Tag Archives: 2024 election

World has gone mad!

There can be no getting around what I believe is obvious, which is that our world has gone mad, nuts, bonkers, into the loony bin … and beyond.

I’m going to harken to the 2024 presidential election in which a tiny plurality of Americans decided to ignore the obvious warning signs about the Republican Party nominee for president and elected this guy to a second term in the White House.

Yep. Donald Trump told us what was in store if we elected him. He would be the “retribution” for the MAGA cult and that he would all by himself fix what he said was wrong with the greatest nation on Earth. My goodness! The message could not possibly have been clearer!

He took office on Jan. 20, 2025 and commenced to do precisely what he said he would do. And no one seemed to care! OK, many of us did care. We have been raising holy hell ever since the end of the ’24 campaign. But those in power have blown it off.

It’s getting worse by the day. I read Trump’s “Thanksgiving message” and wanted to puke onto my lap. He hurled racial slurs, insults, epithets and utter rubbish at his opponents. Damn near every word that poured forth from his overfed pie hole was a lie.

Now there appears to be significant evidence of cognitive decline. He’s falling asleep in Oval Office meetings. Try reading transcripts of statements he makes and if you can discern a cogent message out of them, be sure to broadcast it loudly and clearly because no one has been able to make a shred of sense of what this guy is saying.

I’ll say it again, with gusto … which is that we have gone ’round the bend, kids. It is imperative that we collect ourselves and get busy fixing what is fundamentally wrong with our republic.

Trump is POTUS for all of us … yes?

One of the many lessons that Donald J. Trump cannot — or will not — grasp is the notion that as the nation’s highest elected official he serves as leader for the entire country and those who occupy every square mile of it.

Therefore, when Trump denigrates great American cities as “hellholes,” or “war-ravaged,” or communities ravaged by “drugs, sex traffickers, killers and gang members,” he is condemning the leadership coming from what is left of the White House.

I need to remind Trump that he was elected in 2024 by a tiny plurality of Americans. He won the Electoral College vote by a slim, but decisive margin. It was not the “landslide” he keeps calling it. However, he took office as president of the entire nation. He owes it to the people who live in our great cities to give them the attention and tender loving care he keeps heaping onto the laps of those who reside in deep-red states and counties. It’s not happening.

What is happening is that he is sending soldiers into cities to rid them of crime that doesn’t exist. I laughed out loud when I read that Trump had referred to my hometown of Portland as a city “at war,” that it is being swallowed whole by criminals who are living there illegally. What a load of bull dookey … you know?

The only thing that Portland residents have in common with residents of other great cities is that most of them voted for Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

Talk about politicization …

Mandate … shmandate

I want to lay out a few numbers for you in the wake of Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the 2024 presidential election in a “massive landslide.”

Trump’s popular vote plurality sits at 1.47%. He won with fewer than 50% of the popular vote; to be clear, that’s not a huge deal, as other presidents have taken office after winning pluralities and not majorities. Trump’s vote count stands at 49.71%, with Kamala Harris’ total at 48.24%.

He said this past weekend he won the popular vote by “millions and millions” of ballots. The actual count is that he won by about 2.3 million votes out of more than 155 million ballots cast. Yes, he won more votes than any other Republican in U.S. history. The 155 million ballot count was the second-greatest total in U.S. history. The 2020 election is the record holder, with more than 158 million cast for president.

I just feel the need to keep Trump’s victory in some perspective … you know what I mean?

Do not disbelieve Trump’s warnings

Donald Trump’s pathological lying makes it impossible for me to believe virtually nothing that flies out of his yapper.

Except for one thing.

That would be the warnings he has issued about what he intends to do when he becomes president of the United States of America.

When he has said he lost “many friends” on 9/11, we learned he attended zero funerals for his friends after that tragedy. He boasts about his “landslide” victory in 2016 when in fact he lost the popular vote and was elected solely on the basis of the Electoral College. He inflates his net worth, his intelligence and says he hires only “the best people”; all lies.

But he says he will toss the Constitution aside on his first day in office and will govern “like a dictator” for one day. That kind of boast … I believe.

He has said he intends to pardon many of the Jan. 6 traitors imprisoned after being convicted of seeking to overturn the 2020 election. He vows to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with Ukraine. He intends to “drill baby, drill” even though we’re now producing more petroleum than ever in our history.

Trump will take office with plenty of executive authority at his disposal. He says his 2024 victory gave him a “mandate” to use that power. Well, it did nothing of the sort. His victory was narrow. He will deploy that authority immediately upon taking office, or so he has vowed.

I will take him at his word on that, but on nothing else.

Blog takes brief turn

This blog took form as a political venue for me to vent and for others to respond to my spewage. I haven’t let up much over the many years I’ve been writing it.

For the next few days, during the holiday season, I am going to dial back by venom on High Plains Blogger just a tad in honor of Christmas, Hannukah and whatever else we want to celebrate.

You know my feelings already about the just-concluded election. It didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. I am going to spare you the intense reaction I am feeling in my gut about the decisions the POTUS-elect is making. I will seek to be civil for the time being.

I also will concentrate more on other subjects of interest during this time of year. We had a municipal election in Princeton this past week, with the mayor losing in a runoff against a challenger. I’ll have some things to say about that.

Other stuff crops up, too.

So, with that I’ll let y’all enjoy your day. I will enjoy mine.

If I were doing any better right now … I’d be twins.

No mandate here, Donald

Donald Trump and his collection of MAGA goons/cultists keep yapping about a “mandate” that the Nov. 5 presidential election delivered to the GOP ticket.

Mandates are born from electoral landslides. Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, while significant, doesn’t constitute a mandate.

To wit:

  • 1952, Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower scored a landslide win over Adlai Stevenson. His mandate was to build an interstate highway system that revolutionized motor vehicle travel in this nation.
  • 1964, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson won election huge over Barry Goldwater and then embarked on the Great Society effort that produced landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.
  • 1972, Republican President Richard Nixon swept to re-election over George McGovern and then managed the following year to end our combat involvement in the Vietnam War.
  • 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan capitalized on President Carter’s bad luck with the Iranian hostage crisis and high inflation. His mandate enabled him to restore national confidence in our government. Same for the mandate he secured with his 49-state landslide in 1984 over Walter Mondale.

So, if Donald Trump is going to boast about mandates in the 2024 election, I must remind y’all that all the examples I cited came from campaigns that produced enormous popular vote margins, not to mention Electoral College wipeouts of historic proportions.

At last count, Kamala Harris is continuing to whittle Trump’s vote margin down to less than a majority and a plurality that stands at 1.55%.

Will the new president heed those numbers as he continues to assemble his executive team? Hardly.

Trump fills out clown show cast

Donald J. Trump continues to fill out his cast of Cabinet-level goofballs, fruitcakes and assorted loyalists … just as he promised he would prior to the 2024 presidential election.

The latest cast member to sign on is Linda McMahon, the former exec with the World Wrestling and Entertainment outfit run by her husband, Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon has been nominated to be our nation’s education secretary.

Her education credentials? The silence you hear is evidence that she doesn’t have anything in her background. No administration experience. Nothing, man!

But … she is a Trump loyalist along with attorney general nominee and one-time DOJ investigative target Matt Gaetz, Fox News blowhard and defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Kennedy political scion and anti-vaxxer health and human services boss RFK Jr., and Russian agent and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard.

I mean, good grief! What the hell is the POTUS-elect seeking to do here?

The only good news I can find is that there appear to be enough Republican senators who are finding their long-squishy backbone to block many of the nuttiest of the nut jobs Trump has gathered around him.

Loser showed grace; the winner showed … up

It was a little thing, but the gestures spoke volumes about the man who won the 2024 presidential election and the woman who lost it.

Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election the day after they declared  Donald Trump the winner. In her speech, she told the crowd that she had phoned the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory. The response from her supporters gathered before her was understandably muted. But she made the gesture and acknowledged it publicly with grace and class.

How did Trump respond to his stunning victory? He stood before his rally goers … and didn’t say a single word about Kamala Harris.

To be candid, I found his snubbing of his opponent to be worthy of scorn.

I’ve listened to many winning candidates over many years watching elections and listened to the voice they used to accept victory. To a man, they have always recognized the concession call that came from the loser. To varying degrees, they also managed to speak well of the candidate’s losing effort. You’ve heard it, too: “I want to thank my opponent for the tough campaign and for accepting defeat with grace and dignity.”

We didn’t get that kind of magnanimous gesture from Trump. Nope. He chose to refuse to recognize the history that Harris made as the first woman of color ever nominated to run for the presidency. He also refused to recognize the spirited and, yes, hard-charging campaign she ran.

Am I dismayed at Trump’s lack of class in declaring victory? Yes. Am I surprised? Not one single bit!

Get busy, Texas Democrats

Looks to me as if the Texas Democratic Party has some work to do — I mean plenty of work to do — if it hopes to regain its footing as a competitive political organization in this great state.

I lost count of the emails and text messages I got from Democratic senatorial nominee Colin Allred proclaiming how he had Sen. Ted Cruz on the run, that he had caught the Cruz Missile in the fight for his U.S. Senate seat.

On Election Day, Allred fell — shall we say — far, far short of the mark. Cruz rolled to re-election. Allred now has to find another job, as he surrendered his Dallas House seat to compete for the Senate.

That was the story across the state. Democrats everywhere met the same kind of electoral fate that befell Allred.

Oh, and the presidential vote total? Donald Trump rolled to an easy win over Kamala Harris, capturing the state’s 40 Electoral College votes that seemed to be in the bag since before Harris became the nominee this past summer.

Texas Democratic Party chair Gilberto Hinojosa has resigned. Good! See ya around, Mr. Chairman.

Democrats have been talking bravely about a potential turnaround in Texas since 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within 2 percentage points of defeating Cruz. It’s been downhill for Democrats ever since.

What’s the answer for Texas Democrats? How about starting from scratch? Perhaps the party should stop seeking to placate different racial and ethnic groups. Maybe it should forgo trying to warm up to LGBTQ groups. Perhaps the party should stop fighting the last key court decision.

A turn toward authenticity could be one answer. I remember when Texas Democrats were led by individuals who portrayed themselves as who they were. Shouldn’t that be enough?

The Democratic Party — and I am in their corner — need to get real busy real fast if it wants to be competitive in Texas.

Moral standards have vanished

I will go to my grave flummoxed, flabbergasted and frustrated totally over the lack of moral standards we now require of candidates for president of the United States.

We have elected an individual who has admitted to serial philandering, admitted to grabbing women by their private area, been convicted of 34 felony counts associated with his campaign, been convicted of raping a journalist and convicted of paying an adult film actress $130,000 to keep quiet about a one-night stand that the president says never occurred.

That just scratches the top of my itchy head.

It’s OK for a candidate for the highest office in land to do those things, if you believe the horsesh** pushed by Donald Trump’s loyal cult followers.

What is going to happen when a politician from the Democratic Party side of the aisle gets caught committing any one of those things enumerated here? The MAGA crowd will go ballistic. So will the Oval Office occupant. They will engage in selective outrage because their guy got away with it.

It is disgraceful, disgusting and duplicitous conduct at its worst.