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Of Course, He's Going to Be a Dick About It

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | November 9, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | November 9, 2020 |


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A lot of people I talk to are afraid of the next three months, of what Donald Trump might do to wrangle back the Presidency. I’m not really worried about that. There are too many forces working against Trump now, and he’s not a very smart person. I expect there might be isolated incidents of violence. I expect a number of people behind large conspiracies will be caught before those conspiracies can be executed because most of the people behind large conspiracies are not very bright. The truth is: The race was not that close. Unless Donald Trump can get 45,000 votes (and counting) overturned in Pennsylvania (and those don’t even include the votes that came in the mail after November 3rd), there is no path.

Look: Rudy Guiliani — the man who tried to get a blow job from a fake reporter in a Borat film — is in charge of Donald Trump’s legal challenges. He gave a press conference in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. They’re not exactly great legal minds over there. America and Biden have got this, but that doesn’t mean that Trump will concede. That doesn’t mean that the Trump appointee in the GSA will approve the transition anytime soon. It’s gonna be a long few weeks where Trumpworld will try and create as much uncertainty as possible.

There is no uncertainty, folks. Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20th. Donald Trump will leave office the same day. This man is not going to change that.

But still, we will flinch. Because we have been traumatized by the last four years, and for the foreseeable future, every time we see an ALL CAPS tweet, we might jump out of our skin. Those man-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters in middle America will still make us sick to our stomachs (they had them on The Daily this morning, and I had to turn it off). To be honest, I’m more scared of 2024 — my anxiety is very forward-thinking, and all it can think about now is, “How do we ensure that no one like Trump is elected in four years? What’s our game plan for that?”

For now? It took us a while to accept the results in 2016. It took us a while to come to terms with the fact that so many people would vote for Donald Trump (and we’re still obviously working through that). In 2016, I think we expected that someone would come out of nowhere and miraculously save us. It’s how people like Louise Mensch and The Palmer Blog the Krassenstein brothers and all of those people who leave comments below every Trump tweet managed to gain so much influence immediately after the election: Because a lot of people were prepared to believe anything that might save us from four years of Trump. Do you know how many insane Seth Abramson Twitter threads that Democrats sifted through for signs of hope?!

We eventually came to terms with it. They will, too. It may take them longer, however, because those beliefs in conspiracy theories are so deeply rooted and their distrust of the media so great (also, Fox News ain’t helping!). On the other hand, Biden is not a particularly divisive figure, and Trump lost by 3 million votes the first time, and it’s looking like closer to 5-7 million votes this time. I mean, honestly, their argument is: We need to somehow throw out 50,000 Biden votes in Philadelphia so that we can install minority rule again?

In the words of Joe Biden: “Come on, man.”

Anyway, Pfizer announced that their coronavirus vaccine looks to be about 90 percent effective this morning. This news is excellent. There is no other way to put that. It’s fantastic. I feel incredibly optimistic about that and I’m already making plans to see Wonder Woman 1984 in theaters. Donald Trump and his followers are trying to take credit for it (though it was not part of Operation Warp Speed). I don’t care. I honestly do not. In fact, I don’t give a shit who gets credit because in four years, that’s not going to be an issue in the 2024 election, and the 2020 election has already been decided, and it went against the guy who let 250,000 people die while he waited on a vaccine to save us.

All I care about is how our next President will use this information to govern. The first thing that Biden did after he became President-elect, basically, was to hire his Coronavirus task force, the names of which were announced this morning. Moreover, this vaccine news didn’t change anything about Biden’s approach, because he knows literally tens of thousands more people could die between now and the time the vaccine is available. He wants to prevent that while Trump wants to take some sort of vaccine victory lap that will kill another 100,000 people.

I’m probably going to disagree with Biden a lot over the next four years, but those disagreements will not be toxic. He’s a good man, he knows what he’s doing, and I trust him. My only hope is that Biden does something that Obama did not do particularly effectively, which is: While he’s unf**king the nation over the next four years, I hope that Biden also has an eye on the future — not for him, but for the country — to ensure that 2016-2020 never fucking happens again. We can’t go through another four years of that.



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