Donald Trump’s Expiration Date
Donald Trump is no longer needed. His core is not nearly big enough to keep him in power. The only reason he remained a viable contender in his re-election bid was the support of moderate Republicans, blue-collar Democrats and independents who looked behind Joe Biden and saw the far left policies of the Democratic Party. They recoiled at talk about higher taxes, reparations for Blacks and concessions to big labor such as the PRO Act, a national version of California’s disastrous AB5 that threatens to destroy the gig economy. They didn’t like the street violence in Portland, Seattle and other cities controlled by Democratic mayors, and they bristled at calls by liberal leaders to “defund” the police.
As appalled as they might have been by Donald Trump, the person, they saw Donald Trump, the president, as a bulwark, and so they voted for him because they feared the Senate would go blue and Biden, a decent man and very much a political moderate, would not be strong enough to resist the progressive push within the Democratic Party. Either that, or he would not finish his term and at some point, perhaps in the very near future, cede the presidency to Kamala Harris, who in 2019 was ranked the most liberal U.S. senator by the nonpartisan, independent congressional tracker GovTrack.us.
Regardless, gridlock was preferable. Trump was nothing more than a pawn.
Then came Election Day, and the biggest surprise was not how tight the race was between Trump and Biden (although polling, I fear, will never recover), but, rather, that the GOP remained in control of the Senate.
That meant gridlock could be achieved without Donald Trump, and in a flash the president became irrelevant.
Republicans and others who supported Trump’s re-election bid already had been having second thoughts. The incessant, inflammatory tweeting was getting old. The surging COVID-19 case count triggered nagging doubts about the Trump administration’s competency in fighting the pandemic. Then came his chaotic performance during the first presidential debate, which undoubtedly siphoned off a fair number of would-be Trump votes to Libertarian Jo Jorgensen or some other third-party candidate.
And then came Election Night. The Senate remaining red was the turning point; Trump’s 2 a.m. blustering rant about fraud and attempts to steal his certain victory was the proverbial icing on the cake. His fragile grip on voters outside his core — his hardcore, I should say — was gone, and his efforts to contest the election and rally popular support around his allegations of fraud and a “Deep State” conspiracy to do him in will not work.
The best thing for Donald Trump to do is to accept the election results, admit that he’s lost, concede graciously to Joe Biden, and then quietly slip away.
Is he going to do any of that? Of course not.
But no matter how much of a ruckus he raises, in his heart — if he even has one — he must know the sad, hard truth: America no longer cares. His expiration date has come and gone.
