These Are the Most Pathetic People Alive
If you thought there was any reality in which Trump supporters would accept their candidate’s defeat like grownups and move on, then you’re perhaps as delusional as they are.
Joe Biden has now flipped five states — to Donald Trump’s zero — and is leading the popular vote by over five million. He has 74 more electoral votes than Trump and 36 more than he needed to clinch victory. Even with the strength of incumbency and the maddeningly unfair advantage of the Electoral College on his side, Donald Trump lost this election by substantial margins. Of course, that hasn’t stopped his goons from launching a crusade in search of voter fraud and burying the nation in paperwork in a last-ditch, long-shot effort to exploit some tiny loophole and overturn the election.
It also hasn’t stopped his supporters from taking up that cause themselves, and cheerleading it from coast to coast until they’re blue in the face. In battleground states across the country, these people have waged a hideous and self-righteous campaign against what they see as a massive coordinated fix carried out by the nation’s election workers on behalf of the Democrats. They’ve pounded on the windows of vote counting rooms. They’ve showed up armed to the teeth to scream outside polling places. They’ve wailed in righteous indignation at the audacity of requests that they observe the vote count from a distance of ten feet instead of six; in their ideal world, they’d be breathing down election workers’ necks from all of three inches away, snarling in their faces as they worked, even examining the ballots being counted, as if that’s something poll watchers are ever allowed to do.
It’s not just that this is all a truly terrible look, a fizzy cocktail of denial and poor sportsmanship, a temper tantrum thrown by people who were too old for temper tantrums when Trump was still hocking stuffed-crust pizza. It’s that it’s an insult to the people who actually cared enough about this country to step up and make sure this highly contentious — and, given the pandemic, more than a little dangerous — election ran smoothly. These shrieking Trump supporters are acting on the outrageous presumption that election workers in battleground states are partisan agents bent on sabotaging democracy, illegally doctoring or destroying ballots, and generally suppressing the voices of selectively-chosen portions of the electorate in order to push their preferred candidate.
Trump supporters’ stated purpose in all of this is to protect the integrity of the election. The only problem here, of course, is that it is the election workers who, by definition, are protecting the integrity of the election, not these MAGA mouthbreathers trying to smear and intimidate them. I’m the millionth person to write this sentence, but: there is no evidence of substantial fraud in the 2020 election. All we have instead is a bunch of neanderthals who are, for no good reason, demonizing and disrupting people who are working incredibly hard at an incredibly important task. Election workers are the stewards of our democracy right now, and in the last few weeks, we’ve seen them relentlessly antagonized and subjected to hideous insinuations, all on the basis of nothing, by people who then turn around and say all they’re trying to do is make sure the election is fair. It’s so infuriating I want to pull my hair out.
After several years of trying to suppress my disdain for these people in the interest of seeing the world through their eyes, figuring out why they’re so goddamn angry all the time, and hopefully healing the national divide, I’m now fed up. I can’t do it anymore. It’s time to cut the horseshit. Fuck these people. Their behavior since November 3 has been a travesty: anti-democratic, utterly classless, and entirely divorced from reality.
“The media doesn’t decide the election,” Trump’s greasy sycophants have been saying on Twitter and in conservative media. Sure enough, this line has now been parroted by countless Trump supporters since the race was called for Biden. Never mind that these people have lived through half a dozen or more other presidential elections and have watched, with their own eyes, as the nation — and, presumably, they themselves! — took the moment when the networks projected a winner as the moment when the outcome was confirmed. This is nothing new. It’s normal, and they know it. They’ve seen it in every presidential election since they were old enough to watch TV. (They also understand — god, I hope they understand — that CNN’s projection of a winner does not amount to the media “deciding” the election, that it only amounts to the media reporting that the current vote tally makes the outcome of the election all but mathematically assured.)
Their protest game is also dumb as fuck. Their messaging is a case study in self-contradiction, declaring in one moment that Trump is definitively the true winner before asserting, in the next, that they’re just trying to Determine The Truth about the vote count, whatever it may be. At one point, while Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania and behind in Arizona, he had one crowd of degenerates demanding that voting in PA be stopped and another in Maricopa County bellowing to count every vote.
“Count legal votes only” say some of their signs, as if anyone, anywhere, is advocating that illegal votes should be counted. “Stop the steal” say others, in the only case I can think of outside of basketball in which “steal” is used as a noun. Do I sound elitist? Choke on it. The libtards will stop making fun of them for not putting sentences together correctly when they start putting sentences together correctly.
Of course, you may be inclined to point out that the conviction that the election is rife with fraud is born of a months-long propaganda campaign from Trump himself. But if Trump is evil for seeding this dangerous horseshit — and he very much is — then his supporters are pathetic, brainless losers for buying into it. It matters not one iota that no substantial fraud has been uncovered; as long as Trump says there’s been fraud, there’s been fraud. It matters not one iota that the Trump team has been laughed out of almost every courtroom they’ve been in since the election; as long as Trump says there’s been fraud, there’s been fraud. It matters not one iota how many judges have waved away how many cases, or that Trump’s own administration has declared the 2020 election the most secure in our nation’s history; as long as Trump says there’s been fraud, there’s been fraud.
You know what you call a guy whose word, no matter how implausible or unsubstantiated, is taken as gospel by legions of supporters? You call him a false idol. Trump’s supporters have bestowed a godlike status upon him. Trump. That guy. A god. This weekend, these cretins have descended upon Washington, D.C. for a rally they’re calling the “Million MAGA March.” Let’s put aside, for a moment, what a grotesque, yet exquisitely Trumpian, troll job it is to co-opt the name of an iconic civil rights event and use it for an event in support of a guy who spent this whole summer demonizing the nation’s current civil rights movement. Let’s instead focus on this dispatch from the march on Saturday. “I needed to be here. We all need to show our president some support,” said some moron about a guy who doesn’t give a rat’s ass if she lives or dies. “He needs it. He needs us. He’s been wrung through the ringer since Day One.”
Oh, the poor, poor president. Oh, the poor thing, being questioned by the big bad media for his years of unabashedly racist rhetoric, for his assault on the natural world, for presiding over more COVID-19 deaths than the entire European Union, whose population is about 100 million larger than that of the U.S. and who has been afflicted by the virus for even longer than we have.
“God bless our president. I would die for that man,” said another unfathomably sad specimen while Trump was getting the world’s best medical care for a COVID case he caught at a superspreader event he hosted. “I will die for him. I will die for that man happily. I will die for him.” After his third time reiterating that he would be willing to lay down his life for Donald fucking Trump, the guy went on to say “Anybody wanna mess with him, you mess with me first.” What a tough guy.
Nothing is more pathetic than giving yourself over, entirely and unwaveringly and unconditionally, to a single individual who doesn’t even know who you are. For the first seven decades of his life, Donald Trump never lifted a finger for the public good. Civil service is as alien to him as marital fidelity. The idea that he suddenly felt such a strong patriotic calling that he was compelled not just to seek office, but to seek no lower office than the presidency of the United States is comically absurd. This has always been about ego, power, and glory for him and him alone. If his supporters believe he gives a damn about the country, then they’re more gullible than I thought any adult could be. If they in fact realize he’s only in it for himself, and despite this are still willing to do whatever they can, and believe anything he says, to keep him happy, then they’re spineless and self-debasing and in dire need of a personality. In either case, it’s got to be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.