Could Trump Win All 50 States?
The Case for a Red/Orange November Trumpslide
September 9 2020
Given this is 2020, every prediction about the US Presidential election should come with a hefty qualification. Sure it’s less than two months away, but who the heck knows what will happen before then?
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both get the ‘rona and are replaced by Hillary and, hey why not, Michelle Obama? It’s not the weirdest thing that woulda happened this year. Who knows: there might not even be an election, or at least as we know it, and there’s a fair chance that if it does go ahead we won’t know the result until next year anyway.
But let’s assume things remain somewhat as they are now, almost certain October surprise notwithstanding. This is my bold and highly unpopular, trigger-warning-required prediction: Donald Trump will win all 50 states.
For anyone who follows politics on Medium, this seems like an almost incomprehensible outcome. Sure, many people are grudgingly starting to do the necessary mental work to prepare for four more years of the Orange One.
But such is the visceral hatred that exists for this individual — a hatred that is fairly astonishing for many not inside this ideological bubble — there appear few progressives pessimistic enough about the morality of their fellow Americans to accept he could attract the votes to win in a complete red-wash.
But I’m here to give you the hard but — in my humble outsider down under opinion — necessary truth that a Trumpslide is very much on the cards.
Why?
Firstly, I would like to rehash an argument I made a few months ago, which seems as relevant as ever now: liberal friends, you need to wake up to the fact that you are being trolled.
Not just by the President, who seems to be getting too much enjoyment out of saying things that he knows and doesn’t care will cement your existing belief that he is a stupid, incompetent, bigoted narcissist.
But you are also getting trolled by his entire supporter base. They find it hilarious that people could think Trump — someone who, it is worth remembering, has risen to the top of America’s business, entertainment and political arenas — is an intellectual simpleton. And by this stage, they appear to be at peace with the fact that they have largely been written off as racists and misogynists — claiming it more as a badge of honour. In fact, it seems quite obvious to me that they are right now getting their own back, by deliberately sabotaging the already fatally flawed polls that true believers are still clinging to as hope that Sleepy Joe-mentum has not completely stalled.
And this leads to the main culprit in this whole debacle: the mainstream media, an institution dying a slow, painful but regrettably deserved death right in front of our eyes. Their performance in covering the key events of this year has often been stunningly incompetent, to the extent that a cynic like me would judge this incompetence as being deliberate.
The fear porn narrative they have driven about the pandemic should hopefully now be becoming obvious to most people. To be clear, I’m not a Covid denier, but just a questioner. I absolutely accept there was a need for urgency and even overreaction as the pandemic initially took shape, such was the degree and extent of uncertainty that existed, and that some imposition on normal life is still warranted.
But it has been quite astonishing to many neutral onlookers to see an outright refusal of key news outlets to admit that this pandemic might not be as bad as it was originally thought. Shouldn’t this be good news? Yet we have articles such as this, seemingly doing their best to will a greater number of dead Americans into existence.
The media, through the public figures the choose to trumpet, remain fixated on a vaccine as the only pathway out of our dire, virus-ridden new reality. This is despite the increasingly accepted alternate reality — boosted by the CDC’s now well publicised 6% figure — that the danger COVID-19 presents to anyone except the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions is no more than other risk-factors we have come to accept as part of life.
You are going to see a pattern in this article: if you think it is selfish that mostly healthy people show little concern for a virus that is almost certainly not going to affect their health, that isn’t the point. As I also argued previously:
“While a lot of people have died, more than a lot of people didn’t. In fact a hell of a lot of people were barely affected in any tangible sense by the virus itself. They were affected, however, by its response — by the lockdowns. I’m not sure if you fully appreciate how pissed they were about this, when you ordered them to stay at home (unless it was to protest), to close their businesses (unless it was a big business), to even stop going to the beach.”
But many of these people are at the same time arguing that this whole lockdown business doesn’t really seem about health when long-accepted health-promoting behaviours are at the same time being suppressed. This is not even taking into account the suppression of seemingly safe and effective treatments for newly infected individuals — notably but not limited to the combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Azithromycin — that make a vaccine largely redundant.
What, hydroxychloroquine? That dangerous quack medicine that only Trump and that African Doctor who believes demonic aliens are impregnating our women would be stupid enough to recommend? No, snap out of it, please. It is not just a treatment for COVID-19, now being used around the world and being supported by observational study after observational study — it also now appears to be a miracle cure for the mind control that has been keeping people blind to the corruption that exists within Western medical institutions. Once you realise that hydroxychloroquine does work, how poorly designed and dishonest those studies were that made it seem ineffective and dangerous, and just how obvious this fact has been for some time, this particular ivory tower begins to crumble in on itself.
Then we have the coverage of the protests that emerged following the now regrettably politicized death of George Floyd.
Again, this coverage did not begin in bad faith: we all saw the footage, we all understood the visceral outrage that it evoked, even if it was not for many of us to feel the full extent of that outrage ourselves. But the coverage of these protests and the needless rioting and looting that it has morphed into in many cities has grown increasingly detached and unhinged from reality. This is not just the reality that these are no longer peaceful protests but rather the playgrounds of professional and wannabe anarchists, but also how this violence is negatively effecting everyday Americans, including those black Americans they are supposedly representing. It’s no surprise that Democrats eventually came around to denouncing the rioters that they had up until recently been enabling, even if they saved face by blaming Trump in the process.
So, again: the point is not whether you choose to believe what the mainstream media are telling you about the protests, but the fact that an increasing amount of Americans do not.
Just like it is not the point whether or not you think it is reasonable to make a martyr out of a charged sex offender in the name of racist police violence; or hailing as peaceful protestors three felons — including a domestic abuser and another a pedophile — to justify slurring their 17 year old shooter as a white supremacist.
It is the fact that an increasing amount of Americans do not.
Just like it is not the point whether you think it is a distraction from the issue at hand to point out how many more black people are killing each other, because an increasing amount of Americans do not.
The point is that there will be no escaping from the true reality of each of these issues come November 3rd.
But back to Trump, because that’s probably why you are still (potentially hate) reading.
You are probably still convinced that he referred to neo-Nazi skinheads as fine people. Guess what, he didn’t, and it is clear for anyone to see this if they do their due diligence and go back to what he actually said.
What about that time he mocked a disable reporter? Look, I feel dirty even trying to offer a defense here, but the fact is that Trump has done this similar actions to mock people multiple times before.
Was it still inappropriate and almost certainly offensive? Yes. But this is Trump: he doesn’t give a fuck, and he has a brutal consistency in how he treats people he doesn’t like, which makes many people uncomfortable in a way that can easily be interpreted as hate speech.
Like when he called Mexicans rapists and animals? Again, the true shockingness of these statements is that we never expect to hear such bluntness from a politician. These comments do push the boundaries, and certainly act as dog whistles, but the truth at their heart is what a lot of people want to hear.
They want it acknowledged that a large number of people crossing the border are criminals, which was the actual context of his comments at his campaign launch. They also want acknowledged the absolute brutality and inhumanity of mostly Mexican violent gangs such as MS-13, which was the actual target of Trump’s ‘animals’ comment.
Yeh, some of the people who appreciated these comments are racists. But others are not, and are more simply those able to understand the nuance and unpopular truths contained within these otherwise offensive statements, even if they cringe while doing so.
I am fully aware of how this article will be read by many people: as a defense of the indefensible. But I am also past the point of caring. I’ve spent the last few months doing my own trolling of liberals in the comments sections of this site, not because I enjoy it (although a part of me that I would rather not acknowledge does seem to enjoy it) but because I believe it is necessary.
You need to wake up. You are being trolled by Trump and his supporters. You are being lied to by the media. And let not anyone forget: you are being gaslit by the party you are putting your trust in to save you, when they gave you a senile candidate whose running mate has strongly implied that he was both a racist and a rapist.
And all these things are becoming increasingly obvious to neutral observers, and increasingly worrying for those observers with a trace of compassion, not to mention those like me who have loved ones caught up in this spell.
So that’s why I’m happy to go out on a limb here, even if just for the shock value: Trump will win all 50 states. Sure, if it does happen, people will undoubtably blame it on wide scale election interference. And sure, even with such interference, it still stretches basic political credibility to think that liberal strongholds like New York and California are at play here. But hey, it is 2020.
And imagine how smug I would be allowed to act if I’m right.