Lame Duck Execution

After almost two weeks of not writing about Donald Trump, it's sad to conclude that in those two weeks he has stooped to ever lower behavior, all the time reaching new absolute low-points for any person, let alone the President of the United States of America.

In politics, a lame duck or outgoing politician is an elected official whose successor has already been elected or will be soon, hence the tradition of calling the outgoing president a lame duck president. In general though, a lame duck is simply an ineffectual or unsuccessful person, and I do not think that applies to mr. Trump; he has been a highly effectual person when it comes to achieving personal success at the expense of everyone and everything around him. Only his supporters don't yet realize that he's taking advantage of them as well; he has now raised more than 200 million dollars in a donation campaign from his gullible fan-base by making them believe there's still a chance to overturn the outcome of the general elections, more than a month ago now.

In that month his legal team has lost more than 50 federal and state lawsuits, and in the past week his personally appointed supreme justices have dismissed the two cases that reached their courts. Still, to this moment the Orange Baby rage-tweets about a stolen election and keeps firing up his army of millions of supporters who believe him just as easily as they believe the ridiculous conspiracy theories coming from QAnon. So sad. These people do not understand in the slightest how they are responsible for the debasement of the term "conspiracy theory", how they are in large part responsible for the fact that this term can now easily be used as a discussion-stopper. Republican officials have publicly begged Trump to stop fanning the flames under his rage-filled supporters, as they are receiving threats for simply doing their jobs, for simply acknowledging the reality of Trump's loss. But Trump doesn't care about anyone but himself, so he just doubled-down on the fanning. The result? Well... Just watch this first video...

Every time you think Trump has hit an absolute low, he surprises everyone by going even lower. Every claim made about the alleged unfairness of this election has been disproved, debunked and thrown out of the courts, but still millions of Trump voters feel robbed, believe that China, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia are conspiring against their Great Leader and with Joe Biden. Trump has managed to destroy what little was left of democracy in America, but I agree with Kyle in the above linked video when he says that it's not all Trump's doing; society and its institutions must have failed on multiple levels, to make possible the existence of such a large group of people who've lost touch with reality. Mainstream media, politicians on both sides, corporations and economists alike have lied to their people for decades, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised about the rise of an individual that's an expert liar and con man.

As the egotistical megalomaniac narcissist that he is, lame duck Trump is now pulling every trick in the book, milking every last drop of opportunity that's left in his period as the POTUS. And in the style we've come to expect from him he keeps breaking new low-points day after day. Thursday he broke with a longstanding tradition in which the outgoing president postpones scheduled executions until the new president is installed. Brandon Bernard had the bad luck that this time Donald Trump was the outgoing president, so he was executed yesterday for a crime he committed when he was an adolescent. That was to be expected though; the Trump administration ended a 17-year hiatus on federal executions this summer, in the midst of a pandemic that already costs thousands of lifes per day.

“We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” William Barr said in a 2019 decree that the Department of Justice would renew the practice. [...] With Trump on his way out of office, he and his attorney general plan to execute another four inmates in a last-minute rush before the inauguration of Joe Biden, who opposes capital punishment. The next inmate, Alfred Bourgeois, will be executed on Friday at the same prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, while the final execution, of Dustin Higgs, will take place less than a week before Biden becomes president. Unless any legal challenges delay the lethal injections, Trump will have executed more Americans than any president in a given year since 1896, a grim record that he set in just seven months.
_{source: Intelligencer}

Like I said: this man's presidency is just full of nasty, shameful low-points and I for one look forward to the day he leaves the White House. And even for that day, there are rumors that he plans to hold a rally on the exact moment Joe Biden is to be inaugurated, desperately trying to stay in the spotlights until the very last moment, and childishly refusing to grant his successor his moment in those spotlights. We'll see if that day indeed results in a split-screen coverage as is now predicted. I guess it will, because the sad truth is that Trump has been good for the mainstream media, starting already at the very beginning, when it was reported in 2016 that Trump received 2 billion dollars worth of free airtime on account of the endless series of scandals surrounding his person and campaign... And they've learned nothing since then...

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