Stop handing Donald Trump victories
With a few noble exceptions, the mainstream media pundits have opportunistically declared that this is Doomsday Week. They’ve decided to exploit your fears over the impeachment trial sham acquittal by insisting that Donald Trump will become more “emboldened” and “brazen” and “unrestrained” and whatever scary buzzwords they’re all copy-pasting from each other right now.
Trump has been 100% emboldened, 100% brazen, and 100% unrestrained in his corrupt criminality since he took office. He’s already treasonously tried to blackmail a foreign country into helping him in the 2020 election. He didn’t succeed. His Ukraine scheme didn’t gain him a single 2020 vote. In fact he failed so badly at it, he got impeached for it. So what if he’s getting acquitted? He was going to keep doing this same exact stuff whether or not impeachment, acquittal, or any other constitutional construct came into play. Trump is Trump. He’s not in any way influenced by what anyone in Congress has to say about his antics.
Remember when the media told us that Trump was going to magically pardon everyone? His people went to prison instead. Remember when the media said Trump was going to take us to war with North Korea, and that it was going to somehow magically get him reelected? Remember when the media said the same exact thing about Iran? Remember when the media told us that the House impeachment hearings were somehow going to cause his pathetic approval rating to go up? How many times can these pundits be wrong with their doomsday prophecies?
That’s because it’s not about being correct. It’s about scaring the crap out of you, so you’ll stay tuned in. It’s about ratings, ratings, ratings, ratings, and ratings. There are no other factors. Why else would most of the mainstream media pundits be so willing to be wrong over and over again? They figure that in the end you’ll be so relieved that none of their doomsday prophecies came true, it won’t occur to you that they were lying to you when they said it going to happen.
It’s not just that the pundits are pushing the vague notion that this new “emboldened” Donald Trump is going to magically get smarter with his dimwitted scheming. A number of pundits are reaching so far to come up with such histrionic over-the-top doomsday scenarios to keep you tuned in, you almost feel bad at their desperation. One of the most popular laughably fictional scenarios is that Trump will simply decide not to leave office if he loses, and that this will somehow magically work out for him. This weekend we’ve seen the emergence of an even more laugh-out-loud scenario in which Trump simply declares martial law and/or cancels the election.
Let’s try to come back to the land of the sane. Donald Trump isn’t within a million miles of somehow being able to magically cancel the election. He just isn’t. That’s a joke. And if Trump loses the election but then refuses to leave office, the new president will be sworn in whether Trump participates in the inauguration or not. Trump will no longer be president, and law enforcement would then drag him out of the White House by his heels. These doomsday scenarios are a joke. You’d have to think Trump is a wizard with a magic wand to believe that any of this utter bullshit could happen.
If you believe that any of the above could actually happen, you’ve become so brainwashed by the doomsday pundits, you – in all seriousness – probably need a psychological intervention. If you’re repeating these hallucinatory doomsday fantasies about Trump having magic powers, then you’re handing Trump leverage that he doesn’t have, and you’re doing extreme harm to your own side. Stop it. Stop repeating this hysterical nonsense. Stop listening to pundits who feed you this garbage to try to scare you. We have enough actual problems to fight against, without making up insane doomsday scenarios that obviously aren’t going to happen. Stop being your own enemy by assigning magical powers to Trump that he obviously, laughably, does not have. When you go around spewing this crap, you are your own worst enemy.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report