As much as progressives hate the Electoral College - and we can argue its flaws all day long - in 2020, the Electoral College is the only game in town. There's not going to be some miracle where it's not the rule book. The winner of the Electoral College is president. Doesn't matter how many popular votes you get.
When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the potential for abuse of power.
There's a reason most Republicans and a vast majority of voters loathe Donald Trump: his vulgarity, his blistering ignorance, his constant dishonesty, his venality, and his utter lack of the knowledge, judgment, or temperament to be president of the United States.
Part of the sales pitch for the Trump campaign is their unique, esoteric secret sauce based on a rabid cult following motivated by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media manipulation.
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others who raced to the microphones at the slightest hint of Obama overstepping the lines were damn quiet as Trump wildly colored outside the lines of any rational version of executive power.
Donald Trump, like many cult leaders, understands the power his words will have over the minds and actions of his followers... but few cult leaders have a pet media infrastructure.
For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.
The purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter. The mission of deterrence to make all parties in possession of nuclear weapons never, ever use them.
Democrats are holistically bad at politics. They don't know how to fight in the way Republicans do.
Donald Trump is an idiot and a moron and just a kook of the first order, but he is surrounded by a bunch of guys like me, who are ride-or-die for him. They don't love him ideologically, but they're stuck. And they're very smart. And they're very determined and they will do anything to win.
Extinction isn't pretty, especially when you know it's coming and do nothing about it.
Trump has learned over his long career as a lying liar who lies that none of his stories have to be true.
It's become a cliche to stare in mute horror at Donald Trump's endless stream of Twitter vomit, wondering what chthonic god finds pleasure in watching us writhe as Trump brings out the very worst in his followers and new levels of willful ignorance from Republicans determined to see no evil, no matter how in their face that evil is.
Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.
Donald Trump's racism is of course an ongoing feature, not a bug.
Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.
Trump, like any good Stalinist, knows that one death is a tragedy but 100,000 is a statistic.
America once used the words 'treason' and 'traitors' only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation's most vital secrets or interests.
Every re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent. Every. Single. One.
Almost every culture has a cognitive bias for the tough guy, the alpha, the winner.
