“I Can’t Believe I’m Losing To This Guy”
Don’t wait for the party message to change. Become the messenger. And make damn sure we don’t lose to that guy.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – You might remember the classic Saturday Night Live presidential debate sketch from 1988 in which Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush rambled incoherently about “staying the course” and “a thousand points of light.” Then, after Bush’s time ran out, Jon Lovitz’s Mike Dukakis threw his hands in the air and lamented, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
No, President Biden isn’t losing to Donald Trump, and it’s way too early to predict anything about an election that’s still 15 months out, but, based on current polling, the ex-tyrant and the current president are too close for comfort. It’s nothing if not confounding how Donald Trump manages to stay afloat given the reality of both his criminal and non-criminal records.
Let’s review, starting with a few big ticket items from his non-criminal record.
Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost the midterms in 2018. He lost his re-election campaign in 2020. And, with his endorsed candidates and copycats on the ballot, he lost the 2022 midterms as well. Given his record of losing, it speaks volumes about the weakness of the other Republican candidates who aren’t even in the same universe as Trump’s poll numbers.
He was impeached twice, once for extorting a foreign nation, Ukraine, in a desperate plot to damage Joe Biden during the 2020 election; and a second time for attempting a coup to overturn the 2020 election results.
He also chose to slow walk the government response to COVID in order to keep the economy afloat during the 2020 election cycle, leading to 400,000 American deaths during his final year in office – sacrificing all those people in order to win again. He lost anyway. Imagine if 400,000 people died on 9/11. Imagine if 400,000 people died at Benghazi. Sadly, Trump will never be held fully accountable for the mass death he personally precipitated.
There are myriad foreign relations and domestic policy failures, too, due primarily to his extraordinary incompetence. Among other things, negative job creation. He signed a massive tax cut for the super-wealthy, from which he personally benefited by an estimated $593 million to $1.4 billion. He also de-regulated corporate polluters, allowing factories to dump toxic slurry into rivers and streams. He appointed three Supreme Court justices who were instrumental in overturning women’s bodily autonomy. The science is still out in terms of how badly he worsened the climate crisis by withdrawing from the Paris climate accords – leaving death and mayhem in the paths of his grandchildren.
Now, in terms of crimes:
Trump was criminally indicted this week on four counts including a conspiracy to stage a coup against Congress, a conspiracy to disenfranchise the votes of millions of Americans, as well as conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States. All of this had to do with his obvious plot to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election – a plot, by the way, that included his extortion of Ukraine and his deadly response to COVID.
Trump was criminally indicted for stealing documents detailing America’s most closely held secrets. He also showed at least one of those documents to unauthorized randos, then refused to return the documents to the government – lying to his lawyers and the FBI in the process.
In the same documents case, he was criminally indicted for ordering his Mar-a-lago staffers to delete security camera video footage of the documents being hidden from the FBI – after that footage was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. This is obvious consciousness of guilt, not to mention obstruction of justice.
Trump was indicted in New York City for financial fraud stemming from his hush money payments – signed in the White House and distributed to an adult film actor he had sex with while his wife Melania was pregnant with Barron Trump.
Any day now, Trump will likely also be indicted in Fulton County, Georgia for his efforts to commit election fraud in 2020.
Trump was also accused of a dozen instances of obstruction of justice in the Mueller Report – instances that weren’t criminally charged because of an archaic Justice Department rule against indicting sitting presidents.
He was kicked off all major social media platforms for being a menace to society.
Trump was found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. The Trump Organization was found guilty of financial and tax fraud. The Trump Foundation was permanently dissolved after it was caught exploiting children with cancer in order to raise money that was almost entirely used as a Trump family slush fund.
I can’t believe we’re losing to this guy.
We’re not, really, but again – knowing the big ticket items, there’s no way he should be anywhere close to becoming president again. So, why is it so close – why is he still the presumptive nominee of his party?
Now out for Banter Members:
It’s the power of relentless propaganda and disinformation. If you’re willing to lie with reckless abandon – if you’re a soulless monster who’s willing to manipulate vulnerable people, you, too, can have a successful career in punditry and politics on the Republican side.
Yes, there are liars on the left, too, but the MAGA movement has turned criminality, deception, and agitprop into an art form, borrowing from the timeless grift of traveling faith healers and televangelists who’ve been suckering gullible people out of their life savings for eons. Likewise, certain elements of the traditional media have become so desperate to manufacture journalistic equilibrium that they’ve artificially elevated one or two non-scandal scandals on the left to the same level of coverage as everything I listed above and hundreds of other things.
Absent a shock to the system that might shake certain Americans out of their hypnotic torpor, the future of democracy is entirely up to you and me. We can’t wait for the shock, we can’t wait for the news media to abandon its both-siderism, and we certainly can’t risk Trump or his copycats getting anywhere near the White House again. Based on the numbers, we have a ton of hard work to do between now and November 2024. So get the word out about Trump’s crimes and non-crimes. Steal what I wrote here if you have to. Don’t wait for the party message to change. Become the messenger. And make damn sure we don’t lose to that guy.
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That polls are as close as they are is absolutely horrifying to me, and it is such an indictment (there's that word again) of voters in this country that they are (so close). Here's the sad fact: About 40% of the voters in this country are going to support him no matter what. Where we see hatred, bigotry, indictments and obvious criminality, they see those same things as virtues. He only has to get a small percentage of independents in order to win the upcoming election, and given the Republicans' huge structural advantage in the Electoral College, that number isn't high at all--it's really just a few voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. You can probably add Nevada to that list as well.
My comment is always…..what polls? Just received an email showing what you said. In this email under 2000 registered voters (nationwide) were polled. How can that possibly project anything? I have been voting for over 60 years (almost always democrat) and I have never been polled. I was an election worker for a few years and I was never polled. So what is this being based on? And a current comment from The hill says republicans believe the healthier 77 year old will beat the unhealthy 80 year old. Give me a break. Please take a stand about these polls.