Heard a radio report about California’s Shasta County switching from automated to hand counting of election ballots. Ditching their Dominion equipment. The estimated cost is $1.6 million or more. Which cash-strapped Shasta County can ill-afford. To count 70,000 votes. That’s over $21 per ballot.
Such craziness is fallout from Trump’s 2020 election lie, undermining confidence in our vote counting. And involved in the Shasta story is giant Trumpsucker asshole clown Mike “My Pillow” Lindell.
Trump made up the “vote steal” lie because his damaged brain couldn’t accept losing. Anyone with an undamaged brain knows that. His psychologist niece Mary’s book tells how Trump absorbed his father’s dictum that people are either killers or losers. It’s guided his life.
In Trump’s upcoming trials, concerning his own effort to steal the 2020 election, a key question is whether he knew he’d lost, or truly believed his lies. Tough to answer, with a psyche so messed up.
How much better he’d have looked had he instead done the right thing, and graciously conceded the election. As every other losing presidential candidate in U.S. history had done. A better launchpad for a 2024 comeback? But doing the right thing, and graciousness, are not in Trump’s wheelhouse. At all. Ever. Never passing up an opportunity for vileness. He thinks it makes him look strong — a killer.
And the great irony is that all his vile behavior since November 4, 2020 has done nothing to counteract the fact that he lost. To the contrary: it has occasioned unceasing reminders, in responsible news media, that he did lose, and he’s a liar as well as a loser. Now central facts in America’s story. Truly making Trump the biggest loser of all time.
There’d be some satisfaction there, except that tens of millions of Americans are on the opposite page entirely. Totally invested in his shit. Like in pathetic Shasta County, wasting taxpayer money on a harebrained scheme inspired by Trump’s “election fraud” nonsense. Shasta is just one small example of a much wider syndrome. There’s something seriously broken in this country.
A recent article in The Economist examined how much impact AI, generating “deepfakes” and other sorts of disinformation, might have on the 2024 election. Not likely much, the report concluded. Turns out those hungriest for partisan nonsense are zealots feeding their confirmation bias, rather than ordinary folks. While people tend to be so wedded to their political stances that they aren’t swayed by any news, real or fake. Seeing it all as a cacophony they ignore.
Yet that mentality is propelled by all the stuff out there that makes people distrust everything. Trump’s “election fraud” lie fed right into this. Americans’ overall trust in our institutions — and in each other — has been collapsing. A very bad thing.
