After the 2008 election there were serious suggestions that the Republican party was dead. I am sure that in the archives of even your own paper there were learned treatises indicating this party had lost focus and was being abducted by alien forces (no, not those aliens but right wing tea party radicalism). The Democrats held the Congress and the highest office in a firm, and seemingly, impenetrable grip.
But by 2016 the world had shifted on its axis and the Democrats were now on the outside looking in. Alice in Wonderland? No, it is the eight year power cycle that has controled our political universe, almost without exception for nearly three quarters of a century.
Since the changing of the guard in 1952, when Mr. Eisenhower and his party wrested the power of the presidency from the Dems, the Oval Office has been on a two term and out cycle as regular as the waxing and waning of the moon, except for the one term of Mr. Carter followed by 12 years of Republican rule (two for Reagan and one for Poppy Bush).
So, history and precedent is on the president's side in 2020. No matter how aberrational his behavior, how unique his perspective on how to conduct himself, short of self immolation (which is clearly an omnipresent possibility), there is a very strong likelihood that Mr. Trump will wear his thorny crown for two full terms.
I have predicted such a result from the first moment of his ascension and neither revolting incendiary tweet, Robert Mueller, Elizabeth Warren nor any self inflicted wound will likely keep this most unseemly serial prevaricator from his appointed rounds.
For in the end, the fault lies not in this self imagined star but in ourselves. We find comfort in wearing the same clothes for multiple rinse and wash cycles until we finally decide they are now but old rags to be discarded. And after four years we have a pronounced tendency to believe everything still fits well enough to continue to wear.
Mr. Trump, despite his bizarre actions, his seemingly daily descent into the recesses of a warped cranium, no matter his strange hairdo or ridiculously long ties, is the wrong man at the right time. For a long time.
5 comments:
sorry to have to agree with you lois
Oy.
AL
I most sincerely hope you are dead wrong!!!
A
Very sage remarks, as always. But let us hope that another inexorable cycle that changes the game every ten years near the end of the decade, and has since 1838 -- the Business Cycle -- arrives in time to make America cry Ouch! and the unemployment lines are long enough and wallets are empty enough to wake the dim bulbs up and vote for a change. Let's hope. A small price in the big picture.
GB
Very prescient. I have already begun to train myself to think he has won the election, so that when it happens I won't be crushed. --RE
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