Version 2.153

Last night, for some odd reason, I was extremely tired at 9:30 PM, so nearly asleep as I wrote my last post -- not that that is a first, being nearly asleep, that is, but the early hour was puzzling. One might call my day productive, but mostly I just thought about things, especially the state of our current affairs. 

I have often described Donald Trump as President as an accelerator of change. It is clear that many of the things that have happened had been brewing for quite some time, but he just created the conditions for them to fully ripen, such as the Me Too and the Black Lives Matter movements. 

People will tolerate many things if they feel that we are making progress, but if things start to look like they are moving back, Americans will rebel. The whole concept of being American revolves around the notion that each of us have a chance at helping build a better country. Movies, books, education, art, everything is geared toward the idea that one person can make a difference. 

Trump being the one person that could make a difference is how he managed to get such a great following, but his goal is to take America back to a period of greatness and that is where the ideology starts to fall apart. The best of American is not in the past; it has to be in the future because that is when a perfect union can be attained. As such, Trump and his ideology will eventually be defeated. 

At this point it does not seem like he can govern another term. Now that the federal stimulus has ended, and companies are beginning to lay off, people will not be as understanding. The GOP has lost control of the message, there is actually no message. It used to be that they stood for smaller government, but with the costs of the trade war and the pandemic, not only does the government have a bigger weight on the economy, but the tax cuts that were passed were not enough to pay for themselves, so public debt is increasing very quickly. All that is left is a social ideology that is at odds with the country.

The Trump presidency is also quite problematic for the GOP. Trump never finished hiring all the usual staff for the administration and many of the ones that he did hire were not from the party, but from his pool of personal friends. This means that if Biden wins, it will be at least four more years until the GOP can staff an administration, but if Trump wins, it will be at least eight more years or even 12. This means that Republicans will not have anyone who knows how to run government and the outcome is worse with Trump than with Biden. The last normal government that the GOP had was George W. Bush from 2001 until 2008. 

If Trump loses, the GOP has a chance of presenting a normal candidate in four years and winning the Presidency, especially since Biden is very old. If Trump wins, the likely outcome will be an impeachment, but Trump will not go quietly, plus Pence would have to govern with a Democratic VP. It would be a rather weak position for the GOP and they'd likely lose the next Presidential election four years from now.