70+ Days of Turmoil

During Barack Obama’s term as President, a chain email went out reporting about his appointment of “czars”. Now, Presidents before him had done the same thing. You see, “czar” is just a term: “a person appointed by government to advise on and coordinate policy in a particular area.” All US presidents make appointments of people to various positions in their administration. What caused controversy was the use of the word “czars” to describe these appointments.

This term sent conservatives into a frenzy! They started to insist that Obama had a dictator mentality. Theories that Obama would not leave office when his term was up started to spread like wildfire. In 2016, an article even started to float around far-right leaning “news” sites quoting Obama as saying he would refuse to stand down from office if Trump were elected president! These reports were proven false.

Truth is, Obama never said or did anything to give anyone reason to be concerned that he was trying to seize control of the country and bypass our democratic process! Yet, conservatives swore he was a dictator, and that he would have to be forcefully removed from the White House.

Transition into Trump’s presidency!

Before he was even inaugurated into office, Trump started making claims of voter fraud! He said this was the reason he lost the popular vote, though he still won the election based on electoral votes won. This claim of voter fraud would be disproven but would continue to be a regular cry through his entire term.

Now, while most presidents spend at least the first couple of years actively working on issues with the administration he puts into place within the first few months of his or her term, Trump never left the campaign trail! In his first year in office, and through the rest of his term, Trump held several rallies…which were obviously campaign rallies. The entire 4 years, his administration has had a revolving door when it comes to people. When anyone shows any sign of not being 100% loyal to Trump, they are fired or forced to resign.

Throughout his term, Trump has repeatedly made claims that he was untouchable. I guess you could say he was the new “Teflon Don”! Not even an impeachment with a mountain of evidence stuck, as he had the Senate Majority Leader pledging his full loyalty…refusing to call witnesses, and pushing the motion in the Senate to drop the charges! Trump has even said that he could shoot someone and not lose voters!

This past year, Trump started to make claims that he felt he should get a “third term”…a “do-over”…because of how Democrats treated him! The whole while, he doubled down on his voter fraud claims, doing all he could to disrupt the nation’s trust in mail-in ballots in a year that the entire country is in the grips of a pandemic! “If I lose this election, it’s rigged” was the new cry!

You would think at this point alarms would go off in all those people who claimed Obama had a dictator mentality! These people who used to try to compare Obama to Hitler (while Obama exhibited no comparable traits to the former dictator) are now ignoring every warning sign! Even as Trump refuses to concede the 2020 election to Biden (which Trump clearly lost), his supporters rally behind him in support of his claims of mass voter fraud, and his outrageous claims that he actually won the election! The whole while, Trump is in process of one last firing spree, appointing loyalists who support his claims to key national security positions. And yet, the alarms still are not going off in the minds of his supporters!

I was one of the people who have said since the election results of 2016 that Trump would not leave office quietly! I didn’t want to be right…I really hoped I was wrong, and just being paranoid. However, my gut is rarely wrong, and my gut was screaming in this situation. The more Trump attacked the legitimacy of our voting process, the more I became concerned. We are now looking at the possibility that Trump will need to be forcefully removed from the White House at noon on January 20, 2021! This becomes a reality of greater potential every day! What will happen then? Will there be an uprising of his supporters, basically plunging us into a civil war? At least I can take some solace in that world leaders are coming out in support of Biden, accepting him as our president-elect! The next 70+ days are going to be a rollercoaster ride, this much is certain!