You’ve gotten the memo from the leftist chin-strokers on social media. It’s simple. You’re insane for questioning the 2020 presidential election result. Joe Biden is the president-elect, so you just run along and ignore the copious news stories about election fraud and get over it. Man up!
Political titans on Capitol Hill look visibly concerned when asked by MSM reporters about the president and his millions of voters who aren’t convinced that this election wasn’t filled with fraud.
The party of Governor Stacey Abrams, President Hillary Clinton, and “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances” dares to point the magenta cat-toy-feather-wand of shame at Republicans who can’t believe that the candidate with the most momentum and the power of the incumbency didn’t win.
You’re not wrong. And you’re not crazy.
Here are just five reasons why people are not crazy to question the results of the 2020 election.
1. Enthusiasm
While Joe Biden was stumbling through basement Zoom calls to the fortunate few who were selected to ask him pre-arranged questions to which he fumbled his scripted answers, Donald Trump went before enthusiastic and huge crowds, giving speeches where he’d wander off the teleprompter to offer off-the-cuff jokes, barbs, and snappy patter for more than at hour, multiple times per day, for days.
Biden Rally:#Trump2020Landslide #BidenRally pic.twitter.com/AVlkKKXquK
— President-Elect thesourwarhead (@thesourwarhead) October 16, 2020
Trump’s famous rallies were all done pre-and-post COVID shutdown to the giddy delight of those who waited in line for hours for the privilege of not being able to go to the bathroom and getting felt up by Secret Service agents.
By contrast, Joe Biden’s events, to the extent he had any, were sparsely attended. His “rallies” took on the look of the ribbon-cutting for a puppy mill, there were so few people. Later, he asked the big guns to help him out, such as Lady Gaga, which probably left Gaga wondering, “What the hell am I doing here?’
Dismal audience participation for Lady Gaga while she is campaigning for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/igsCHs353Z
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 3, 2020
Joe’s car rallies looked a little more alive, owing to the lights and horns of the few who showed up.
Wait, the thinking goes, voters didn’t bother to come out and see Joe when he and Punxsutawney Jill – excuse me, Doctor Punxsutawney Jill – came out of the basement of their Big-Guy-paid-for manse but did show up to vote for him?
The enthusiasm deficit for Joe Biden is a huge reason why people are leery of the reported election results.
VIP: Is It Misinformation to Claim ‘Widespread Fraud or Errors’ Changed the Election Outcome?
2. Riots and Law and Order
President Trump made the antifa and Black Lives Matter riots, looting, arsons, and violence a campaign issue.
He owns the riots #BidenRiots pic.twitter.com/18FmjCQiSK
— 🇺🇸Bea Taylor #militarywidow Text TRUMP to 88022 (@dragonian3333) August 31, 2020
He attempted to stop the nightly attacks at the Portland, Oregon, federal courthouse, eventually acceding to the demands of the governor and mayor, who promised they’d deploy state police to stop the assaults, which they did for two seconds.
While Trump made unrest from antifa and BLM a campaign issue and demanded Democrats denounce them, Biden’s “denunciations,” such as they were, were often muddled, and siding with antifa outcomes. In a statement in May, when Portland, Kenosha and other cities were on fire from anti-cop riots, Biden weighed into the fray saying that “protesting police brutality is ‘right and necessary’ and the ‘American response.’ But burning down communities and needless destruction is not.”
For observers of the antifa and BLM riots of the spring, summer, and fall, riots and protests were of a piece. You didn’t have one without the other.
By putting himself on the side of the politically-motivated rioters being cheered on by his party’s Left, Biden seemed to embrace the Democrats’ defund-the-police and anti-police messages even as rioters set fires, destroyed other peoples’ property, threatened others’ lives, and acted like terrorists.
Trump knew this. There was no question of where he stood. The president expanded the First Step Act and gave clemency to people who had been arguably wronged by the judicial process. He supported law and order but most of all he demanded justice and was ready to make it right where he saw a wrong.
The idea that millions more people favored the guy who was ambivalent about the literal terrorism on the streets of America was unthinkable to Trump supporters. Who would vote for a guy who would give the old ¡Olé! to people looting, burning, and threatening people? Surely, fewer than those who voted for Trump…
Trump: ‘Joe Biden Has Given Moral Aid and Comfort’ to Rioters by Calling Riots ‘Peaceful Protests’
3. COVID Response
Early in the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and after he stopped travelers from China, President Trump took a federalist approach to much of the response. He held daily news conferences along with Vice President Pence and he led the federal government in ticking off a daily checklist of things that needed to be done to confront the new virus.
The White House amassed information and began the effort to get a vaccine on track using the CDC, FDA, NIH, and the military. President Trump sent military medical ships to California and New York to help with any emergency room overflows, which thankfully never occurred.
Trump pressed into service U.S. manufacturers, sometimes using the Defense Production Act, to get companies to build ventilators and even hand sanitizer, which was in short supply.
In so doing, Trump resupplied spent emergency stores never replenished by the Obama administration after the much smaller H1N1 pandemic.
President Trump got the ball rolling on the big-picture items needed for a country to respond to a pandemic.
As he did this he devolved hands-on responses to local governments, in the federalist approach, where he believed it belonged and where it would be more efficient.
Many big, top-down government fans didn’t like it and often blamed the president for not commanding shutdowns and arrogating more power to himself to oversee response at the granular level. If he had any notion of doing such a thing, Trump didn’t give into it.
While Trump took hits for leadership lapses in the COVID response, complaints were usually uttered by leftists who wished he’d done more to lock down, force vaccinations, and take a greater hand in shutting down the economy.
Trump’s approach and his sideline Twitter sniping let people know he didn’t want a wholesale shutdown. He’d hoped to reopen the economy “by Easter” and tried to cajole Democrat governors into lifting the reigns on the people and the shutdown of the economy. Democrats like Governors Jay Inslee, Kate Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer did the exact opposite. Citizens organized recall efforts to respond to the governors’ autocratic response.
Trump deemed the federal government’s response as “the greatest mobilization since World War II.” And he’ll never get the credit for getting a country on war-footing to fight a pandemic from the ground up.
4. Coattails …?
Stories about President Trump’s weak coattails were legion before the election. His likability was questioned and still is, but, what ho! Look what actually happened.
After the usual midterm 2018 thrashing for the president in power (George W. Bush and FDR are the only presidents who added seats during the midterms), Republicans made up some of those losses in congressional races and statehouses across the country in 2020.
Ballotpedia reports that while Democrats won 222 seats to Republicans’ 212, the GOP unexpectedly flipped 14 seats from D to R compared to three seats for the D’s.
Among the claw-backs were four California seats lost in the 2018 election to the new “ballot harvesting” measures Democrats put into effect. Trump didn’t come to California to hold rallies but did he did come to fundraise.
The candidates won on the backs of law and order (sound familiar?) and opening up the economy. They were Trump messages without the man. And Republican Michelle Steel is already working on getting Governor Gavin Newsom to change his disastrous tax and law and order policies that have made California so unpopular that people are fleeing in droves and the state could lose a congressional seat.
“We can’t afford to dither any longer or California will permanently lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs to states like Texas that place value on business and investment.”https://t.co/nLz8itjkVs
— Michelle Steel (@MichelleSteelCA) December 31, 2020
Republicans expanded their “trifecta” of governor’s mansions and state houses by two and possibly three, according to Ballotpedia. Alaska is still tallying the votes, believe it or not.
The media are loathe to give Trump any credit, but Trump received ten million more votes than he did in 2016 – the most of any Republican president ever. He energized the voter base and flipped back a bunch of seats in both state houses and Congress.
What’s the definition of coattails again?
5. Another ‘Election’
If President Trump is so divisive and unlikable and truly the worst, most contemptible person in the world, then why did he win the Gallup Poll’s “most admired” person, outstripping the Obamas and Joe?
Who are these people? Rubes? Or could it be that the oldest public polling firm in America captured the lightening in the bottle that shows what has really happened in the body politic?
- Trump – 18%
- Obama – 15%
- Joe Biden- 6%
- Dr. Fauci – 3%
The Dalai Lama came in at a — womp, womp — 1%.
We all know about public opinion polls. Joe was supposed to win by 10 or more points in 2020 and Hillary was going to easily get into office in a landslide. But Trump trebling the declared president-elect in a public opinion poll done in December? You can’t blame that on a sympathy vote. Nobody feels sorry for Donald Trump. They just love – or hate – him.
So you can be forgiven for your skepticism about the presidential results.
And you’re not crazy.
Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it here. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft
Join the conversation as a VIP Member