Tag Archives: 2024 election

national news

Hoping to hear truth behind what we received

I am hoping the day will arrive — and that I’ll be alive to watch its arrival — when we will understand how American voters got suckered twice into electing a known fraud, con man and imposter to the nation’s highest office.

To be honest, I am still in a fog over that one. We once demanded the very best among us to serve in the presidency. With Donald John Trump we have gotten the worst among us.

What makes this case even more maddening is that Trump forewarned us himself about what we would get if we elected him. He once declared in the open that he would be the “retribution” of those who believe they have been done wrong. Boy howdy, has this clown delivered the goods on that one.

There were plenty of high-powered individuals who had told us to be wary of what we were swallowing. Mitt Romney, the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee, called Trump a “phony, a fraud,” and spelled out in excruciating detail evidence he had to make such a claim. Our collective response was to push it all aside. Many MAGA faithful called Romney guilty of spitting sour grapes. Well, Mitt was spot on!

A POTUS who should have more important matters to occupy his time instead vents on a reflecting pool, bitches about the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and continues to denigrate the records of his immediate predecessors … namely Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

This is what he told us we would get if we elected him to the White House? Yep. It damn sure is!

Shame on American voters for guzzling this swill.

national news, political news

How’d we go from best to worst?

This point deserves to be repeated, so … therefore I will do so.

I will go to the Great Beyond never understanding how the American voting public could stop insisting on selecting the best among us for high office and settle for the worst among us.

Our values have been turned on their ears. We no longer care if our president is a serial philanderer, or that he is a convicted felon, lacks any semblance of a moral compass, or mocks war heroes, disabled Americans.

We set aside his lies as long as he tells us what we want to hear.

I am not going to give up on the idea that our quest for the best of us is a lost cause. It can return. Indeed, it did briefly with the election in 2020 of President Biden. Then he was gone. We got the nimrod he defeated in 2020 back for a second term after he pledged in plain English that his next term would be run with a vengeance.

Many of us said, “Hey, that’s OK! As long as he delivers the goods.” Donald Trump hasn’t delivered a damn thing!

national news

Year ends in frustration

I hereby declare that the final post on High Plains Blogger in 2025 will end with my hands thrown into the air accompanied by the sigh of frustration from an American patriot who still cannot grasp what has become of the country he loves more than life itself.

That would be me, of course.

The year that is drawing to a merciful close will give way soon to many new opportunities to correct what has gone so terribly wrong. I await 2026 with undying optimism that we’re going to snap out of it, we’ll come to our senses and we will begin charting the corrective course that will save us all.

Donald John Trump was elected in 2024 to another term as the White House gatekeeper. I am finding it difficult these days even to refer to him as president. I vowed after the 2016 election that I would decline to attach the word “President” directly in front of Trump’s name. I have been faithful to that pledge. I accept your congratulations.

Now that we’re one year into the second term, I cannot even refer to his second victory as a “re-election.” The dude did get his melon thumped in 2020 by President Biden and he debased the office even more by declaring his refusal to accept the result and then incited the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The individual is a disgrace.

The year was spent hiring incompetent boobs to run multibillion-dollar government agencies. The more I think about it, the more logical it seems that the imbecile in chief would surround himself with agency heads who at some level make the man in charge seem smarter than he is. It really hasn’t worked.

What is the remedy? Midterm election. We’re going to elect the entire and House one-third of the Senate in November 2026. The notion that the House is likely to flip from R to D when the ballots are counted gives me hope that a competent House speaker will be able to steer that congressional chamber back to doing what we expect of it. The House will return to governing!

We also have to consider that a third Trump impeachment may occur. I don’t want that to happen. If it does, I want the House to produce proof that could persuade enough GOP House members that they have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump has violated his oath of loyalty to the Constitution.

The reconstruction of our democratic principles can begin in this new year. I will use this blog to do my tiny part to ensure the project gets completed.

national news, political news

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.

political news

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 …

national news

Mandate … shmandate

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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?

Donald Trump, national news

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.

local news

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.

national news, political news

No mandate here, Donald

7 Comments

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.

Donald Trump

Trump fills out clown show cast

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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.