Electoral Votes: Biden 371, Trump 167

According to the Princeton Consortium, if the elections were held today, Joe Biden would win the Presidency by a landside. Every poll tracked by the Consortium has Biden winning. His popular vote count would pass Trump’s by 10 million. And the Democrats would keep the House and take back the Senate for a clean sweep. The rule by the Donald would end in an inglorious defeat for the self-proclaimed “Stable Genius.” That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Trump has a huge treasure chest of money for stirring up a lot of excrement to be splattered across the voting landscape. His Postmaster General appointee is hard at work jamming up the postal networks right now to try to bring mail-in ballots to a standstill. That action, alone, cannot swing the vote back to Trump. But Vladimir Putin has a huge bag of dirty tricks that can have a much greater effect. He is busy churning up this incredulous bit of mischief: He is planting the lie that Joe Biden is suffering from mental issues. And Donald Trump is Putin’s favorite mouthpiece. He is following Putin’s game plan. Can you imagine that? Trump is telling us that Biden has mental issues! The Donald can barely walk and chew gum at the same time! But according to the Nazi propaganda handbook (c. 1930), “if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.”

In 2016 Trump managed to swing 80 electoral votes away from Hilary Clinton’s column to his own in the final ten days of the election season. James Comey’s revelation that he was investigating whether she had committed a crime with her missing emails added to the late shift. A mere 74,000 votes was enough to pull out a victory from the jaws of defeat for Trump.

Donald Trump wants to kill Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, Pre-existing Conditions, Medicare, Public Schools, clean energy research, while ignorng climate change, a decayng industrial infrastructure, trade, and our defense alliances around the world. He would exascerbate wealth and income inequalities thus creating huge pools of poverty, crime, mental health issues, drug usage, and a host of other socio-economic issues. He wants “12 more years” (Trump +4, Pence +8). Meanwhile, he wants to add this new issue to his resume of how he transformed America to Trumpsylvania:

The Herd Effect: Trump is now talking about letting the “Herd Effect” take over the Covid-19 virus to snuff it out. That is not heresay. I listened to him say it yesterday on the news. Rachel Maddow devoted most of her program to it. Accoring to the experts, here is how that effect would work: Drop all safeguards (masks, social distancing, crowds), open all schools, and send everyone back to work, Then let the virus run wild. When 65 percent of the American public catch the virus (330 million population X .65 = 214.5 million infected), the virus might have too few people left to sustain itself, so it could die out. But one percent of those infected would almost certainly die. The Herd Effect would likely kill 2,145,000 Americans. How evil is that plan? Put another way, how expendable are you, and your children, and your parents?

Can he do it? Yes. Will he do it? Unlikely. But you can never say never in the game of dirty politics, crooked votes, international rigging, and no empathy. WWII cost the world 75 million human lives mostly by starvation and by freezing. At this writing, Trump needs to swing 104 electoral votes away from Biden. Can he be stopped? I am betting on the intelligence, the compassion, and the goodwill of the American public this time around.