Op-Ed

Friends,

It was announced recently that it appears the final count may now be in — and Trump has FAILED to win a majority of the popular vote. His final total, as of now, will be under 50% — or 49.83%.

This was no landslide. It was the smallest percentage of a popular vote victory in a Presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968.

Here’s how little we lost by:

Just 12 votes per precinct across the entire United States!

That’s it. With Harris behind by just 2.4 million votes out of the 152 million who voted, that’s an average of just 12 votes per precinct across the nearly 200,000 precincts in the U.S.

As the Trump administration prepares to confront China's growing influence, it is critical to base strategies on accurate assessments of domestic capabilities. Misleading narratives, such as those propagated by conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, risk undermining government efficiency by spreading falsehoods about federal telework practices.

President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”

 That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks -- and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.

 Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”

Antisemitism is wrong—there’s no debate about that. By the same token, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are equally dangerous. Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is not only misguided but also harmful. Ohio state Senator Terry Johnson’s proposed legislation does just that, threatening to undermine fundamental constitutional rights, stifle political expression, and open the door to discriminatory enforcement.

The recent vilification of student-led protests on college campuses, chief among them what happened on our own, The Ohio State University, was so dangerous that made many of us shiver.  

If you want to play the game of politics, here’s step one: Reduce everything to a linear political viewpoint: “right” or “left.” No matter how deep and large and complex that viewpoint is, politicize it, turn it into something that’s either right or wrong. It’s all about winning or losing.

Did Harris lean too far left? Oh gosh. Neither Liz Cheney nor Taylor Swift could save her.

I’m still immersed in my own recovery process – recovery from the election, of course. And yes, I’m feeling pain because “my side” lost, but my emotions are complicated by the fact that I didn’t really have a side in the election. It wasn’t simply that I was frustrated with the campaigns and claims of both major parties (the only ones that mattered, right?). I’ve apparently reached a point in my life where the entire political game feels problematic; it minimizes our world in a way I can no longer tolerate.

If you stop and think about it, we’ve come up with a lot of doozies in our history. Like the genocide of 20 million Native Americans. Or the enslavement of 12 million kidnapped Africans. Or us invading Vietnam and killing 4 million Asian people for no reason at all. We are not a good people. We have a non-stop cavalcade, a sordid laundry list of evil deeds that led us directly to last week, to the point where we the people, by popular vote, elected a 34-time convicted felon, a fascist, and a civilly-charged and convicted sexual abuser to be our 47th president of the United States. And we did so after he clearly and quite honestly warned us that he was going to do a mass round-up and deportation of nearly 15 million people. And that he would consider executing people he referred to as “the enemy within” (i.e. his political opponents and those who were disloyal to him).

“America is for Americans – Americans only!”

The words are those of Stephen Miller, speaking last month at the infamous Madison Square Garden rally, but they define Donald Trump. This is the message – the cry from the mountaintop – he brought to the country . . . at least to approximately half of it. It’s the unifying force behind his campaign, both pragmatically and spiritually. It transcends politics and cuts to people’s deepest values and deepest fears.

It’s why he won: Donald the Outsider, standing up to the Washington status quo, opening the doors of the American government and letting its citizens flow in (legally this time, without breaking doors and windows). America is for Americans – sieg heil!