REASON(S): Will we take the physician's challenge?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2024

Blue America's broken toys:  A funny thing happened on the way to the future in Donald Trump's latest interview.

Time magazine had named him its Person of the Year. In the accompanying interview, the incoming strongman allegedly made the statement we highlight below:

Trump Says His 1st Acts Will Include Deportations and Jan. 6 Pardons

[...]

The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted on Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Mr. Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.

Intriguing! That's from the news report in the New York Times about the interview session. We're intrigued for the following reason:

According to the incoming president, he himself ran a flawless campaign this year. Meanwhile, the Democrats—the opposing party—had been "out of touch with Americans" during that same campaign.

In our view, the Times' account of what the strongman said is basically accurate. With apologies for the length of the excerpt, here's the relevant part of Time magazine's fawning transcript: 

TIME (12/12/24): You had an extraordinary year. You lived it and you know it. You cleared the field in the Republican campaign. You spent part of your campaign in a courtroom. You were almost shot to death on the trail. Your opponent dropped out, and then you won the swing states, which many people did not expect. What's one thing that we should know about your experience this year that we don't know?

TRUMP: Well, I think we ran a flawless campaign. It was, it was really quite something. I called it 72 Days of Fury. There were no days off. There were no timeouts. If you made a mistake, it would be magnified at levels that nobody's ever seen before. So you couldn't make a mistake. And I think we just really ran well. It was a drive to go through it. It started 72 days out. For some reason, it just seemed to be it. And I worked very hard. I've been, I've been given credit by, actually, the reporters that followed me, because it was, you know, just, it just was all the time, every day, and we said the right things. We said things that were on the minds of the country. I think the Democrats didn't get it. They just kept going back to the same old nonsense. And it was nonsense, especially in where we are right now. And we hit—we hit something that was very special. We hit the nerve of the country. They don't want to see jails emptied out into our country. They don't want to see people from mental institutions being dismissed from their institutions. 

TIME: Mr. President, what did the Democrats not get? You just said “they didn’t get it.” What did you mean by that? 

TRUMP: I don't think they got the feel of the country. The country was angry because of immigration, because of the people, you know, millions and millions of people. I was saying it could be 21 million people. They were saying a much lesser number, but it wasn't a much lesser number. But even if it was, it was irrelevant, because it was—they were allowing anybody to come into our country. They are right now. They opened it up again. You see what's going on? They're coming. They're pouring up through Mexico and other places. And they weren't using common sense. I said, We’ve become the party of common sense... 

And so on, at endless length from there. 

According to the winning candidate, he himself ran a flawless campaign, Even the reporters give him credit for that, he said, though he cited no specific examples.

As for the Democrats, they didn't get the feel of the country. "They just kept going back to the same old nonsense," the winning candidate said.

What makes that presentation intriguing? With apologies for a type of repetition, the answer is sitting right here:

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024 
Donald J. Trump (R): 77,300,739 (49.81%)
Kamala Harris (D):    75,014,534 (48.33%)

For the record, those numbers no longer seem to be changing. We may have reached something like the end of the count. 

With respect to the repetition, we'll offer this bit of wisdom. There are very few actual facts left within our failing culture. We should hold tight to the handful which remain as we try to make sense of our world.

That said, what's intriguing about the strongman's statement to Time? The intriguing part is this:

He says he ran a flawless campaign. He says the other party just kept returning to nonsense.

In short, he ran a flawless campaign against a ship of fools—but intriguingly, he ended up winning by less than a point and a half! He won the battleground state of Michigan by substantially less than that!

Time didn't challenge the Caesar on the apparent incongruity lodged in his claims. That too is a part of the world we've been left—a part of the world which remains.

A steady stream of bogus clams are now part of our national culture. Corrections and clarifications will be offered by some news orgs, but all such corrections will be disappeared by quite a few others.

Our nation is thereby left with very few facts. Plus, the incoming president has, as of this very day, once again added to a collection some will regard as a playhouse of broken toys. 

Who is the latest toy in the toy chest? This very morning, the New York Times offers this report:

Trump Chooses Kari Lake to Lead Voice of America

[...]

Since abandoning her journalism career for electoral politics, Ms. Lake has frequently spread conspiracy theories and false assertions. In her 2022 race, she ran on the falsehood that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and spun her own unsubstantiated claims that Ms. Hobbs committed election crimes. After narrowly losing to Ms. Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede and instead brought legal challenges that were all later rejected by courts.

This year, after Representative Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin than Ms. Hobbs did, she only hinted at a concession.

“I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.

Is "something wrong" with future director Lake? In Blue America, some citizens may wonder.

 Meanwhile, in Red America, Lake is presented as a champion of clear vision—one whose unsubstantiated claims about rigged elections will be disappeared and ignored.

Within our bifurcated former nation, some people will regard Lake as the latest broken toy. For the record, that report about Lake didn't make this morning's front page—but this other news report did:

Trump’s Middle East Adviser Pick Is a Small-Time Truck Salesman

President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East adviser, Massad Boulos, has enjoyed a reputation as a billionaire mogul at the helm of a business that bears his family name.

Mr. Boulos has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions. Mr. Trump called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.”

The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker.”

In fact, records show that Mr. Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. He is chief executive of the company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, which made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show.

There is no indication in corporate documents that Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. The truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price. Mr. Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, is worth $1.53.

[...]

Mr. Boulos will advise on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions—a region that Mr. Boulos said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval.

Is Boulos another broken toy? Viewers of the Fox News Channel will never be exposed to the representations which fill this front-page report.

That said, do those representations qualify as facts? Very few such creatures are left within our failing national culture. 

Round the decay of the widening wreck, very few facts remain. What may be "facts" in Blue America are non-existent among the Reds. 

Having said that, we need to add this. Sometimes, citizens of Red America are exposed to facts which are largely withheld from Us!

Those of us in Blue America may not be aware of that situation. In our view, that may help explain how a vastly flawed candidate like Donald J. Trump managed to squeeze out a narrow win over an accidental opponent who, through no particular fault of her own, had only three months to campaign.

At this site, we've been poking at a pair of questions in recent weeks. We'd describe the questions as second cousins. These questions are related, but they aren't quite the same:

Two questions in Blue America:
Question 1: How did we ever lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?
Question 2: Why would any decent person ever have voted for Trump?

Many of us in Blue America can't imagine an answer to that second question. We can't imagine any possible reasons why a decent fellow citizen would have cast such a vote.

Once again, we'll suggest that there are many reasons why a decent person might have decided to vote for Candidate Trump—or might have decided to vote against our own Democratic candidates.

President Biden was going to be the nominee—and then he suddenly wasn't. Three weeks later, Vice President Harris was subbed in. For reasons which still haven't quite been explained, we Blues had become an amateur hockey team changing lines on the fly.

Even in that situation, the flawless strongman managed to win by only 1.48 points! Still and all, he did win—and the consequences could be jaw-dropping, vast, enormous.

In the view of Blue America, broken toys are being put in place all over the emerging firmament. Will we still be in NATO by the end of next year? Can anyone answer that question?

Will a narrow win in a very strange circumstance change the fabric of world history? And how did it [ever] get this far? How did those of us in Blue America ever end up in this place?

We think it started in 1965—and we ourselves were physically present! Also, we think there's an endless array of obvious reasons why a decent person might have decided to vote against us Blue Americans and against our candidates.

The future president describes his own performance as flawless. There's a small irony lurking there:

In all honesty, that's the way we Blue Americans may tend to see ourselves! 

We tend to think of ourselves as the moral, smart people. We may be inclined to see the others as "deeply racist."

It may be too late to make a difference; the die may have been cast. But we think our own tribe's imperfect understanding is the biggest political story here in our own Blue America.

Over there, the incoming strongman keeps anointing broken toys and keeps dispensing bogus claims. But what's it like over here?

How did we ever lose to that guy? Why in the world did 77.3 million people decide to vote for him?

We ourselves never considered voting for Candidate Trump. On the other hand, we don't find it especially hard to understand why many others did.

Starting in 1965, we Blues may perhaps have played with some broken toys of our own. And we may perhaps be blind to that fact. Could our own tribal delusions perhaps have dragged us down?

Blue America, heal thyself? There isn't much else we can do at this point. 

We only lost by a couple of points—but how could it even have been that close?

 Why did anyone vote for him? Next week, our search continues.