President-Reject Trump's Dangerous Legacy

U.S. voters are fearful, angry but hopeful about country post-election | Pew Research Center

President-reject Trump's legacy is to leave almost two-thirds of Americans feeling fearful about the future of the country, as the coronavirus pandemic grips the country like no other, and the narcissistic fool is too proud to admit defeat and allow the handover to President-elect Biden to proceed as smoothly as it should if continuity is to be maintained and Biden is to get to grips with the major problems as quickly as he needs to.

This is the finding of a Pew Research survey published a few days ago.

But the survey also showed how a majority of people now feel more hopeful following Biden's election than felt hopeful during Trump's disastrous stint in office but not in charge, rising to 56% from 42% under Trump.

So we now have the paradox of a majority of Americans still feeling fearful, but more hopeful about the future of the nation.

The difference between Trump voters and Biden voters in this change is striking, with many Trump voters seeming to have believed Trump's and the evangelical extreme Christian right's frankly paranoid and absurd warnings about an America under a Democrat president. Many more Trump voters are now more fearful and less hopeful. Trump's legacy, apart from the death and destruction caused by his inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic, is a deeply divided, heavily-armed, tribal America, with one half living in mortal fear of the other half - exactly the conditions for an extremist grab for power such as we saw in Europe in the first half of the 20^th century which took us two generations and tens of millions of deaths to rectify.

America is now polarized by lurid conspiracy theories about Communist take-overs and a 'Deep State' run by baby-eating Satanic paedophiles in the Democrat Party, the coronavirus being a Chinese-run / Bill Gates / Jewish global bankers plot to prevent Christians going to church and being forced to wear face-masks to prevent them breathing properly, and of course the usual paranoid anti-vaxxer nonsense about monkey and gay genes, nanobots and vaccines made from aborted babies and even a gene to make you stop believing in God!

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities.

Voltaire.

So, it is hardly surprising that people who believe Donald Trump (DONALD TRUMP!) is a messiah and saviour sent by God as some sort of second coming, will also believe the consiracy theories being promulgated by political extremists of the white supremacist far right supported by evangelical Christian talibangelists with a far right political agenda, and the unsubstantiated stories of 'masses of evidence' of voter fraud on an organised and systematic scale, even in Republican-run states and electoral districts, apparently.

All we need now is the claim that the complete absence of any evidence of a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud is proof of the conspiracy, because someone has hidden the evidence!

However, the extent to which Trump's paranoid lies and unsubstantiated claims about evidence of 'massive electoral fraud' stealing the victory from him that he feels he deserved despite his inept performance, has penetrated Americans, especially the minority who voted for him, can be seen in the answers to questions about satisfaction with the electoral process and counting of the votes.

The confidence in October that the counting would be accurate, of those Trump voters who reported voting in person either before Nov 3^rd or on polling day, which was almost equally matched by the confidence of those who voted for Biden (92% and 90% respectively) fell to 63% for Trump voters after the election but rose to 98% for Biden voters. Strangely, while more Trump voters believed the count would be accurate than Biden voters in October, they appear to have changed their mind dramatically when their candidate lost. Similar changes in opinion were seen in those who voted by absentee or mail-in votes.

Clearly, very many voters find it as hard to believe they backed the loser, as does the loser that he lost.

The late surge in votes for Biden which was seen as the mail-in and absentee votes were counted, which so incensed and panicked Trump and his supporters who saw their entitled victory slipping away as the day went on and so started bleating forlornly to "Stop the Count!", is explained by the differential voting methods of Trump's and Biden's supporters respectively. While very many Biden voters took Biden's advice and avoided voting in person because of the risk of catching the coronavirus, Trump voters clearly followed Trump's lead of ignoring and minimising the dangers, despite the evidence, and voting in person. This can be readily seen in the result of the survey.

Having spent considerable energy creating this differential, it is both a measure of the credulity of Trump's supporters and their willingness to accept the easy, but demonstrably bad advice he was giving them, and astonishing that Trump professes incredulity at what he himself achieved by it. It reflects poorly on Trump's supporters that they, like Trump, profess incredulity at this differential when they followed Trump's instructions so willingly and easily. I suppose no-one likes to admit they fell for a blatant lie.

These last two charts show the extent to which the propaganda tactics of the Trump camp have persuaded people that there was fraud in places where they personally weren't present to witness it. The first is the opinions of voters about the administration of the vote overall across all states and electoral districts; the second is of the same opinion of the administration of it in their local community.

It's much easier to believe someone else, somewhere else was up to no good because someone says so, than to accept what you saw yourself to be a well-run, fair and accurate poll was being manipulated somehow. Although this result shows that a majority of Americans' believe that the poll was conducted fairly and without fraud in their area, based on their own experience, nevertheless, a substantial proportion of them don't believe the evidence of other witnesses in other areas who also saw no problem with the conduct of the ballot. Instead, they prefer to believe the sour-grapes whining of those who have a vested interest in casting doubt on the process by alleging widespread and organised electoral fraud.

The pdf below contains the full data used in this survey report:


It is clear from this report that President-reject Donald Trump, because of his own narcissism and ineptitude and in casual alliance with the extreme right, both in its old, pre-civil rights, white supremacist form, and the white Talibangelical 'Christians' looking to create their own theocracy, who had always tended to lean to the extreme right, has left a deeply divided America, both racially and culturally between the more liberal, tolerant, urbanised north and the rural south.

He has succeeded in setting back the clock on civil rights, on religious tolerance and plurality, on ethnic diversity and on progress towards full civil rights for all. And he has stuffed the Supreme Court with his own odious stooges - political interference with the judiciary that will take a generation to rectify. This is a long-lasting legacy, opening up the wounds that have been festering below the surface ever since the civil war. And all to serve his own ego and his right white privileged male feeling of superior entitlement and ownership of the country and entitlement to govern it. But like other narcissistic despots, having obtained the power he craved, he had no idea at all how to use it and what to do with it. His sole ambition was to undo the previous achievements of President Barak Obama, whom he saw as an illegitimate president on account of being the 'wrong' colour and from the 'wrong' cultural background with the upstart effrontery to think he could ever be president in Donald Trump's, white-run America.

President-reject Trump came to power promising to 'drain the swamp' and promptly turned it into a stinking cesspit of corruption and deception, believing himself and his administration to be above the law and accountable only to themselves. It was like giving a spoilt adolescent with learning difficulties a Twitter account and telling him he now runs America from his bedroom. Consequently, he has spent the last four years blaming others and looking for scapegoats for his own failures, and has now paid the price for his incompetence at the ballot box. The question American's now need to ask themselves is, are they going to allow him to pull America down with him because he can't accept their collective verdict on his clown-like, bumbling performance, or are they going to build back better with Biden? There is much to do.

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