Americans who didn't need to die, he complains that allowing universal voting by mail would be an easy way for the Democrats to steal the election. He makes no effort to explain how that would even be physically possible and doesn't even address the fact that mail-in ballots have been used by many jurisdictions for years with absolutely no evidence of foul play. Some people are going to very reasonably refuse to vote in person because they will be afraid of the virus, and most of the people who stay home for that reason will be likely Biden voters. Even now, many Trump supporters continue in a state of denial that COVID-19 is even a significant problem.

Well, now Mr. Trump has come flat out and said this about the sudden scaling back of the postal system at a suspiciously convenient point on the election cycle:

They want $25 billion for the post office, Now, they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. Now in the meantime, they aren't getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting, because they're not equipped to have it. Now, if we don't make a deal that means they don't get the money. That means they can't have universal mail-in voting.

Got that?

POTUS pretty much comes out and says that he's blocking the money in order to suppress the vote. Yet he claims that it's the Democrats who are trying to rig the election.

And the hell of it is, his rapidly-dwindling base will agree with him about both things.