My Nation, Alas!

The very worst thing about this, Americans of all kinds, we let Trump win! I hate when we can't stop assholes from profiting by their bad behavior. 

 The Betrayal of Hope -   This was supposed to be the Beginning of the End of Trumpism.  It still is, in a way, but the end is not as I visualized, the public's awakening to the corruption at the heart of it and their rejection of him.  I would say this is the end of the Obama-Biden-Harris Era, which overlaps with the newly-recognized Era of Dickhead.  Republican obstructionism throughout limited the gains a true Democratic majority coalition could get for the American people and for the future of humanity.  That coalition is breaking down now.

The next couple of years will see how much of those limited improvements will be wiped out by the return of the monstrous extremists to full Federal power. Then, after that, the inevitable Republican-driven economic collapse (I see it as renewed inflation combined with job scarcity driven by export dropoffs). The nation will then (2026?  more likely 2028) be ripe for the Great Restoration, and Trump's own rapid fade from center-stage as among the lamest of ducks. 

My speculative theory was that Putin and Trump, in their numerous private, unrecorded calls, made a high-stakes wager:  the proposition was that Trump could basically campaign with nothing but tariffs, xenophobia, and invective, and win the election.  If he wins, the two of them split up the resulting future grift in some specified way (Putin gets X% of the future Trump Moscow?); if he'd lost Putin gives him a safe exile spot (Baku).  Putin wins, either way, as confidence in American democratic elections will be undermined.  So, congratulations to them on their winning bet.

Justice Unserved - To put it in baseball terms, our systems for Presidential accountability batted one-for-six, .167, against Trump. 

 The first impeachment was, in effect, a "waste pitch", it never had a chance, Democrats were just showing they were willing to impeach.  (We have since seen that the House can, in effect, impeach a ham sandwich, as the Republican House just did with HHS Secretary Mayorkas.) . The second impeachment, though, was the real chance to kill off the threat of Trump, and most Republican Senators failed to show, many of them with miserable excuses.  Foul ball. Any claims of acquittal on that one ring hollow, though technically correct. McConnell said it should be left to the prosecutors.  So they did.  (The part about Trump's being out of office for the Senate trial portion was completely bogus, and recognized as such.)

We got a second strike with the NY state trial and conviction, though it did not produce an out.  Two good things about that one:  1) As it is in NY state, which is unlikely to have a Republican governor willing to eliminate the conviction anytime soon, history will record the felony (sentenced to probation, never completed).  Historians do notice things like that.  2)  It will record his legal indiscretion as tax fraud. It is entirely appropriate that he, personally, be convicted of fraud (not just his charities, or his organization, or his luckless subservient victims).  It is certainly one prominent aspect of his criminal persona, fraud. 

The big one, though, was his contempt for the constitution and for the rule of law overriding his power. The overt evidence of it was the indictment for the same incitement to insurrection (Jan. 6) that the second impeachment's Senate punted (to mix sports metaphors), though there was a lot of evidence of covert acts for the same purpose uncovered through investigations.  Not all of it could be used, ruled the Trumpist Supreme Court, in effect, but some of it could be.  There was a real chance for a conviction, if it were to happen. 

Now, it won't.  I'd still like to see Jack Smith, who has a very smart legal mind, come up with a way that his case be frozen in ice for four years, to be defrosted later.  To put it somewhere Trump can't have it dismissed without recourse, and without the statute of limitations expiring.  If that were so, and Trump alive, he'd still be guilty, the public would undoubtedly hate him and all his former allies would already have deserted him.  The record should show, regardless of whether he serves a day in prison, that he did indeed conspire to obstruct a Federal proceeding and defraud the American public. 

As for the other two cases, they won't come to trial, either, now, if they ever would have without the election result.  Trump will get a very stern letter about his abuse of documents, and the Georgia case against him will go into a file cabinet while the rest of the case may eventually go on without him.

We Become the World's Untreated Sewer Hole - I put my thoughts about the pollution the US will be spewing upon the rest of the world above the domestic effects of this electoral result. Culturally, there will be the usual dreck we export, though some of it has lost its bite.  Technology-wise, we will see whether there will seen to be risk trusting American devices.  Trash-wise, we will go from being the "world's garbage dump" to a serious brain-drain, and I doubt anyone will take our barges of unrecycled recyclables. 

In the midst of reduced exports (and a stubbornly resistant negative trade balance, which will irk Trump incessantly), our tariffs will give Trump a chance to play wheeler-dealer with other countries, and you know what kind of edge he will seek.  One he can capitalize upon. 

This will apply in particular to his management of oil exports and the associated grift.  We will do our best in the next four years to contribute to climate warming, while sponsoring nothing new domestically to reduce our footprint upon the air, the land, and the waters. 

We Need Resistance at the State Level - By which, I mean also at the local level.  We can expect nothing new that is not negative from the Federal government over the coming years.  If we are resolute, we can minimize the impact in the places we live of the Trump Administration.  The first two years will be critical:  Trump will have one shot to get fulfillment of promises about deportations, Justice department purges, oil leases, and tax code revisions going.  He will get appropriations for some of it, right away in a budget reconciliation bill, which just needs a bare Senate majority.   He will seek a change in the healthcare regime to replace the ACA; if he has the votes to repeal it, he likely will not have the support for something to replace it. 

The damage from some of these policies can be reduced by attentive local resistance.  Deportees can be protected in some cases; oil drills and pipelines can be tied up by protests and legal challenges. In particular, states may be able to make provisions to reduce the harm coming to our healthcare.  There are Democratic governors with strong political positions (e.g. Newsom, Pritzker, Moore) who can demonstrate that kind of positive leadership  and thereby raise their own prospects for what will be a wide-open 2028 contest.

Democracy, Liberty, and Freedom: I Need a Break from This

I am highly skeptical of our claims to have democratic elections because of all the distortions in our system (Electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts, the unrepresentative Senate).  This one seems to have given a clear majority to Trump (final popular vote will be about 50-48, a 3-point shift to him and the same away from Biden to Harris, on similar total vote), and that's what really bothers me.  This is what our voters freely chose; my conclusion is that we do have a democracy but we have a failing polity.  The cost of our elections has gone way up, and the quality of the result way down.   The level of civic education is shockingly low. I'm not going to explain this opinion about what to me is evident; I was witness to this campaign, and I know what I feel when I wake up in the morning:  It is a lot like how I felt waking up during the pandemic; it's very discouraging.

When it comes to liberty, we should expect that Trump would increase it; he is more a libertarian than he is a conservative.  His objective is reducing the degree to which Federal laws, organizations, and individuals touch upon us.  His actions are almost anarchic, reducing the scope and effectiveness of them, except for those tools of government he can use and abuse. The judgment is pending whether he will crack down on things like homelessness, cannabis legalization, same-sex marriage, and reproductive rights, or leave those things to the mixed state and local jurisdictions. This is a key aspect as to whether his administration will be tolerable for the average citizen. 

"Freedom" was one of the keywords of the Harris campaign, recently rejected.  She was using it largely to speak to reproductive rights for women, but there are other aspects of freedom to which we must look. (of course, she lost, and the fate of that freedom is very unclear) I am thinking of the basic ones of where one will live, work, how they will raise children, and enter into social engagements.  We will deny foreigners the freedom to be in our land, and we may well find that penalties will fall on companies and people who dare to leave. 

As for  me, though, I am looking to escape his maladministration and suppression of my liberties.  Appeals to "patriotism" in the fight against Trump are leaving me unmoved; I am more interested in how the rest of the world deals with Trump than I am with our domestic struggles.  I recognize that Trump's malign impact will be felt worldwide; I am not going to be a cheerleader for the USA in these days. 

Predictions

My own predictions for this election were bad, but no worse than most others'. Essentially, I had the scenario wrong:  after Harris came on, I concluded we were probably back to the "Status Quo" scenario of a deadlock, but we were actually still in the "Biden weakened" one (change the name in the subject).  Harris was fatally limited by the Biden administration's weak incumbency.  Harris was further handicapped by misogyny, racism and status anxiety, faults very evident in American society. I will add a dark implication that Hispanics don't seem all that willing to back a black woman.

 I had the ranking of the swing states somewhat right (except for Arizona), but I based them on an estimate of the national vote which was wrong by 3% in each direction.  As I suggested, a three-point drop for either candidate would be catastrophic, and it was electorally disastrous.  

My stake in PredictIt, which had survived the 2016 loss and many other twists and turns, went almost entirely down the drain this time.  The election prediction markets are not very predictive, but they react very quickly.  In the past, I could hedge those kinds of Democratic losses with other markets where I offset the losses confidently.  This year, there were very few markets--PredictIt seems to be on its last legs, with Kalshi now the governmentally-approved site  (I passed on Kalshi when it requested I enlist with a payment service called Plaid which promised to sell my data) , so I risked all of it.  The only money I will have there coming out of this election will be on the win by Ruben Gallego in Arizona and, most likely, some marginal payoff if Biden does not resign his job before Jan. 20 (something I just heard Jamal Simmons suggest). 

My predictions for the Trump Administration:  the tax cuts will happen, through the budget reconciliation process, and that will also fund the increase in ICE and other HHS organizations for the deportations, which will increase but not to the extent Trump pretended in his campaigns.  The logistics are too difficult to deport tens of millions, not to speak of the bad public relations involved.  There will be a harsh immigration bill passed, and there will be a long debate about an abortion bill, which will not pass.  The economy will look great for a year or two and then crash.  Democrats will win what is possible in 2026's midterm elections and will be ready to take on the post-Trump Republicans in 2028. 

The biggest uncertainty about Trump's coming administration is whether he will find the need to declare a national emergency to get his more extreme policies implemented.  He did that for the Muslim ban and to steal appropriations to build some of his wall during his first term.  This time, the circumstances are more favorable for his ability to do his dirty work, so maybe declaring an emergency which would put all our safety at risk will not be necessary.

Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You f***ed up. You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it! Maybe we can help. -- Animal House