Ugh We're Going to Re-Elect Donald Trump

Good lord, we’re going to reelect Donald Trump next year.

With Bernie Sanders’ entry into what was already shaping up to serve as a clinic in how not to win an election, the only thing that would add more fuel to the fire is for Hilary Clinton to run again.

We are just chomping at the bit to tear each other apart over the narcissism of small differences, aren’t we? Kamala Harris failed her constituents as a District Attorney. Bernie Sanders is an old, white, single-issue misogynist. Elizabeth Warren is terrible on foreign policy, and something about a DNA test? Cory Booker is a phony progressive and a sellout. Meanwhile there is a literal Nazi sympathizer in the White House and it feels a bit like we on the left are having a hard time focusing on that.

Clear, widespread, and well-funded voter fraud was rampant in North Carolina, and yet the New York Times prefers to call it a “Scheme” for the 20 hours the story was even on their website. Commercial drugs are now more likely to kill you than driving, you are currently being harmed by global warming, and, technically, you’re living in an oligarchy.

Even Tucker Carlson is mad as hell, and isn’t going to take it anymore.

And yet, here we are, just lining up to pick each other bloody like a bunch of damn poultry.

To be fair there are better and worse candidates on the left, and the primary system is a decent way to suss that out. Bernie did a lot of good to energize his progressive base and move the Democratic party to the left. But with the nervous hand wringing and dissonance that is already shepherding in the next election cycle, we’re getting ready for a second term of 45.

All of the candidates will have some kind of problematic past, or record, or stupid party costume when they were 19. All of the candidates are 100 times better than what we currently have. During primary season their differences will feel profound. They will be separated by chasms in debates over healthcare, foreign policy, and the environment.

The Republican establishment is already laying a foundation to vilify the left as baby-murdering eco-terrorists, but the reality is that nothing that is proposed in the next election cycle will be particularly earth shattering. Policies that are rejected here as radical and socialist are commonplace in most of the industrialized world. What has passed for progressive in the United States for decades has been nothing left of center-right on any honest conversation of scale.

This next year, let’s recognize that we as Americans elected an authoritarian, right wing nationalist government. Not Romania, not Ukraine. The President of the United States is on the record defending neo-Nazi violence. And he has been met, generally, with disdain.

Donald Trump is, hands down, the least popular president we have had in modern memory, which is a good thing. Sort of like Brexit, it’s as though we made a panicky, emotional decision that we didn’t really mean. Frankly, we blew it. Unlike Brexit, we can do our best to make it right, and vote him out in a landslide.

But in order to do that, we need a candidate who can energize voters and get them to the polls. This will not happen if we spend the next year or so ruining the credibility of the pool. All of the democratic prospects are functionally identical in that they are not Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that, because doing so will all but guarantee a second Trump term, and that is unforgivable.