(I couldn’t think of a better title.)
It has been a long year. Coping with the coronavirus. Coping with people during the pandemic. Coping with myself, trying not to hoard, to trust myself, to trust God, dealing with institutions that didn’t know what they were doing before COVID-19 arrived and almost fell apart because of it.
This is the first year I actually wondered if I would lose my job before the end of the year, the first year I worried that the university might have to turn out its lights. This was a year of first for many Americans, who lost their jobs because of the shutdown and won’t have a new one by the end of the year.
And, then there was the election. And watching the president of the United States deliberately fumble the most important health crisis in the country (maybe the world) since AIDS (maybe?). Deliberately. He looked at the science, looked at the numbers, the projections, and decided to stand back and let COVID-19 run its course while he focused on the economy and the markets and tried to get reelected. The United States, which has the resources to combat and contain COVID-19, which has supposedly some of the best medical facilities and treatments in the world, has had one of the worst responses of any country to the coronavirus BECAUSE Donald Trump chose himself over his country and Democrat, Republicans, and American citizens chose to politicize the virus, to treat it like a political issue instead of a deadly virus.
It should not be surprising to anyone that Donald Trump is willing to undermine the office he holds, his party, the government, the constitution, because he didn’t get what he wants. He put the lives of tens of millions of Americans at risk, and was (and is) willing to lose millions to the coronavirus, to get reelected, to get what he wants, to win. Of course he’s willing to mislead millions about the election process, and try to bully and intimidate elected officials to help him steal the election. To Win!
This is winning at all costs.
Enflame the portion of your voter base who will believe anything you say. Watch them attack anyone who contradicts your conspiracy theory, your lie. If they intimidate some people, make them hide in their homes, hire security guards. Good. That will keep the rest of them in line. If they hurt someone, if someone gets killed? We’ll deal with that when/if the time comes. Ruin political careers, cost people their political support? They should have kept their mouths shut and toed Trump’s line. Lose control of the Senate because Republicans in Georgia believe the game is rugged and their votes are worthless, because Trump convinced them it was? So what? Trump lost, he can’t handle it, he can’t admit it, he’s emotionally immature, and humiliated, and he did all of this, gambled all our lives, to WIN.
And then he didn’t win? And, we are saying he lost because he put the economy before the pandemic, because he didn’t take it seriously.
A man who would knowingly sacrificed potentially millions of American lives to win, would gladly sacrifice his party, or the integrity of the presidency. A man who would send children’s back to school, to get infected, to potentially die, for the economy, so the numbers would be healthy enough to help his reelection campaign, would plot, and poison the election well with fear of voter fraud, so that if he lost, it would sour Joe Biden’s win and delegitimize his presidency, the presidency.
With Trump it’s simple: when he wins, it is because he was supposed to win, he’s the better man; when he loses, it’s because the other person, or the other side, cheated. In other words, Trump never loses and has never lost in his life. He’s the winner or he’s the victim, always.
He is the ultimate alpha male and the ultimate victim. Everyone admires and respects him, an everyone else is the enemy. Anyone who bucks him, who contradicts him, who tells the truth – there is no voter fraud, Joe Biden won the election, Trump lied about the severity of COVID-19 so he could get reelected – is the enemy. You can only be his friend if he has full control over what comes out of your mouth. He’s like the kids in school who wanted to tell you who your friends could be and were ready to dump you if you liked someone they didn’t .
Donald Trump hopes the people who “betrayed him” get their asses beat. He hopes they are chased out of their homes, out of their states. He hopes they are run out of office. He hopes he has ruined their futures in the Republican party. He hopes Fox Media goes out of business. He hopes the Republican party burns to the ground and finally goes out of business, because of him.
He hopes Joe Biden has the worst term in office of any US president. He hopes he carries to the stain of “voter fraud” to his grave and beyond. And he hopes he loses reelection.
Mark Earnest Johnson 