It’s Almost Over.
It’s 2016. Trump is, at this point, slated to win the election. He seems like a bigot and a blowhard, a New York liberal wearing GOP getup, and blonde orange machine of destruction. He probably is most of those things. Meanwhile, Clinton’s camp is in ruins, for the time being. Tuesday is the election, but with every day yielding the number or headlines expected of a whole month of news, that’s still a quarter of a year away. Could she still win? Certainly. Could the votes be rigged? Certainly. Could Trump still win? Absolutely. At this point, it’s his election to lose.
I have no particular love for Trump. I don’t like the stuff that’s come out about him. I don’t like his general stance on abortion, on same-sex marriage, nor on how to typically run a campaign. His pandering to conservatives with his poorly-researched talking points on abortion—despite being in favor of it prior to running for office—is unconvincing, at best. At worst, it reeks every bit of the sort of dishonesty one should expect of presidents at this point. His stances on so-called gender-equality—including his nonchalance with Kaitlyn Jenner using a woman’s bathroom in his tower—are sketchy, at best, despite appealing to some vague sense of Pan-American live and let live attitude. And there aren’t any easy answers to how I feel about his stance on trade.
But these are policy decisions, not history. Policies change. And during election season, you can’t expect all promises to be followed through with. Most won’t be. Who knows how Trump will actually act once in office. Given his erratic behavior during his candidacy, it’s anyone’s guess. That is, in fact, the only real basis of criticism against the man, at least for democrat voters. He’s a loose cannon! Accusations of his hating minority groups and his personal treatment of women are either wildly off-base or too easily leveled at their own candidate to have sticking power. And if they had anything severely damaging on him at all, they would have used it by now. I’m a little surprised he’s as clean as he is, all things considered.
And conservatives struggle with Trump, as rightly they should. He’s not conservative and he’s not a great guy. He bullied his way through the primaries and then squandered opportunities during the general. He floated on arrogance and nearly sank once the media really turned against him. He made frequent miscalculations and had one campaign shakeup after another. In any reasonable election, he’d have handed it to the opposition at least twice by now, and the opposition would have had it in the bag.
But this hasn’t been a normal election.
The argument could be made that no election is a normal one. That’s bogus. 1996 was normal. 2000 was normal. 2004 was extremely normal. 2008 was 2008 and that’s all that can be said about that. And 2012 set the stage for today. In 1996, Democrats ran a smear campaign against an old man who dryly propped his campaign up on the Republican talking points of ten years prior—which, it turns out, is a normal election. We saw that again repeated in 2008, except without the opposition holding the advantage of incumbency (instead holding an advantage in media, race, and hype). They tried the same thing in 2000, with two established politicians running against one another, only this time, the Democrats fielded the more boring of the two and threw such a fit when their opposition won that they mounted a lawsuit. Typical.
But 2016 is an anomaly as far as recent politics goes. The Democratic candidate is so corrupt and unlikeable that even some of her own support network is pulling away from her and distancing themselves—and most likely, not even out of moral obligation, but because the flippancy and disregard for decency could implicate them in whatever conspiratorial machinations are threatening to come to light. She’s under multiple FBI investigations over her criminal mishandling of classified information and her misplacement of federal documents, in addition to a massive investigation into her role in the Clinton Foundation. The FBI is convinced with almost complete certainty that her private server was hacked by as many as five foreign intelligence agencies—something that shouldn’t be much of a surprise when one considers that her server was listed as ClintonEmail and had less security on it than a typical Gmail account does. Between the server and the allegations of pay-for-play deals done through the Foundation, criminal misconduct is, conceivably, the lesser of the charges that could be involved here. She’s running for president because the alternative is the destruction of her empire and the end of her career. Possibly even jail.
The DNC establishment wanted this person. They didn’t end up with her like the GOP ended up with Trump. Trump slipped through because tactical miscalculations on the part of the primary frontrunners, in addition to petty quibbling and egos getting in the way. Maybe it was for the better, who knows? But the GOP did not want Trump—neither the establishment, nor most of the voting base. But Democrats have wanted Hillary Clinton for decades. She’s been the de facto candidate since 2008. She’s a woman. She was a former First Lady. It’s her turn. It’s disgusting that so many urbanite limp-wristed liberals have bought into this idiotic women’s entitlement movement that has been buoying her into the limelight. It was almost as if the party purposefully ran the most unashamedly socialist old man against her in the primaries as a joke, in order to make her seem moderate. How ironic, then, that they not only had to rig the convention in her favor, but she had to actually go further left and adapt some of his talking points during the primary season just to stay relevant. Obama helped set this stage with his blatantly socialist policies, goals, and rhetoric, and the Democrats are now paying for it. Good riddance. Everything about all of this is simply insane.
Meanwhile, despite all of this breaking, and despite Hillary’s stuttering and poor attempt to chock all of this up to Russian hackers mysteriously connected to Trump somehow, despite Trump’s managing to stay on message and not make serious gaffs for a couple weeks (shocking, actually), the polls still show a Clinton lead. Last year, poll numbers anticipated a distinct loss for Netanyahu during the Israeli election season. He won by significant numbers, despite Obama’s Administration getting caught red-handed funding his opposition. Earlier this year, poll numbers expected a landslide loss of the Brexit EU referendum, but instead, it won by an almost 4% margin. Given that the world is watching this election, just as it was watching Brexit and how much of it was watching Israel, is there reason to believe now that the polls aren’t somehow stacked? Between the oversampling of democrats and the sheer precedent for DNC officials to get their hands on anything that can be twisted around, it seems to me that the race is and has been significantly closer than the polls want to reflect. Trump might lose, but I don’t think it will be by the landslide numbers that CTR is hoping for. Then again, Trump might win. The election is too close to call, and all this crap coming out in the Wikileaks dumps has made it obvious that we can’t trust the media to tell us the truth, we can’t trust the poll data, and we might not even be able to trust the election itself given the sheer amount of voter fraud that has been occurring for the last couple elections. At this point, who knows? The only good thing about any of this is that it’s starting to come out into the open.
Election day is four days away. Given how the headlines are going, that might as well be four weeks. Trump could still lose this thing.
