Watching Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz might leave one either scratching their head in amazement or thinking they are digging a hole to bury themselves in. However, a factor that must be realized is that IF Trump is not convicted (which seems likely) he will be eligible to run for the next Presidential election. And he will be looking for a running mate. Mike Pence will not be that person. There is a void in the Republican Party and people like Matt Gaetz are assuming they have a shot at getting that position THEN running for President themselves later. That must be the thinking of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.  It’s a jockey for position dance we will see as long as Trump remains a potential candidate.

The Republican Party really is stuck. Trump got tons of votes and still has wide support because most Republicans still believe the lies and misrepresentations Trump told them. Media such as Fox and Newsmax continue the Trump message unabated and remain untethered to the truth.  They are following the Mitch McConnel strategy when Obama got elected – “my job is to make sure Obama is a one term President”.  It’s not ‘make America great again as much as it is get the Republicans (or Trumpians) in control again. So the Trump people will not see and hear media that will change their views. In fact some refuse to watch CNN or MSNBC as a point of principle. They have no intention of letting facts change their views.       The big question will be what happens over the next year or so. If Trump is hit with serious charges of tax fraud and the like and we finally see his taxes and find out there was indeed more going on between him and Russia his power should diminish. Likewise if Biden is successful in curbing the virus and all the Republican predictions of him moving the US into “socialism”, being soft on China, ruining the economy etc turn out to be just silly propaganda that proves to be false then there is some potential to glue the country back together again.

It is likely that more and more dirt will come out about Trump and hopefully it will begin to stick. Fingers crossed.

Of course Fox and other right wing media will decry the loss of jobs due to the Keystone pipeline cancellation and Biden’s moves to limit further drilling on public land – and they would be right. Jobs in those areas will be lost.  However jobs always get lost when new technology comes along – it is the capitalist way. Meanwhile more jobs will come in new areas of endeavor that will more than make up for the job losses AND have better results for the economy and such issues as climate change. The reality is that climate change is already having a negative impact on the US economy and it is only going to get bigger. Trump’s failure to take it seriously will end up in history of one of his biggest failings as a President. Biden knows the time is now and he has no choice but to react. Some jobs will be lost, more will be made. Long live capitalism.

Watching the news over the past week two thoughts come to mind. First the divisions in the United States are hard to escape. Watching TV, switching between channels Fox, MSNBC, CNN Newsmax etc it becomes very apparent that a major factor or perhaps THE major factor now that Trump cant tweet is the media itself. When I watch Fox for instance, I ask the question: is this program meant to make me angry? Is it meant to decrease my faith in the Biden Presidency? Is it aimed at confirming my antagonism for the other side? Unfortunately in most cases the answer is YES. So for the Trump supporter watching only Fox and Newsmax or other similar outlet, the fanning of the flames continues unabated. The public is divided because the media makes it that way.

Second. The Republican party is no longer what it was. Those that feared what Trump might do to the party, Republicans even more than Democrats, were proved right. Trump has destroyed the Republican Party as we knew it.  It is now a party that did not even bother to have a platform in this Presidential election. The platform was Trump. For all the talk of cancel culture blamed on the left, the Trump people are quite happy to cancel those views in their own party that are not 100% Trump’s. How the party of Lincoln could sink to the depths it has – supporting anti democratic views –  believing crazy conspiracy theories and the like should be shocking to behold.

The reality is that the media makes its money from advertising. Advertising rates depend on viewership or listenership. The more eyeballs or ears the greater can be the advertising rates. That is Capitalism at work. One can argue that ALL views are there for the ears or eyes so it’s OK. BUT the reality is that people tune into one or two outlets that tell them what they want to hear and do NOT hear other outlets that give the opposing view. THEN that media outlet can guide them to even more extreme views that will KEEP them on that media and keep them away from the opposing views.  It’s business. We are stuck with it. Free Press is great, but now we face the freedom to spread lies as well as the truth.

People complain that certain media is spreading lies, fanning the flames of division and other people complain that any restriction of the media is anti democratic. Both are right. That’s the catch 22. What Trump did is make Truth become what you want it to be. Alternative facts. Worse, he proved that Truth does not matter. What matters is what you BELIEVE. He also proved, largely through Twitter, you can influence people to believe what you want them to believe. He proved “you can fool some of the people all the time” – and in a democratic system like exists in the US that can be enough.

QAnon people are shocked that Trump did not take over the government and arrest Biden. In other words what they said was going to be true turned out to be NOT true. Joe Biden is President – Trump slinked out of the Whitehouse and is now holed up in Florida in disgrace. Of course we have seen that there are a couple of religions that have predicted the end of the world and when the date came to pass and the world did NOT end they had to come up with an excuse (they made a wrong calculation or some other excuse). Such crazy ideas have a way of overcoming facts and continuing.  QAnon will most likely not be different. If one can believe the “eating babies” and other super weird ideas of the QAnon people one can easily see how this jolt to reality can be overcome and move them back to strange and outlandish ideas.

Meanwhile, over over the next few months and years all the predictions of disaster if Biden won that Trump and his people pushed and supported by Hannity types will prove to be as silly and stupid as most of us knew they were. We have already seen the dire warnings Trump made of the stock market (“ITS GOING TO TANK”) did not happen. In fact yesterday, the day Biden became President saw the stock market reach the highest point ever.  Talk of “they are coming for your guns” will prove to be bullshit. Loss of “freedom” etc. by “radicle socialists:” (HORRORS!) will prove to be baseless.

One would hope that media like Fox and Newsmax would stop trying to sell this bullshit but I fear its just wishful thinking. They make all their money from people who believe such things. It is in their interest to KEEP people believing such things.

History will show that the last two Democratic Presidents came into power when the country was in serious trouble. Obama inherited the 2008 financial disaster and Biden the disaster stemming from Covid. Republican Bush came into a healthy economy as did Republican Trump. Trump’s contention that he inherited a mess was just another lie aimed at validating his “I will save America” mantra. Under Obama the economy was consistently growing as the unemployment numbers consistently fell. Trump’s contention that he is passing on a great foundation to Biden is as silly as it is false. The US is in far worse shape today than it was when Trump became President and Trump has to accept at least part of the blame. We will all see the truth in the months to come – we have to hope that some, or many of those people who believed the lies will come to see the truth as well. Fingers crossed

For a guy who has pushed “make America respected again”, “make America great again” Trump leaves the Whitehouse in ignominious fashion. The greatness of the United States starts with one of its greatest gifts to humanity – the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump has dumped on that idea.  Not conceding an election when it was obvious that he lost, not having the class and grace to invite the Biden’s to the Whitehouse as President Obama had done for the Trumps. Not appearing at the inauguration of Joe Biden.  Acting like a spoiled child not getting what he wanted – a poor looser pouting in seclusion as his anger festers and fuels his delusions. Trump has severely tarnished not only his own reputation but that of the Presidency and indeed of the United States as a country. Happy he is soon gone – so sorry that he has done so much damage.

In the end we ALL have to be thankful that Donald Trump turned out to be just as stupid and unqualified as we thought at the beginning. I include all those Republicans who knew this in 2016 as well as Democrats. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Kayleigh McEnany, Mitt Romney, to name a few. Too bad that media like Fox and Newsmax are still in stoking the Trump base mode to keep their viewers (in the case of Fox) or gain viewers (as Newsmax).

Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Limbaugh, and the like have painted themselves with the Trump brush and continue to do so. Hopefully they will join those that refused to believe the Titanic could sink when it hit the iceberg. They believed the hype that the ship couldn’t sink. It did. Belief in that untruth led to the slow response that led to so much loss of life.

President Clinton faced impeachment for a personal sexual act that apparently the majority of the voting public accepted. Clinton was re-elected. It was not what the Republicans went after him for. I remember those days and the fact that the Republicans could not get their head around the Clinton win. So one party not accepting the other is nothing new. When Obama became President, one of Mitch McConnel’s first pronouncements was that his duty was “to make Obama a one term President”. So much for supporting the will of the people. Prior to that Donald Trump worked hard to spread the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the USA. He used that lie to build political profile even though he knew it was a lie. He told us “you will not believe what we are finding”. Then never told us he found nothing. In that regard it is poetic justice that conspiracy theories came back to bite him in the ass. If you live by the sword you die by the sword.

The various Republican pundits can rightly claim that the Democrats did not favor Trump from the vary start. A “you started it” argument. In fact, seeing the videos of the Republicans back in 2016 most of them also did not favor him. Graham, Cruz, Romney gave scathing criticism – even his current press secretary heaped abuse on Trump. Everyone knew at the start who Trump was. They were shocked when he won the nomination. They were even more shocked when he won the election. Even Trump was shocked. Then the rot set in and Republicans reversed their positions to a degree many still cannot understand. The Democrats did not reverse their position. They knew Trump was a shit just as the Republicans had done at the beginning.

The really scary thing about Trump is that he got so many people to believe his lies. I think even he began to believe them. If he had been just a little bit smarter – been more careful with those who he attacked, what lies he told, he might have won the election and in 4 years the US might well have faced the birth of a dictatorship. In the end Trump’s stupidity saved US democracy.

These days it is interesting to switch back and forth from Fox and Newsmax to MSNBC and CNN to see how different each is reacting to the events of Jan. 6th. On Fox Tucker Carlson said last night we all saw what happened at the Capital on Jan. 6th (ie believe your own eyes) then told us what it wasn’t (ie believe his eyes). Seems to me he was telling me what I saw with my own eyes were lies.

1. He said it was not a racist mob. True AND false. Interviews with police have claimed some were called niggers. So some were definitely racist but no one has claimed that the entire mob was racist, nor that all the Trump supporters are racist. The point has always been that Trump has attracted the racist element and it is part (however big) of his base of support.

2.  He said it was not an insurrection. Then what the hell was it? Looked like an insurrection to me. Trying to overturn an election, which is what they were trying to do is the very definition of an insurrection.

3. He said it wasn’t an invasion by a mob of “dangerous white supremacist’s”. Did I not see the confederate flag? The guy with the Camp Auschwitz T shirt? Posts on the internet make it clear white supremacists were headed to Washington following Trumps invitation. So there WERE white supremacists in that mob. Though again, no one is saying all the mob were white supremacists. 

Tucker’s rant was that the attack is being used as a way to clamp down on free speech as never before in American history. He is right that there is a clamp down, but it is not against “free speech”. It is a clamp down on dangerous speech; speech that might lead to violence. A better safe than sorry reaction. Like in all such situations there can be overreach but that is to be expected under the circumstances. The same happened after 9/11. Trump did the same with his “Muslim  ban”.

The January 6th situation gave many of the Trump supporters of the past a chance to clean up their act. Try to tell the truth versus tell people what they want to hear. Unfortunately Tucker continued with the old party line and chose not to do so.

The fundamental fact is quite simple. In a world where a person can and DOES tune in to one media outlet and therefore ONLY hears one opinion there is a danger if that outlet does not tell the truth. Newsmax is NOT going to tell its viewers that there are convincing countervailing arguments to points they make. They don’t want people tuning into other networks. If you only watch Newsmax your view of what is going on is completely different from the person who watches CNN. Same if you watch Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Carlson on Fox. Switching back and forth from Hannity and Rachel Maddow one is in two different countries.

The problem of the Trump supporter is that many of them ONLY listened to him and made a point of NOT listening to any arguments contrary to what he was pitching. He encouraged them to believe only him calling all opposition as fake news and enemy of the people. At one point even Fox suffered his ire. The Chinese communist government does the same. They stifle and outright block any views that do not suit them. Russia goes as far as assonating opposition. It’s all about control the message. If you control the message you control the people.