2021 Will be Worse Than 2020

I am sorry to inform, but with Donald Trump gone (hopefully), 2021 will continue the downhill slide experienced by the United States during the last four years.

It's a fact that our country has become less united in purpose and point of view over the past forty years, but that trend toward disunity has accelerated over the past twenty. Donald Trump has rubbed the fine obscurant off the window into that disunity with his big mouth and adolescent communications approach that lacks even the slightest self control. He has brought the anger level of all too many of our factions out into the open. The visible discontent was there; he simply loosed it. We know for certain that President Joe Biden will be a different man in conviction, and he will, at a minimum, be adult supervision. But that won't be enough.

The long nightmare of Donald Trump has birthed an army of Trumpkins, some of whom invaded the United States Capitol on 6 January. That invasion shocked and astonished many Americans, but the shocking news is how many weren't shocked; they approved. The MSNBC network revealed a survey of constituents of various congressmen and senators who had supported the machinations of the invaders. Senator Ted Cruz was a case in point. Not only is his political career still viable, a plurality of his constituents supported the invasion and sacking of the capitol building. That shows the level of hold Donald Trump has on a broad base of the voting population. It may not be all seventy-seven million of the Americans who voted for him, but it's a large chunk. They'll follow his lies, his fanciful, magical thinking wherever he takes it. After Trump is gone from the Whitehouse they will remain as a poison in our electoral system, even if he vanishes.

Personally, I think Donald Trump will find it difficult to remain a king maker after he's out of the White House. We'll see. If he gets himself a good media gig he may endure. I may be wrong, but his pronouncements have gotten more and more weird of late. And I think Trump's successors in the Republican Party will find it difficult to ride the fanciful Trump wave. It may have been a lot easier to have supported the wave of lies than to keep it pumped up with new ones once the leader of the lying cabal is gone. But support for the nature of Donald Trump's presidency will sap the soul of the party. It's a soul that has been artificially pumped up these last four years. I don't see the Democrats, the party of free stuff and mass illegal immigration, as being much stronger. What we need is an industrial policy to strengthen the core of the country. Fat chance. The Democrats make their money by promising the disparate members of their coalition the stuff they want.

All this means the country is going nowhere successfully. (sigh)