Don’t listen to Donald Trump’s delusions, they aren’t yours to bear

Donald Trump is refusing to accept reality. Picture: AFP.

On Tuesday, the US Attorney-General William Barr, a Trump appointee, told Associated Press, he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

Barr’s statement is the latest rejection of Trump’s increasingly desperate claims of electoral shenanigans that cost him a victory he believes was his due. The FBI, GOP governors, election officials across the land have already said much the same thing as Barr. In any event, the states Joe Biden flipped – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia have all certified their results.

Still, Trump clings to mad unsubstantiated conspiracy theories – he has said that the Department of Justice and the FBI “maybe” are involved in his contrived conspiracy. His latest Tweets offer little more than incredulity that Biden had won 80,000 million votes.

The President is stuck deep in denial and that phase of the grieving process looks set to last with acceptance a long way away.

Hope everybody is watching @OANN right now. Other media afraid to show. People are coming forward like never before. Large truck carrying hundreds of thousands of fraudulent (FAKE) ballots to a voting center? TERRIBLE - SAVE AMERICA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2020

Perhaps the saddest element is not, as commentators here and in the US have indicated, that Trump is undermining public faith in the democratic process. There is that certainly, but it may turn out to be a self-defeating argument, with many Trump voters in Georgia saying they won’t cast a ballot in the two Senate run-off election on January 5.

If those two run-offs go the Democrats way, giving them the balance of power in both Houses of Congress, I guarantee the GOP’s own version of the stages of grief will quickly turn to anger directed at Trump, whose tantrums firstly discouraged Republican voters from casting mail-in ballots for the presidential election and now effectively dissuade those in Georgia from voting at all.

But the real problem is not the 74 million voters who voted for Trump but the subset of them who are going dangerously along for the ride with the President’s deranged conspiracies.

Let’s go back to polling day. On the morning of the election White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was on Fox News predicting a landslide win for Donald Trump.

“Our campaign believes that tonight will be a landslide,” McEnany said.

Florida and Ohio were “a lock” for the President she said. McEnany was right on that score. But she also tipped Trump would win Nevada and Minnesota. Biden won Minnesota by seven points, a margin of almost 250,000 votes with 3.2 million votes cast in the state. Nevada was closer but Biden still won by more than two points.

Had Trump won those states it still would not have constituted a landslide win. Where else might Trump have flipped blue states? Virginia? Biden won by ten points. New Hampshire? Biden won by seven and a half points. Colorado? Biden won by 13 points. New Mexico? Biden won by eleven points. There was never any prospect of a Trump landslide win.

Maybe we can put McEnany’s statements down to a little pre-count excitement, a bit of barracking for the team. It happens. It’s not unusual. But the Trump rusted-ons were saying the same thing. Forget the polls. Trump would win by a landslide.

McEnany clearly believed a substantial win was coming Donald Trump’s way because she went on to say this: “We believe this will be a landslide and for the Biden campaign to come out and double down on Hillary Clinton’s egregious statement that (under) no circumstance should you concede just tells you all you need to know,” she said.

Back in August the failed presidential candidate had advised Joe Biden not to concede on election night. At the time, the Biden camp did not respond.

But here we are a month after the election and McEnany’s boss is yet to concede and probably won’t ever.

I’m not fighting for me, I’m fighting for the 74,000,000 million people (not including the many Trump ballots that were “tossed”), a record for a sitting President, who voted for me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020

The media played a role in creating confusion and suspicion about the results. When Americans went to bed on election night, US commentators and analysts were generally of the view that Biden could not win Pennsylvania. Highly paid analysts in expensive suits were staring at maps and babbling about a replication of the 2016 result without taking the time to look – and it was there for all to see – that dark blue counties around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg had less than ten per cent counted.

But they didn’t even have to look that far because at the very same time, Biden trailed by ten points in Lackawanna County, PA.

Viewers of the US production of The Office starring Steve Carell as the regional manager of fictitious paper company Dunder Mifflin, will know Lackawanna County is home to Scranton, Pennsylvania’s sixth largest city. It is also Joe Biden’s birthplace.

Did anyone seriously believe Biden would lose in the county of his birth? He ended up winning by almost 10,000 votes with 110,000 counted.

Talk about your fish and chip wrapper analysis. It was dead in the water in the space of a night.

Don’t forget that 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Picture: AFP.

If people wish to continue to support Donald Trump’s version of conservative nationalism and MAGA populism, fair enough. Seventy four million Americans did. Their views are genuine, their political beliefs authentic and their aspirations worthy.

But there is a big difference between political affiliation and faith based devotion.

I keep a very close eye on QAnon, the US-based cult with perhaps as many as three million followers worldwide. Post-election, the usual channels of the cult went quiet. ‘Q drops’ – the messages from the fictitious deep state insider ceased. The usual QAnon grifters, all of whom make a very nice living out of the cult through web subscriptions, donations and merch, fell silent.

I’d like to think that many Anons took that silence as an opportunity to reflect that of all the Q prophecies, not one has come true, from Comet Pizza or Pizzagate on. I hope many would have walked away, reached out to their families for the first time in years and maybe even broken bread once again over Thanksgiving dining tables.

In the last ten days QAnon has stirred, revved up by Sidney Powell’s bizarre accusations. Powell’s claims, now filed with the State of Georgia’s District Court, assert that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who has been dead for seven and a half years, orchestrated massive electoral fraud with the assistance of CIA black ops, and the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, to rig Dominion voting machines to shuffle not thousands but hundreds of thousands of votes from one side to another.

Irrational presumptions and charlatanism are the cornerstones of cults. There’s no point in trying to punch holes in their belief system. Hell, you could drive a Leopard tank through them, do a U-turn and come back and do it all over again.

The point is if you believe them, if you give these ridiculous claims the time of day, you are on the verge of joining a cult. Call it QAnon, call it the Cult of Trump, you are on a one-way ticket down a very deep, dark rabbit hole from which there may be no coming back.

There are other signs. You find people avoiding your company. That extended family members stay away. That Christmas dinner looks like a solitary exercise. That your phone doesn’t ring with mates wanting nothing more than a friendly chat. Or you spend more and more time in a darkened room chatting in bleak corners of the web with those of deluded like mind.

The best advice I can give is to pull back. Embrace the good things in life — family and friends. Maybe forget about politics for a while. It’s a win-lose game and you can’t win all of the time. Trump’s delusions are not yours to bear.