Winter is Coming

There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter

The problem with news is that each story is presented as a discrete item, which makes it harder to follow the throughline. In other words, we’re so busy looking at all the trees, there is no way we can see the forest.

In my business, such failures are called “lack of narrative cohesion,” and they usually result in readers getting frustrated, giving up, and putting down the book.

I’m fairly certain that’s what’s happened to the American electorate.

Who can keep track of what’s going on anymore? Who has that much energy at the end of a long day? Take Trump’s shambolic presidency, for example. He drained the collective life out of us. He zombified an entire nation. His presidency convinced us of two things: the world had gone mad and there was nothing we could do about it.

Here’s a very rough overview of what we as a country have been through under Trump:

1. He dismissed Russian interference in the election, even though he knew better than anybody that there was Russian interference in the election.

2. He appointed unqualified members of his family to top administration roles, including son-in-law Jared Kushner, a strangely luminous Slender Man figure whom even GOP operative Roger Stone accused of having “an IQ of 70.” In that same conversation, Stone referred to First Daughter Ivanka Trump as Trump’s “abortionist bitch daughter.” This was Trump’s inner circle, his consigliere, who sometimes ruled the country through Trump.

3. He was impeached. Twice. Never happened before in U.S. history.

4. After American teens on TikTok claimed credit for half-filled seats at Trump’s ‘comeback’ rally in Tulsa, Trump tried to ban TikTok.

5. Trump approved a dangerous and devastating pipeline through Native land.

6. He called far-right protesters at a rally where an innocent woman was murdered in cold blood “very fine people.”

7. He hired Steven Bannon.

8. He imposed a Muslim travel ban, but only on countries he didn’t want to do business with.

9. He refused to release his tax returns and then lied about why he couldn’t do it.

10. He lied about the size of his wiener inauguration crowd size.

11. He lied repeatedly about Stormy Daniels and the resulting coverup.

12. He doubled fees at his resort hotels after becoming president and then charged the country millions of dollars to house his security detail in them.

13. He tried to buy Greenland.

14. He told police officers to rough up suspects.

15. He said North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un wasn’t at all to blame for the death of student-accused-of-stealing-a-poster Otto Warmbier, even though he clearly was.

16. He appointed card-carrying racist/LGBTQ hater/Keebler elf Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.

17. He hired Michael Flynn, who was and continues to be a dangerous, double-dealing foreign agent.

18. He said vaccines caused autism.

19. He held a presser and told Americans to inject bleach as a cure for Covid.

20. He appointed Teresa Manning, an anti-abortion advocate, to oversee family planning funding for low-income communities.

21. He cut a pandemic early warning program in 2019 and fired the pandemic response unit just because it had been initiated by Obama.

22. He revealed classified information to the Russian ambassador.

23. He took private meetings with Russian president Vladimir V. Putin where no one else was present.

24. He cut corporate tax to its lowest rate since 1939 without having any plan in place to make up that lost revenue.

25. He mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who credibly accused then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

26. He separated over 5000 migrant children from their parents—and then proceeded to lose most of them. As of June, 2022, at least 1000 families have yet to be reunited. “I've been doing this work for 30 years,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said, “And this is by far the worst thing that I have ever seen. We're talking about really a historic wrong by this country because it wasn't an accident. It wasn't a few mistakes. It was a deliberate policy at the highest levels of the United States government sitting down and saying, 'Let's take children away from their parents so that the parents say, 'Let's just give up our asylum claims.' And no one ever tries to come in."

27. He hired Stephen Miller.

28. He sprayed Black Lives Matter protesters with tear gas so he could attend a photo op.

    

29. He granted full clemency to 237 individuals charged or convicted of federal criminal offenses.

30. He edited a video to make it look as though he’d won the Noble Peace Prize. Obama won it, so Trump thought he should, too.

31. He asked Georgia officials to fix the election for him.

32. He incited a violent attack on our nation’s capital that left five people dead.

33. He politicized the Justice Department to investigate his enemies and protect him from culpability.

34. He obstructed the Mueller investigation.

35. He pressured Ukraine to help his reelection campaign and then covered it up.

36. He demanded “loyalty oaths” from everyone around him.

37. He called a former Miss Universe “a fat pig.”

38. He regularly purged officials who testified against him, including US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Lt. Col Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council, and Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

39. He hired Rudy Giuliani. Also temporary AG Matthew Whitaker, a known scam artist who designed toilets for “well-endowed men.”

40. He repeatedly denied knowing Russian “businessman” and convicted thug Lev Parnas, despite multiple photos of the two hanging out together.

41. He made 30,573 demonstrably false or misleading claims over 4 years.

42. He hired the 13 senior aides who violated the Hatch Act by using their official position for partisan politics and/or personal gain.

43. He installed mega-donor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, a position for which he is unsuited, to slow down mail delivery during the 2020 elections.

44. He broke more than 40 years of precedent by refusing to divest from his assets upon taking office.

45. He committed over 3000 conflict of interest violations since day one of his presidency, including accepting foreign trademarks on Trump brands, government events held at Trump properties, and promotion of the Trump brand by White House officials.

46. He hired Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who racked up 18 investigations into his behavior, including allegations of lavish spending and whistleblower retaliation before being forced to resign.

47. He fired FBI Director James Comey for failing to deliver on the “Hillary’s emails” investigation.

48. He left critical posts vacant in a naked attempt to cripple government and make it less efficient.

49. He hired EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who was bunglingly incompetent, had close ties to the fossil fuel industry, sued the EPA 14 times, and was so infamously corrupt, he tried lobbying Chik-fil-A on behalf of his wife. He was ultimately forced to resign.

50. He has refused to return records of vital importance to our nation’s safety, for which he is under investigation.

    

    Trump shaking hands with James Comey.

    You see my point, of course. When you lay it all out like that, the true horror of what Trump did, the unfathomable damage he caused, becomes a hundred times more impactful. Instead of water torture, drop-by-drop, we are fully immersed—waterboarded, if you will—in a flood of big-picture information.

    
    We need this. America is tired, and its capsized attention span makes absorbing information that much more difficult.

    Here then was the enormous value of Representative Adam Schiff, who at the end of Trump’s second impeachment trial said the most prescient words ever spoken. It was a summation of Trump’s entire presidency:
    
    ”He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him, what’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.”

    
    I don’t think most of us will ever be the same after the Trump Era, and as Americans, we’ve been through some things in the past fifty years: the Challenger explosion, 9/11, Emmett Till’s murder, #MeToo, social media addiction, the opioid crisis, and of course, our climate emergency. That’s hardly a comprehensive list, but you get the idea. Those of us who are paying attention, those of us who care, are stressed out of our minds right now. If the elections don’t break our way (historically, the Party opposed to the incumbent president is the one that sweeps a midterm election), democracy will likely fall.

    
    It sounds so dramatic when I put it this way, but it’s true. If the Republicans take back the House and the Senate, the Trump investigation is over, abortion rights are over (without hope of further redress), birth control will become harder and more expensive to obtain, voting rights will be fully gutted, and we’ll go back to drill, baby, drill, all Green initiatives pushed gleefully off the table. Or, possibly, Kevin McCarthy, the likely Speaker of the House should the Republicans win, could pull a Mitch McConnell and kill every piece of legislation that comes his way.

    

    Republican contender for Speaker of the House in 2022, Kevin Owen McCarthy

    Keep in mind, McCarthy is cut from a different cloth than McConnell. McCarthy is an anti-abortion, Covid-denying, Capitol riot relativist, environment poisoning, MAGAt-loving, health care refusnik, gay-rights-despising corporatist toady who thinks people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are “patriots.” So … I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
    
    The majority of Americans, I’m happy to say, rightly see these people as unhinged. But a sizable, loud, violent minority led by Trump have proven time and again that they will vote for anyone with an R by their name. Anyone. Pedophiles, rapists, crooks, snake oil salesmen endorsed by Oprah.
    
    And this is the part I need you to hear, so pay attention.

    
    They don’t care what the truth is.
    
    They don’t care about a woman’s right to choose. They don’t care about human rights. They don’t care about your retirement money, the air you breathe, or the water you drink. That’s why the hundreds of investigations, impeachments, grand jury indictments proving that Trump is not only a racist game show host but a pennyante criminal mean nothing to them. The only thing they care about are the hordes of “Mexican illegals with prayer rugs” that are flooding over the border to steal their jobs and their women.

    
    They won’t say that, of course. They’ll mumble something about the economy, which, if you drill down, means “Wall Street,” although most of these people are too poor to own stock. Then they’ll pivot to Trump being “tough on crime” without realizing that Trump was credibly accused of committing at least 48 criminal offenses while in office. The irony is lost on Trumpublicans, most of whom watch Fox News or the now-defunct America One News, and have never heard of these crimes.
    
    It wouldn’t matter. We could take every single one of these MAGAts, prop their eyelids open with toothpicks à la Alex DeLarge in Clockwork Orange, and show them proof of Trump’s criminal activities, and they wouldn’t just vote for him, they would drop to their knees and thank Jesus for the privilege.
    
    This is where we’re at now. You do get that, right? Trump is still running. He’s still in the game. Without setting foot outside Mar-a-Lago except to testify in his multiple criminal indictments, he is absolutely 100% in charge of this midterm election. If you don’t vote, and if you don’t demand that everyone you know votes, we may not survive as a democracy or a country. Yes, it’s that important.
    
    If every single reader of this publication drove two people to the polls this week, that would be 6,000 votes—more than enough to turn an election. Many elections have hinged on fewer votes than that. And look, I know we’re burned out on political ads, sick of having our inboxes flooded with political fundraising, and generally over the whole election year mishigas, but I wouldn’t ask if it were critically important.
    
    Please don’t let democracy die. Don’t let these in-all-but-name Klansmen take over the country. Remember what it is we’re fighting for:

    
    U.S.
    
    Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

    Let me know what you’re thinking. The comments section is right below this article.
    
    
    

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