Donald Trump’s lame duck nightmare

| 9:00 pm EST November 1, 2020
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A new Stanford University study shows that across 18 rallies Donald Trump’s campaign has held between June 20 and September 30, the campaign may have caused around 30,000 COVID-19 infections and over 700 COVID deaths. In Trump world, that’s called “tough shit,” “collateral damage,” or “a noble sacrifice.” In reality, we call that gross negligence, a dereliction of humanity, and titanic irresponsibility. 30,000 cases is almost 6 times more than the entire state of Washington has had in the last week.

The Trump strategy to tackling COVID is the same strategy your dog takes after it craps on your pillow — forget about it and leave the mess for somebody else to clean up. This analogy actually takes me to my point in this article: if Joe Biden wins, and god willing he does, then I predict that Donald Trump and his lackeys will make it a spiteful point to ensure a difficult, vexatious, and ineffective transition of power to Joe Biden.

Despite his win in the 2016 election, Donald Trump managed to be a sore winner. His insecurity about Secretary Clinton’s popular vote win and President Obama’s inauguration crowd size are but two of myriad examples of Trump being a sore winner. When I imagine Trump losing the 2020 election, I think “sore loser” is a woefully inadequate term.

If Trump indeed loses and sabotages the nascent Biden administration, you can bet that Trump’s lame duck will be outrageous in other ways as well. This Politico article goes into detail about some of what Trump might try to do during his rancorous lame duck, including bizarre pardons, lashings out at the “deep state” (i.e., career executive branch agencies), mass firings of top officials, mass records destructions (this one in particular has concerned me for awhile now), engaging in military conflict, and further weakening the already pathetic pandemic response.

This article by The Atlantic offers some advice on how to defend against a malign Trump lame duck, but whatever the case, we might see the United States’ institutions tested like never before.