This is from the Raw Story article above:President-elect Donald Trump managed to cobble together a popular vote-winning coalition and he did so by making notable but modest gains with certain minority groups.
But the problem for him, wrote Ronald Brownstein for CNN, is that he won the election with a group of voters who broadly don't like him, and may not even agree with some of his core policies like mass deportations. They simply took a chance on him over economic discontent, he wrote — and it won't take much for that to come crumbling down.
The portion that caught my attention is highlighted below:
"If Trump provides his most controversial nominees – such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel as director of the FBI – a 'blank check' to pursue polarizing agendas, [GOP pollster White] Ayres said, 'we are going to be looking at Joe Biden level-job approval numbers before we turn around' for Trump," Brownstein wrote.
There's a part of me that I don't really know what to make of when it comes to wishing the absolute worst for the country during the next four years so people who voted for Trump suffer. In order for this to happen lots of good people will also suffer. In fact it is the good people will initially suffer more than the typical Trump voter. I don't want to see people suffer, not just know they are suffering, but literally see them suffering on television. But for the country to turn around this has to happen.
I offer for your consideration my Trump Tesla analogy.
I know that the people who thought Trump would usher in a a world of bluebirds and happiness for them personally are going to at some time be poleaxed with the realization that they bought the lemon of all lemon cars from a slick psychopathic salesman. The Trump car, let's say for obvious reasons that it is a Tesla, looked great in the showroom. Maybe they took it on a test drive and were impressed with the head snapping acceleration (one model will do 0-60 in less than two seconds and has a top speed of 200) and all electonic gewgaws.
Perhaps in time these buyers will eventually discover the transmission had a nasty habit of freezing up. They might discover the hard way that there were faulty airbags, that the navigation system didn't know north from south, that the air conditioning is faulty, and there's a glitch in the automatic locking system that may engage trapping them inside. Back to the consequences of this at the end of the blog.
The pragmatic part of me knows that for the country to change and for compassionate democracy and a moral society to be embraced by enough voters to swing the next two elections to Democrats things have to go very very badly for those who voted for Trump. The Trump promised shiny new Trump Tesla has to be exposed as a junker. Things not only have to go so badly that the Democrats take control of Congress in two years and the presidency in four, but enough of the conservatives on the Supreme Court also must realize what evil they have enabled and the court has to take steps to put America back on course.
If enough voters realize they bought a slick looking junker named Trump they could vote Democratic in the next election and not only wrest control of Congress from Republicans but win in statewide elections.
If people who voted for Trump because they were gullible and believed his lies, how will they learn that they are among many who are angry about this? Perhaps it will take talking to friends about increasing grocery prices or other effects they can see in their everyday lives. But if Trump has his druthers they won't find out about his growing unpopularity from the approval numbers provided by polling companies very possibly because every time they show his popularity dropping he will sue the companies. This will instill doubt in the veracity of the numbers. Obviously this would be Trump's intention.
He will use his usual technique of claiming the opposite of any inconvenient truth and saying his numbers are soaring and he is the most popular president in history. After all, he's managed to spread the word far and wide that he won a mandate in the election and thus is empowered to do anything he wants to do.
Consider:
The first U.S. presidential poll to use modern statistical methods was a Gallup poll in 1936. But the first known presidential straw polls date to 1824—over a century before.
These early straw polls were regional and informal. Newspapers reported the results as information about local opinions rather than possible predictions about how the national election might play out. Local straw polls continued throughout the 19th century. Then in 1916, The Literary Digest launched a national presidential poll. The magazine’s methods were flawed, but for five consecutive presidential races, the winner of The Literary Digest poll was also the winner of the actual election.
This streak ended in 1936, when George Gallup predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt would win reelection and The Literary Digest said he wouldn’t. Gallup’s poll was a victory for statistical survey methods, and paved the way for modern presidential polling. From History.com
What would happen if Trump sued or threatened to sue every polling company and any media who published the results of the polls if they showed he was becoming unpopular. What if there were no more public opinion polls? The public would have no way of knowing about the national sentiment about what he was doing aside from talking to their friends unless there were street protests covered by the media. But then what if Trump sued companies that covered the protests?
Going even further, perhaps coming from my own Trump hopefully not a derangement syndrome which I believe is based on a knowledge of history and my own rational fears, what if Trump declared a national emergency, outlawed protests, and called in the military to break protests up?
Going even further into Trump exercising dictatorial control and going full-on despot, what if an incident like the Kent State massacre happened and the regular media and social media couldn't publish photos like these?
The worst of the worst may not happen. It is possible that Trump's consuming need for revenge will lessen in time and his deep desire to be seen as both the most deeply loved and most horribly feared person in history will be satisfied.I hope, if I live to see the day all of this plays out, and that I am not writing blogs saying "you were warned" but rather issuing a mea culpa.
Consider yesterday's blog with two Venn diagrams illustrating why I have such fear about what Trump may do to our democracy.
Click above to enlarge image. Click here to read blog.
If past is prologue, people who want unadulterated news about the coming Trump administration will probably have to listen to podcasts and watch independent political coverage on YouTube and read independent blogs on the internet.
