My friend, an intelligent, well-educated Trumpist (part 2)

Two hardcore Trump supporters die and ascend to heaven. God meets them at the pearly gates and asks if they have any questions. One of them says, “Yes, what were the real results of the 2020 election and who was behind the fraud?”. God says, “my son, there was no fraud. Biden won the electoral college fair and square, 306 to 232”. After a few seconds of stunned silence, the one guy turns to the other and whispers, “This goes higher up than we thought”.

I had been ponderng how to respond to my friend's text about Sidney Powell's Thursday press briefing, in which she asserts a huge fraud that led to Trump's defeat. What amazed me is that he feels he's done research that supports the fraud conspiracy theory. What I already knew was that if you looked at multiple credible sources on both the right and the left, you'd see that accusation was just not supported.

However, I will acknowledge that it is a tragedy. Obviously, if it was true, it would be extremely disturbing. And if it is not true, which is pretty obvious based on current evidence (mostly the lack of it), then the fact that so many Americans still believe it means Trump has succeeded in getting the revenge he was seeking due to his impeachment – and the Biden administration may then have as little credibility as the current Trump administration. What a lot of folks – especially on the left – continue to miss is the fact that Trump managed to engage a sector of the country that many politicians have misunderstood, especially recent Democrats.

For example, many of my liberal friends refused to read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Why? Simply because Vance was a Trump supporter. If they had bothered to read it, they would have had at least some understanding of how different life is for some folks in many parts of the country.

Did I ever support Trump? No, because long before he actually ran for President many of us living in New York were already very tired of his behavior. His best skill is as an advocate for himself – his most successful role was as the executive in The Apprentice, which was far more successful than virtually all of his real businesses. Those businesses had declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009 due to their inability to meet required payments and to re-negotiate debt with banks. Trump would be far wealthier today if he had just put the 400 million his dad gave him into the stock market. Of course, Trump still denies that his dad gave him any money, despite the fact that it was long well proven by multiple independent sources.

Do I oppose Trump's policies? No, not all. Yes, we needed to get tougher with China – but not by breaking away from all our allies rather than pushing them to join us in dealing with Chinese trade aggression. Yes, we needed immigration reform, which Trump could well have accomplished instead of stupid things like saying it was all just about a wall and taking children away from parents, many of whom will never be able to rejoin their family. Yes, we needed business tax reform, but not by simply increasing our deficit by $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

Trump could have been far more successful if he had just not felt he had to lie about so many things simply because he can't tolerate anything that he feels is a personal attack.

So I do think Mary L. Trump's book about her uncle, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” convincingly lays out why Trump was unable to rise up and become a truly effective president, doing more than just increasing the ongoing hatred and division in US politics.

Election day was over a week ago, but misleading video clips claiming to be evidence of 'voter fraud' are still circulating through social media. Link: “Voter Fraud” video

The bipartisan National Council of State Legislatures:

From credible conservative media:

Mainstream media (mildly left-leaning, but credible fact-checking):

#100daystooffload Day 17.