Enjoy Now Because It's Going to Get Messy

Things are about to get messy. We need to turn out in overwhelming numbers this fall. No excuses. No "both-sides-isms". The choices are clear. The media is tripping over itself to repeat 2016.

Photo by Derek Owens on Unsplash

Next week the Democratic party is going to officially nominate Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as its candidates for President and Vice President of the United States.

The optimism and enthusiasm the Harris/Walz ticket has been inspiring is nothing short of a relief after months of hand-wringing over President Joe Biden’s age and the media-manufactured narrative he is too feeble and addled to withstand another year in the White House, hurting down-ballot Democrats’ election chances.  

Many are comparing the energy the Harris/Walz campaign is generating to Barack Obama’s candidacy and subsequent election in 2008, and it is the perfect foil to the unhinged conspiracy theory-laden palaver coming out of the twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated rapist running again for his old job.

But let’s not get cocky.

The election is still three months away.

And if there is anything politics and history teach us, it’s that things have the potential to flip faster than we can often keep up.

Trump is--pardon the cliche — like a bull in a china shop, and if we’ve learned anything about how he operates over the past nine years, it’s he doesn’t know how to play fairly. 

So get ready for his dirty tricks.

Get ready for republican secretaries of state purging voters from voter roles. 

Get ready for OPEC to jack up gas prices in October. (October surprise, anyone?)

Get ready for phony state electors.

Get ready for county election officials loyal to MAGA refusing to certify the election.  

Get ready for MAGA-loyal republicans in Congress refusing to sign off on the electoral votes on January 6, citing “irregularities”. 

The slew of potential hinky mischief is not lost on President Biden, the first president in history to express doubt over a peaceful transition of power after his predecessor became the first former president in American history to upset that process.

In a CBS News interview, when asked if he believed there would be a peaceful transfer, President Biden replied:

If Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it. All this stuff about “if we lose there’d be a bloodbath”.

President Biden’s inner circle has been busy drawing up a comprehensive legal framework should election results be close.

As reported in Rolling Stone earlier this year:

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s [now Harris’] margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

But the Harris campaign is not the only one in training.

ProPublica and Documented have released to the press dozens of leaked training videos by the former Trump administration officials behind the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for autocracy, “Project 2025.”

Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a chief architect of the autocrat’s playbook, inadvertently revealed plans for secret executive orders, proposed regulations, and other documents to an undercover journalist and a paid actor working for the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR).

ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll recently explained on Democracy Now!:

The first time that Trump got elected, his operation was very unprepared. They did not have a bench of people ready. There was chaos, there was confusion, and that set back that administration for perhaps months, maybe even a year or two. If he is elected again, that will not be the case.

Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that Trump’s lies about Harris/Walz rally crowd sizes at isn’t just bluster; it’s an attempt to cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy should he lose.

“If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent’,” Sanders explained. 

He added:

This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about. This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.

On Monday’s Rachel Maddow Show, journalist Rachel Maddow interviewed Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) president, Noah Bookbinder, about a new report delineating strategies for combating election certification interference. That report confirms 35 county officials around the country complicit in trying to subvert the 2020 election remain in positions preparing them to do it again.

Bookbinder said:

I think there’s almost no question that this is going to happen. And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past. So that’s deeply, deeply concerning.

As political writer and podcaster Bob Cesca repeats on his show, “Don’t get happy.” 

Yes, celebrate the moment because it is historic.

President Biden is relinquishing the nomination to his vice president after historic accomplishments unparalleled in a generation. That vice president could be the first woman, the first Asian American, and the second person of color elected President of the United States. 

She is the perfect foil to the republican nominee.

Kamala Harris was a prosecutor who prosecuted sex offenders. Donald Trump is one.

Kamala Harris is a former Attorney General of California. Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

As Attorney General, Harris shuttered fraudulent for-profit colleges. Donald Trump ran a scam online “university” that stole from veterans for which he was ordered to pay a $25 million education fraud settlement (as a sitting president).

Kamala Harris is a biracial (Jamaican and Indian) Asian American woman. Donald Trump is a racist, sexist xenophobe.

One of Donald Trump’s jobs when his father, Fred Trump, ran the family business was to mark housing applications from applicants of color with a “C” so they could be denied housing, for which the Nixon Justice Dept. sued for racial discrimination. (Yes, he was even too racist for Richard Nixon.)

To “win” the 2016 election, Trump solicited help from Russia. He then lost the popular vote.

Congress impeached Trump twice — once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian president into finding dirt on Joe Biden, and again for inciting the January 6, 2021 attempted coup to keep himself in power.

While in office, he told 30,573 lies (not “falsehoods,” as the media prefers to call them).

Upon leaving office (reluctantly), he made sure to go back to his Florida golf resort with classified documents, some of which contained nuclear intelligence information, left them lying around in various insecure locations, showed them off to various people, and may have even sold some to foreign governments. (In exchange for what did Saudi Arabia give his son in law, Jared Kushner, $2 billion dollars?)

Kamala Harris seeks to build on the accomplishments she helped create with President Biden. Donald Trump seeks to unravel every social, economic, environmental, international, and domestic improvement we have fought for so his billionaire buddies can enjoy another tax cut.

Enjoy the honeymoon period now, because things are about to get messy.

We need to turn out in overwhelming numbers this fall.

No excuses.

No “both-sides-isms”.

The choices are clear.

The media is tripping over itself to repeat 2016. 

We do so at our own peril.