There is a joke circulating in Germany after former President Trump won our election. See the first figure. I find it rather telling, myself.
We elected the convicted felon instead of the former prosecutor. We elected the adjudged sexual predator. We elected the 6-time bankruptcy filer infamous for stiffing vendors, to manage our national economy? We elected the violator of our classified document laws, to be commander-in-chief, when we quite evidently cannot trust him with classified materials, or he would not have been indicted for it.
We re-elected the only president we have ever had in all our national history, who refused to peacefully transition power at the end of his first presidency, instead trying to overturn it by every means available, up to and including inciting an insurrection, on Jan. 6, 2021.
That is very evident stupidity on our part as a nation, and that is the source of the joke in the figure!
All of this has happened because far-right media sources now far outnumber the so-called "mainstream media" sources, and those far-right sources are rife with disinformation and misinformation, including propaganda from the Russians and other hostile nations. These lies from those far-right sources are all that way-too-many-of-us ever encounter anymore! And also quite evidently, as a population overall, we lack the critical thinking skills to know when we are being lied-to by these sources.
Extremism is the real enemy here. Far-right, far-left, religious, all are pure evil! I don’t see very many far-left extremists in the US anymore, but I do see an alarmingly-growing number of far-right extremists. The political spectrum is not the straight line everyone assumes. It is, in fact, a circle, with democracy on one side, and dictatorship on the other, and two different paths leading to the dictatorship side.
Both types of political extremism lead to exactly the same end: a military-supported dictatorship, as illustrated in the second figure. Religious extremism can ally with either path. It does not matter what “they” say, it only matters what they do! We've seen this for centuries now.
A very serious problem
here is a total lack of critical thinking ability on the part of a majority of
the voting public. They simply cannot tell when they are being lied to by their
favorite sources! Which is virtually
all the time.
That lack is the result of two generations (!!!) of dumbing-down public education with a low-ball standardized test, and then tying school funding to its outcome, which exerts enormous pressure to teach only to the test, not the full curriculum. Critical thinking is just not on that test, as we have already seen.
As a result, the gene pool needs more than just a little chlorine now!
The election is over. Trump won, in the electoral college and in the popular vote! Let me predict what is going to happen to you all, as his second term unfolds. It will not be what he and his team told you. Not by a long shot! But it will take significant time to unfold. Why? It just takes a long time for the dead dinosaur to fall over.
Mass deportations of undocumented aliens:
Trump swears he wants to deport about 11 million undocumented aliens from this country. He will certainly try to do it! And if Congress backs him, he will do it! The more deportations, the bigger the effects will be. Just be aware that there is a time lag between action and effect.
Bear in mind that these people to be deported are mainly the harvesters of our food supply, and the backbone of our construction industry. By and large, statistically, they are actually more law-abiding than the majority of American citizens, despite the lies you have been told about them, in the right-wing media. Yeah, there’s exceptions, just not very many. Not very many at all.
These deportations will cripple the agricultural and construction sectors of our economy, simply for lack of available labor. Food and housing prices will rise drastically, first because of a lack of supply, then because the producers will have to drastically raise the wages they pay these workers, in order to get American citizens to take these jobs.
The result will be (1) economic depression from the supply-chain disruptions, and (2) rampantly-high inflation, because those costs will be passed on to the public in drastically-higher prices. This will ripple all-across the economy. It is inevitable. It will happen!
Depression and inflation simultaneously: we have not seen this disaster since the late 1970’s!
And a majority of you voted for this!
Tariffs on foreign imports, largely from China, but also possibly Mexico:
The majority of things that American consumers buy, come from these two sources. They come from there, because those products are generally not produced within the US anymore. We can argue about why that happened, but it is a simple fact-of-life today! Deal with it!
A tariff is a tax upon imported goods. The importer has to pay that tax, which increases his cost of doing business. He will pass that added cost on to you, the consumer, as a price increase big enough to cover it, if not even higher (which some term “greedflation”). It is inevitable. We’ve seen this passing-on of increased costs before!
Mr. Trump is talking about enormous tariffs, anywhere from 10-or-20% to 100%. He will attempt this! That means enormous price increases for most of the things you buy! And that means both supply chain disruptions, leading to economic depression, and large price increases, leading to massive inflation. Period!
Again, this tariff policy will add greatly to the simultaneous disaster of depression and inflation caused by the mass deportations! Our economy stands no chance!
A majority of you voted for this!
A climate change disaster is coming:
Almost to a man, Trump and his political supporters and financial backers are anthropogenic climate change deniers. Trump himself usually calls climate change “a hoax”. That is far-right extremist dis/mis-information, which is actually where he came by that belief. Anthropogenic climate change is quite real, and it is already here, now. We’ve been seeing it in action, the last several years. You are entitled to your own opinions about this, but you are not entitled to your own “facts”! Facts come from science, not far-right media sources.
Trump will kill all the climate change-mitigating efforts of Biden, and that will push the world over the hump of inevitable total disaster, because American leadership on this issue is, and always was, critical! Now that will stop. No other very-powerful country has “bellied up to the bar” as much as we have, on this.
The extreme weather events will get worse over the next very few years, and within your lifetimes, you will see a sudden sea level rise in the 3-6 meter (10-20 feet) range, which is a total disaster, not just for the US, but for all of humanity! Most of our critical and most valuable assets are within 1 meter (3 feet) of current sea level, all around the world.
Something like half the world’s population lives within 1 meter (3 feet) of current sea level! Imagine the “immigration disaster” as these 4 billions go on the march across international borders looking for new places to live! Illegal immigrants? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! This will start wars!
But the majority of you voted for this, too!
Pandemic health disasters are coming:
It seems rather likely that Trump will call upon Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to head the department of Health and Human Services. RFK, Jr., is a vaccine denier, despite the science and the track record, which actually means there is something mentally wrong with that man! You can expect decreased availability of things like Covid and flu vaccines. More people will sicken and die from these otherwise-preventable or reducible diseases. You can also expect zero attention to fending-off the next pandemic! Why? Because that will require more vaccines!
We already have a serious vaccination problem in the US. Rates of whooping cough and measles are on the rise, despite there being very-effective vaccines for both. We have allowed too many exceptions to the required-vaccine rules for public schools, pure and simple! RFK, Jr., would likely make that much worse! He says he won’t deny you vaccines, but he won’t promote them.
There are many other possible pandemic threats out there. So, who is going to pre-emptively try to counter them? Not vaccine-denier RFK, Jr! Something somewhere between the 1918 flu disaster, and the 14th century Black Death disaster, is coming! You will see it, likely in Trump’s term as the 47th president!
A majority of you voted for this!
You just elected your first dictator-for-life, ending our democracy experiment:
You just elected a man who is quite old, and already showing signs of age-related cognitive impairment, but not yet as bad as Biden did, during their 2024 debate. Ignoring the risks of cognitive impairment, Trump (if he lives that long) will not relinquish control at the end of his term after the 2028 election, for the transition of Jan. 20, 2029!
We’ve already seen this after the 2020 election, regarding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, to prevent the Jan. 20, 2021 transition. And note that he promised exactly that same behavior after the 2016 election, if he lost! So why would 2028/2029 be any different?
Maybe he will still be somewhat-functional at the end of his term as 47th president, and maybe not! But if not, there are plenty of Trump-wannabees to take his place as dictator. None of them will willingly turn over power to the next elected president, if we even have a next election at all!
Look at what Trump did appointing federal judges and nominating candidates for the Supreme court. Those candidates came from lists generated by far-right institutions, which more-or-less guaranteed that they would do Trump’s bidding, instead of following the law and the established rules. That is right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook for becoming the dictator of Germany in 1934 after his election to the Chancellorship in 1933.
Example: Trump appointee Aileen Cannon in Florida, who gave Trump’s lawyers everything they asked for, and all the delays they asked for, up to and including trying to dismiss the federal classified documents case entirely, which on the face of it, was a slam-dunk conviction! Back in the 70’s-to-90’s time frame, if I had done with classified documents what Trump did at Mar A Lago, I would still be jail today!
Now he has an immunity ruling from the Supreme Court that he and Mitch McConnell packed, for anything he does “officially” as President. Anything can be claimed to be “official”. In effect, he can no longer be held accountable for anything! No matter how egregious the act!
Trump will pack all the important offices and institutions with underlings who will violate the law to do his bidding instead. He will start with the Justice Department, thus actually implementing the weaponization of it, that he has long falsely accused Democrats of doing. It won’t end there, it extends up to and including sending the Army to capture all who oppose him. Does that remind you of Germany circa 1935-1940?
Update 12-1-2024: his cabinet selections have been not only loyalists who would violate the law for him, but also incompetents and crackpots who would totally disrupt the institutions they were selected to lead. And by using recess appointments, the Senate has no say in this! Disrupting the institutions makes them dysfunctional, and Trump is going to point at a dysfunctional government to justify overthrowing it to install himself as dictator.
You the majority voted for this, too!
Ending the Ukraine-Russia war:
Trump promised to end this war “on day 1” of his presidency. How? Essentially by handing the Ukraine over to Putin. No more support to Ukraine, Ukraine cannot be a NATO member for some 20 years, and no territory invaded and held by Russia, will ever be anything but Russian territory. That’s a lost war for Ukraine! And a loss for all of us who supported Ukraine against Putin!
Trump wants to take the US out of NATO, our only effective defense against Soviet Russia, and now Putin’s Russia, since its founding. He sucked-up to our adversaries, insulted our allies, and threatened to renege on the NATO treaty! Those are matters of the public record! Yes, that misbehavior got some more spending on defense from some of our allies, but this is very most definitely NOT the way to go about doing that! We need our allies! Now more than ever!
Trump is already well-known to be an ardent admirer of Putin. That makes him a puppet of Putin, and thereby a traitor to US interests! We saw this in his first term as president: at the Helsinki conference, where he publicly preferred Putin’s lies, to the determinations of his own government’s various intelligence agencies. You had apparently elected a traitor in 2016! And that treasonous behavior hasn’t changed since.
What will happen when Trump hands Ukraine to Putin? The far-right sources didn’t tell you that, did they? But I will! It emboldens Putin to try to invade and reconquer the other former Soviet Republics, most of which are now NATO allies. Failing American involvement (because of Trump very likely reneging on the NATO treaty, he has a history of threatening that), that starts World War 3 in Europe! It also emboldens Xi in China to try to invade and conquer Taiwan, starting World War 3 in the Pacific. Xi is just waiting to see Putin succeed, before he embarks on his conquests.
Doesn’t matter whether World War 3 actually starts in Europe or the Pacific, it will eventually go nuclear! With utterly devastating loss and destruction in the US, and throughout much of the world! A disaster for the US and all the rest of humanity!
The majority of you voted for this!
What about Taiwan?
If Trump hands Ukraine to Putin, Xi will invade Taiwan. Period! Most of your electronics are made in Taiwan. That means both no more electronics for you, and World War 3 in the Pacific! Period, end of issue. And it will eventually go nuclear!
The majority of you voted for this!
Final remarks:
A totally-depressed economy with massive inflation, chronic expensive weather disasters culminating in truly massive sea level rise within your lifetime, pandemic health disasters coming, a dictator you cannot get rid of, and World War 3 going nuclear on us without any allies.
The majority of you voted for all of this, although you obviously thought he would bring prosperity and strength instead! That’s NOT what he will bring you! You were lied-to!
I hope the majority of you that voted for this, are prepared to live with the consequences of your vote, which are in turn the consequences of not knowing you have been lied-to by far-right extremists.
