LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Welcome to four more years of chaos, confusion and the fall of the American empire. Donald Trump defied the odds again and managed to convince an astounding number of people that in spite of his criminal conviction, his business and first term failures and smash-mouth rhetoric against women, immigrants and minorities that he somehow deserved another shot at running the country from inside the White House.
If he lives to be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025, he and his Opus Dei-Heritage Foundation cult is fully prepared this time to finish off American democracy and turn the United States of America into a theocratic, oligopolistic autocracy.
And apparently a tiny majority of “the people” here are fine with that, or don’t know any better, probably because of the fall of a factual, real news information system that has been hurtling toward chaos for years, driven by the rise of right-wing talk radio, cable TV and silliness on social media that now passes for news and “information.”
It’s been a long time since relying on the mainstream, corporate news media in this country was safe and watching the talking heads on cable television just makes matters worse, it seems, since at every turn since the news of Jan. 6, 2021 died down in the spring of that year the story line went back to what it was in 2016, when Trump’s every false and outrageous tweet was covered as normal behavior and legitimate news.
In recent months, even CBS and PBS have repeated every false, racist rant as if it was legitimate political rhetoric, leaving less educated news viewers no choice really but to be swept up in the Trump narrative, or to turn off the damn TV. Even the once courageous Washington Post abandoned its principles this time, joining the last of the newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, in cowering to Trump by failing to endorse his worthy opponent.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who, let’s face it, did a remarkable job of pulling together a viable campaign for the Democrats in 100 days after President Joe Biden flubbed his debate with Trump, due to bad preparation at Camp David in Maryland.
According to early coverage by the last great American newspaper online, The New York Times, which now may be in trouble too, as a strike by tech workers nearly eroded its election night coverage, Donald Trump “rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time on Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.
“Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris,” the main election story reads. “His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.”
It took Trump and social media just eight years to destroy what was left of a belief in finding smart, educated, qualified people to run the American republic from Washington, and replace it with a White, Christian, “strong man” dictatorship mirroring the third world countries we’ve long tried to help join the developed world, only to see all efforts to regulate pollution to thwart the oncoming massive changes to Earth’s climate caused by global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy fail.
While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ramped up a heroic last stand to do something about it, that battle will now be abandoned again, just like it was in Trump’s first term in office, when he walked away from science and gutted the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other federal government agency’s attempt to research the problem, report on it to the American people, and try to turn the clock back on all the damage to Earth’s fragile ecosystems.
As of early Wednesday, Nov. 6, the results showed Trump improving on his 2020 showing in counties all across America with only limited exceptions. Trump had secured the necessary swing states — including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, even picking up Wisconsin, which Harris was expected to win — to guarantee him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.
Republicans also picked up at least two Senate seats, in Ohio and West Virginia, to give the party a majority in the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call.
Glynn Wilson is editor and publisher of New American Journal (NewAmericanJournal.net).
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024
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