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A commenter on another related thread averred to be glad the election was close, rather than a Joe Biden lanslide, because of the entertainment value of watching Donald Trump squirm slowly toward having to admit, somewhere else than the White House, that he has LOST, unwillingly slouching toward Biden's inauguration. I predict Trump will be in Mar-A-Lago on Inauguration Day; He can look forward to Cyrus Vance Jr. and the other New York authorities being in touch.
And Biden actually has the luxury of not paying attention to him to the extent of pardoning him for any alleged Federal crime, even if an actually independent Department of Justice decides to investigate Trump independently, because it is State charges of various frauds that New York, not the Federal government, will be bringing against him.
All Trump's talk about forming or buying another "conservative" (the conservatives of the 1950s, 60s, 70s would not claim the current twisters of the perfectly good word as their political descendants!) media network to compete with Fox, in whatever form he fantasizes, is going to be moot once he loses the mantle of presidential immunity from prosecution. Trump the Private Citizen of New York is going to have to give up his tax returns when they are subpoenaed.
It's at least tax fraud and bank fraud-- misrepresenting his assets low for tax purposes, and inflating his assets to suck banks into making him loans. He hasn't anything like the capital on hand, probably not the property assets, to fund a start-up conservative media network.
That said, I have a suggestion for him. Mr. Ex-- er, Mr. President: buy Breitbart, it's a household name, and you might be able to afford it, if you hurry up and do it before New York's best prosecutors put a lien on your assets. Just think, you can have Milo Yiannopoulos working for you! .
But, look: this is not entertainment, y'all. We the People have gotten used to Donald Trump behaving as if he was still operating in his "reality-show" fantasy world, where no one's future, much less the world's, was actually at stake.
How could any rational human being look at this transition process, and see and hear the president uttering threats to democracy unprecedented in the history of the United States, and view that as entertainment?
One can look at it as a behavioral modification that has occurred not so much because those who seek to manipulate public opinion spend large sums consulting behavioral scientists (though they have), but because of the impersonality and transactionality of the ubiquitous internet, in an age when the demographic of those raised wholly within the Information Age outnumbers those of us who were mature adults, even grandparents, by the time private ownership of computers became widespread (I had my first puter in 1997, a requirement for graduate school).
Not everyone has fallen for the modification. Millennial adults like my daughter, 28, who with her husband was a poll worker in suburban Atlanta for this election (I am so proud of them!), are way computer-savvy, but have maintained their capacity for critical thinking.
And Generation Z, from age 8 to 22, the oldest of which voted in their first Presidential election, are seeing their standard-procedure growing to adulthood torn up by the coronavirus. They already know how shaky the political and social ground is after four years of Trump's mis-leadership.
So, let us maintain at all costs our personal and collective sense of humor. But to those who are looking at the spectacle, the drama, the soap-operatic nature of this transition period as entertainment-- I say this as an entertainer indefinitely unemployed by the coronavirus: you ought to find some purer, cooler, hotter, whatever-you-want-er stuff to watch. Even in the pandemic there's plenty around.
And Happy Thanksgiving to all!
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