Unprecedented and un-presidential:
You knew he wouldn’t go honorably or quietly, even though he has been quiet as a church mouse for nearly a week at this writing, with virtually no official business on his White House calendar for days.
Instead of looking after the interests of We the People amidst a worsening pandemic, he has been playing golf, Tweeting, watching TV, firing people (via Twitter no less), and sulking. The smart money is that he also has been plotting to screw up the last two months of his presidency big time, worse than he did the 46 months that preceded them.
Unless I miss my guess, among those on his pardon list are Paul Manafort, Rudy Giuliani, and Lizzie Borden.
If there ever were any confirmation of the collective wisdom of the American people in the recent election, it would be in the appalling way the president has reacted to his resounding defeat.
And make no mistake, he lost big time. Election officials in all 50 states, both Republican and Democrat, have confirmed that there were no significant issues with the vote counts in their respective states.
President-elect Joe Biden’s margin of victory nationwide is now more than 5 million votes and rising. The last time an incumbent president lost so decisively was in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt beat another Republican, Herbert Hoover.
The election of 2016 was much closer than this one, both nationwide and in a number of crucial battleground states, but by this time in the transition, our then president-elect had already been invited to the White House and received all the courtesy and official assistance that outgoing presidents have traditionally proffered to their successors.
Yet even in victory in 2016, he claimed fraud to explain away the cold hard fact that he lost the popular vote that time as well. My fellow Americans, the Electoral College is flunking democracy and has got to go.
Yes, Democrats four years ago were devastated by the loss, but they did the right thing in following precedent and that pillar of American democracy: a peaceful transfer of power.
What a difference four years make. It’s like we now live in a different country. It’s a meaner place, a more divided place, and a diminished place. There is less trust, less hope, less charity. There are people abroad in the land whose pastime is calling in death threats not simply to political opponents, but to hard working civil servants doing their bipartisan duty.
How does a person wake up in the morning and decide to make a death threat?
My mother, rest her soul, was a poll worker late in her life. She loved doing her civic duty, meeting people from both parties and helping to insure that things were done correctly —just as poll workers do today.
In her wildest dreams my mother couldn’t have imagined a week like the ones we have just gone through.