For 1459 days, we have been continually astounded by the deep trajectory of Trump’s and the complicit GOP’s dive into fabrication, chaos and fascism. Shocked to insensibility by one precipitous nose-dive after another, we thought, over and over, “How low can they possibly go?” Michelle Obama’s panacea—“When they go low, we go high”—ceased to have any meaning. There was not a humanly accessible height which could possibly balance the depths of evil to which Trump and his lackeys dragged the nation in an incredibly short period of time. Even angels would be hard pressed to negate the darkness with which the Republican Party has blanketed our land. After awhile, we became inured to the shock. We could hardly do more than raise an eyebrow and poise fingers over the keyboard with each new plunge into the depths.
Two years in, despite the GOP manipulating the franchise in every state in the union, Democrats took the House. Victory! we thought. Now we can at least slow Trump’s juggernaut. Maybe we can get through the next two years without falling off the planet and into the abyss!
In 2019, Trump flagrantly attempted to blackmail a foreign leader into helping him destroy a political rival. We rubbed our hands together in anticipation. Now! NOW we can get the GOP to see reason. NOW they’ll see he is as despotic as we have insisted since Day 1. How shocked and demoralized were we when, instead, the GOP closed ranks and gave Dear Leader a pass! Mere days later, we plunged into the madness of the pandemic and Trump’s desperate reelection bid. The state of our union devolved quickly into a race to the bottom, a new bottom every day, every hour.
Depressed, punch-drunk and reeling backward, we looked for the sky, the light of which seemed further and further away every day. We the People—betrayed by our elected “representatives” and left to fend for ourselves, leaderless, ravaged by a killer virus—fell back in despair. And landed on the only power we had left in our own hands. Our votes.
Our votes—which the Republican Party had been working feverishly to take away for decades. Passing oppressive voter ID laws, gerrymandering the hell out of Congressional districts to give every advantage to GOP candidates, closing polling places, limiting or eliminating absentee voting, the GOP had a deep bag of tricks they would use to keep large swathes of voters not slavishly chained to voting Republican OUT of voting booths.
Then Providence intervened. As it turned out, the pandemic offered the perfect work-around to most GOP voter suppression techniques. People demanded to take advantage of absentee voting and vote-by-mail in record numbers. And in some cases, even states with Republican state houses capitulated to those demands. No responsible state leadership would force constituents to literally risk their lives standing in long lines to cast their votes in the general election. Except the ones that did.
But we were fed up. We had had WAY more than enough of Trump and his antics. Those who weren’t able to take advantage of vote by mail DID risk their lives. They DID stand in long lines to cast the votes that, by god, the GOP was NOT going to take away from them. All the old tricks in the GOP bag couldn’t stop almost 82 million American voters from vehemently rejecting Donald J. Trump and all he stood for. We won. Trump lost. Hallelujah!
Or…not. Because necessity is the mother of invention, the fascist Trump and his complicit Party had added one more trick to their bag. And it was a doozy. The rocket-launched grenade of voter suppression. One that, if you’d asked any person on the street five years ago, they’d have unequivocally stated that there was no way in hell this would happen in the United States of America.
Trump and his cabal were so determined that he would serve another term that it became utterly irrelevant that he lost the election. If the people didn’t vote the way they wanted, they would simply declare that any vote not for Trump was fraudulent. Using the classic “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”—a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels—the Trump campaign simply repeated, over and over , as loud and as often as they possibly could, that it only appeared that Trump had lost because there was massive voter fraud. Not content to simply cast doubt on the election process (which wasn’t immediately having the effect they desired) the party line was then amplified to the point where they declared that Trump had actually won in a landslide! 81 million people could not possibly have voted for the other guy! It was obvious to anybody that massive voter fraud was involved.
And that was it, really. That was their case. That was their evidence. Surely that many people could not possibly have voted for Biden. They dragged this “evidence” into courts all over the country, chiefly in battleground states where the end result had not gone their way. So emboldened were they by the lies and the dirty dealings and the outrageous destruction of legal norms they had been allowed to get away with for 4 years, they walked into courtrooms with, basically, nothing. The stuff they presented to the courts didn’t have to be true or valid. It just had to be written down and presented by GOP lawyers, and that somehow gave it enough gravitas to be considered in a court of law.
Well, surprise! The courts weren’t having it. Despite the last-minute flurry of GOP court-packing to which Mitch McConnell had applied all the resources of “his” United States Senate, there weren’t enough Trump-appointed judges to roll over and bestow legitimacy on GOP lawyers’ filings of meaningless, baseless legal gibberish. In fact, there weren’t any. None. No judge would lend credence to Trump’s bags of crap. Even Trump’s toady Attorney General walked away from this attempted craven manipulation of America’s judicial system.
The End, right? Roll credits. The serial attack on American’s voting rights should have stopped, right there. But we all know it didn’t. GOP legislators took up the cause—a cause they had no legal or Constitutional power to affect in any way. They grabbed the “Stop the Steal” banner and led Trump’s troops straight up into the Capitol Building on January 6, where they attempted to take the election through violence and intimidation. They reached deep into their bag of tricks, to the very bottom, where crouched the demon to whom they had sold their souls, and wrestled from its craw the final, desperate tool of voter suppression. A tool… no, a weapon we never, ever thought to see unleashed in our nation’s capitol in our lifetimes. Insurrection. Coup d’etat. Take, by force, what they couldn’t lawfully win.
But they failed.
Today, because of the actions of a lawless, despotic POTUS, his complicit party and his violent, deluded minions, our nation’s capitol looks like a war zone. Tomorrow, surrounded by a protective shield of fences, barbed wire, bullet-proof glass and armed bodies, our new President will be handed the keys to the kingdom. A tarnished, damaged, divided kingdom. Why would anyone want to take those keys, to be responsible for trying to repair the damage, heal the rape and pillage of our government, of our land; to find some way to save our national soul and resume our place as that “city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan spoke of, even as he was laying the groundwork for its destruction.
Who would sign up for that? Joe Biden wants it. He’ll take it on, as the 46th President of the United States. And Kamala Harris has committed to stand at his side as our first woman vice-president. History will be made tomorrow; some glorious, some...not so much. But none, we pray, shocking or horrific.
May the Universe protect these two good people; guide them, and lead them—and us—back toward the light.
As much as we'd like to forget the last four years we'd better damn remember how close we came. Squeaked through supported by men and women who remained true to their oaths, in most cases put the law ahead of politics at least this time.
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