Right-wingers and a significant number of dissatisfied liberals have found unlikely allies in each other: both want four more years of Trump.
From the moment that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, liberals, leftists, and Never-Trumpers swore that they were Indivisible. They would Resist. They’d borrow from the Tea Party playbook, march in their pink hats, and protest time and time again, putting their bodies between the vulnerable and the Trumpish hordes if need be. Because if there’s anything that the Resistance understood, it’s that this country, its people, our democratic system, and the rule of law could not stand four more years of Trump.
Trump did not disappoint. From the first Muslim travel ban onward, his shock-and-awe Presidency produced a string of “greatest hits,” body checks against the body politic, dropping the gloves and taking bare-knuckled swings at the basic concept of civilized governance. He took foreign help to get elected. His political appointees seem purposely chosen to undermine the very agencies they are supposed to lead. Under his watch, honorably discharged veterans are deported while war criminals are pardoned. He separated families at the border and put children in cages. His signature tax cut further enriched the wealthy at the expense of the working and middle classes. He abused the power of his office to punish his political enemies. His trade wars and drone strikes brought immiseration and retaliation to patriotic Americans. The time he wasted pushing the notion that the severity of the novel coronavirus was a Democratic hoax cost lives and treasure. These are just the tip of the rotten iceberg.
Get ready for four more years of this. Here’s why.
Despite a record this corrosive, at the time of writing, fully 43% of Americans still think he’s doing a good job instead of poisoning the country from within. This group is coalescing around a clearly astroturfed, Tea Party-like campaign to “liberate” the economy by reopening workplaces and other venues where people will infect each other. Protesters carried signs with slogans like “Sacrifice the Weak,” “Give Me Liberty or Give Me COVID-19,” “If ballots don’t free us, bullets will,” and “Heil Whitmer,” a reference to Michigan’s governor, complete with a swastika. Currently, a majority of Americans are more worried about getting sick than they are about going broke. However, the longer these protests make their case to increasingly desperate workers who, despite the “booming” pre-COVID economy, are unable to afford a couple missing paychecks, the more likely we are to have four more years of this.
One would think that after living through three and a half years of Trumpism, the opposition would be chomping at the bit to grab their ballots with both hands and vote for anyone who seems halfway viable whose name isn’t associated with gaudy towers, impeachment, and refrigerated morgue trucks. In this case, that means former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President.
Consider: Trump is at his weakest, having decided to quit giving his nightly COVID addresses-cum-campaign rallies because so many detractors are outright mocking his suggestion that irradiating live humans or injecting bleach into their lungs could be a viable treatment for the virus. Meanwhile, Biden has the support of many African American voters, a crucial demographic that the anti-racist left claims to value. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich ought to be able to slide into the White House this election, let alone a former Vice President. And yet, the liberal base is doing what they do best: tearing their nominee to bits better than a Republican ever could.
“Biden is exactly the same as Trump,” they say. As if there were no daylight at all between the narcissistic shartnado in the Oval Office and a bland centrist, who, while certainly imperfect, is unlikely to continue turning American governance into quite the same sadistic carnival as has President Dunning-Kruger. He’s not your kindly Uncle Bernie, but he probably doesn’t want you dead.
The “Reopen” protesters, then, have found unlikely allies in the “Resistance.” Both will support Trump in November, whether enthusiastically or through indifference to the man they once considered to be Satan’s orangest fanboy. We could have a different outcome, but that would require liberals to get as excited about voting for Joe Biden as right wing protesters are about dying of COVID-19.
This is how we get four more years of an unleashed Trump.
Prove me wrong.
Related: Why Should You Bother Voting?
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