I told myself that I was done with Trump. I resolved that I would just trust that he would soon be gone and that despite the warnings of fear mongers and hypercautious media types looking for audiences I would just continue to assume that Joe Biden would be inaugurated on January 20th, and from there we would begin the long trek back toward political normalcy. If I had any continuing political thoughts, it was my hope that today the Democrats would win both of the Georgia Senate seats and give the control of the Senate to Democrats. I was quite happy to be done with writing anything at all about politics. I wanted to treat the last four years and especially 2020 as a bad dream from which I had finally awakened. That was the way I saw it before last weekend when I heard on NPR that the Washington Post published the recording of Donald Trump’s most recent felony, his telephone call to Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.

It is hard for the country, or for me, to focus on more than one story at a time. The Trump call to Georgia effectively pushed everything else, including the facts related to the raging pandemic, off the front page of my mind. I have tried hard to get over Trump despite the obvious fact that he was going to continue to try to destroy what was left of the Republican Party. I was saying to myself that what Trump did no longer mattered to anyone other than those who were hoping to trade on his favor with his populist base. He was going soon, and I hoped like other defeated one-term presidents of my lifetime, George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, he would have no further impact on the country other than the amount of energy we would need to close the open wounds that he had left in his wake.  

For the past week, I had been in a forward-looking frame of mind. I had received Fareed Zakaria’s recently published book, Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World as a Christmas present. It is a book that frequently mentions Trump but focuses more on the more important concept of the world after the pandemic, and without saying so seems to assume that Trump will not be a continuing consideration. My second focus which I saw as derivative of several of the ten lessons in Zakaria’s book was going to be lifted from an article published by the Commonwealth Fund yesterday entitled “Predictions and Prescriptions for Health Care in 2021.” My proposed title for this post was “Predictions and Lessons.” That was before I made the mistake of listening to the evening news where I was reminded that the president was headed to a rally in Dalton, Georgia Monday evening presumably to support the two Republican candidates for the Senate, David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler, in today’s critical runoff election that will determine the control of the Senate’s agenda for the next two years. 

Dalton is a small city of about 35,000 people in northwest Georgia that lies closer to Chattanooga than Atlanta. It is less than an hour from where my youngest sister lives in Rome which is the largest city in that part of Georgia. Dalton’s claim to fame is that it is “the carpet capital of the world.” It is a diverse place, and perhaps because of its need for cheap labor, it is a “white minority” city with 42% non-Hispanic White, and 48% Hispanic or Latino residents. The demographics of the South and especially Georgia have changed dramatically over the last fifty years. My assumption is that many of the people who came to the rally last night lived in the countryside around the area and not in Dalton. The area is beautiful, but there is nowhere in America that is more “red” than the rural northwest corner of Georgia. 

As I watched the “umpteenth” report of the Trump/Raffensburger phone call on the evening news and then heard the prediction that Mike Pence had made in a Georgia church earlier on Monday that there would be things that would be coming out in the Senate on Wednesday that would change everything, I realized that it was still premature to be focusing on “Predictions and Prescriptions for Health Care in 2021” and Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World. I checked the Internet and learned that C-Span would be broadcasting the rally “live” and decided that I needed to watch. If you want to see a little bit for yourself, click here.

In the run-up to the president’s rally, C-Span was broadcasting the news conference of Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official who was making a point by point refutation of the president’s claims while standing in front of a chart labeled “CLAIM VS. FACT.” It was a good introduction to the president’s continuing progress toward 30,000 lies that would follow at 9 PM.

It was hard to judge the size of the crowd waiting for the president’s arrival from the video, but it was easy to see that the attendees were standing shoulder to shoulder, cheek to jowl, in their red MAGA hats sans facemasks. Ok, there were a few masks scattered through the crowd. I wondered how well this little bit of diversity was handled by the huge majority who were ready to lend their shouts of affirmation to every allegation the president made. These group events are pretty predictable. Deep into his speech, the president asked a rhetorical question. He wanted to know why the Democrats had not cheated for Hillary Clinton the way they had stolen the election for Joe Biden. At the mere mention of her name, the crowd began the chant of “LOCK HER UP” and I imagined COVID-19 viral particles riding on a carpet of mist over the crowd driven by their combined angry expulsions of respiratory vapor. I am getting ahead of myself.

Before the show began David Perdue who was one of the two theoretical beneficiaries of the evening made a cameo appearance via video since, ironically, he is quarantined because of COVID exposure from one of his staff. He promised that if elected he would be a bulwark against the communistic designs of Joe Biden who was intent on robbing them of their rights and their religion. He warned them that if he lost and if the Republicans lost the Senate they could kiss off America since Joe was the tool of the far left and the Senate stood as the last bulwark against the designs of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. He described all of the grief they would bring down on future generations of Americans who would be deprived of their freedoms. He hung a lot of crepe in less than five minutes. 

Shortly after Mr. Perdue finished slandering anyone who might be under the spell of the far left and was likely to want to kill unborn babies, take away religion, and deprive Georgians and all Americans of their second amendment rights, a booming voice that sounded like the voice of God announced the approach of the presidential helicopter. The crowd went wild as the presidential helicopter gently settled down gently behind the speakers’ platform. The president appeared in the doorway of the helicopter and made a regal descent of the stairs and then reappeared on the stage with his hands high in the air to acknowledge his welcome. Others in his party including Don, Jr., Ivanka, Mark Meadows, his Chief of Staff, Chief Sychophant Lindsey Graham, and others followed–including Kelly Loeffler, the candidate, who looked about as casual as a woman who with her husband is worth more than 800 million dollars can look. Her greatest distinction so far in her short career after her appointment last year to the Senate is that she is the richest person in the US Senate. Her only newsworthy accomplishment during her year in office has been to be accused of insider trading on information she gleaned in the Senate about the approaching pandemic. The whole idea of the rally was to help get her elected to a full term to defend the country. It is ironic that the women she employes on her WNBA basketball team don’t want her defense. 

The scene is today’s header. The president’s helicopter remained in the background throughout the whole event.  As a stage prop, and perhaps along with the formally attired Marines who stood guard, perhaps the scene was meant as a subtle reminder to every one of the powers that a president has at his disposal.

Somewhere during his almost 90-minute stream of consciousness presentation, the president acknowledged that Loeffler was at the rally. He seemed to have forgotten that the event was about her election and not his. She stood up and spoke for less than two minutes with the only newsworthy comment being that she was joining twelve other Republican senators and the vice president in their attempt on Wednesday to block the election of Joe Biden. Trump was on a roll. He also acknowledged Margorie Taylor Greene, the newly elected Congresswoman from northwest Georgia was also present. Representative Greene was certainly an appropriate person to acknowledge if you are battling a conspiracy. While running for Congress to represent northwest Georgia she had expressed racist views and support for QAnon conspiracy theories in a series of online videos. If you have not heard of Qanon, click here, It appears that the best way to defend America against the peril of a left-wing takeover is to trash the intent of the Constitution and prevent an orderly transfer of government to the care of the person whom a large majority voted to elect. 

We live in a strange world, and what followed would suggest that there is nothing stranger than a Trump rally. The evening was supposed to be about Georgia and the Senate. It was almost 90 minutes of a non stop presentation by the president of previously debunked conspiracy theories about how an election he really won was stolen from him. I was unable to turn my eyes away from the spectacle. I kept saying to myself that what I was seeing was not reality. Surely there is no possibility Trump will succeed in blocking or even delaying the Congressional affirmation of Joe Biden’s election that is to occur tomorrow. It is frightening to realize that the president’s next appearance will be tomorrow in Washington at a rally that will occur while Congress is certifying Biden’s election. A stage for his appearance is being constructed on the “Ellipse’’ with the White House looming behind it. In an article that you can find by clicking on the link above, ABC News has written:

Trump’s plan to attend Wednesday’s rally comes on the heels of audio surfacing of a Saturday phone call he had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the president demanded Raffensperger “find” the exact number of votes he would need to be declared the winner in Georgia, despite three separate counts confirmed that he lost.

“The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

President-elect Joe Biden won the state by 11,779 votes.

Many close advisers to the president were “beside themselves” and unaware of the call’s existence until the story was published first by the Washington Post Sunday evening, sources told ABC News.

The sources say Trump is increasingly isolated, describing a man who is only interested in the Electoral College certification process in Congress on Jan. 6.

I have noted several times before that a relationship with a narcissist always ends badly. Trump seems not to really care about what happens in the Georgia election. He doesn’t care about adding more stress and trauma to an America that is exhausted from his abuse and his neglect of his reponsibility to protect us. The future of America’s democracy is not on his list of concerns. It is time for him to exit and let us begin the repair of the damage that he has done. That seems unlikely to occur soon. I have no idea what will happen when Biden’s election is confirmed tomorrow because our president is out of control and there are still many who are fostering his fantasies. 

I hope that by Friday this storm will have passed, but I continue to be concerned that there is still much potential for damage to our nation ahead and that all that any of us can do is watch and pray that the Republican members of the Senate who are giving encouragement to the president’s damaging actions will stop this circus. I have never much cared about Tom Cotton the arch-conservative senator from Arkansas who until this week was a presidential wannabe and a staunch advocate for Trump. At the rally last night Trump said that he did not like Cotton anymore. Why? Because Cotton refused to join the growing attempts at a coup in the Senate on Wednesday.  The Washington Post reported on Cotton’s refusal to join the efforts being led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.  The Post article reads: