TomFlannery.com

It’s all a bit surreal, this.

The President of the United States refusing to accept the results of an election that even his own personal news outlet admits was fair and transparent. He ran what might have been the dumbest campaign in American history, never missing a chance to drive down his own totals. Instructing his cult to not vote by mail. They complied, of course. Insulting various sections of the country that it turned out he sorely needed (“bad things happen in Philadelphia”). Mocking those who are taking a pandemic seriously, which is the same as spitting on the graves of some 220,000 dead, and counting. And all we’re getting now as evidence of fraud is a tweet saying he won by “A LOT”, (those are his capital letters, not mine. I want to make that clear) and a bizarre press conference held outside a Philadelphia landscaping company wedged between a dildo shop and a crematorium. It’s really not worth trying to satirize Trumpworld, because nothing you come up with can possibly hang with the real thing. When “get Rudy on the phone” is your PR strategy, fresh off the guy priming himself in a hotel room with a supposed under-age girl, the writing is on the wall. Not only did you not drain the swamp, you are now pissing in it.

Saturday was a good day though. Gorgeous weather. And then the news finally came. Pennsylvania was finally called, and our 20 electoral votes put Biden over. He was now the President-elect. Spontaneous celebrations broke out, literally, all over the world. Manhattan came alive in a way it hasn’t since this pandemic started, horns honking and masked crowds gathering in jubilation. An impromptu party broke out outside of Biden’s childhood home in Scranton. The White House, now surrounded by a wall that would be the envy of Mexico, was also ringed with happy voters, gathering to serenade Trump out of town. Massive amounts of shade were thrown from London and France and Canada, everybody exhaling that America didn’t lose its mind twice in a row. Biden and Kamala Harris addressed the nation in the evening, and they used complete sentences and empathetic rhetoric and everything. At first it seemed jarring…..what was going on? And then it clicked. Finally. Adults.

The President, who still hasn’t quite mastered Optics 101, wasn’t home at the time. He thought it more Presidential to golf at one of his clubs, at tax payer’s expense, and then rage-tweet about how unfair it was that the legal votes went to him and the illegal ones went the the other guy. He said all along he was only going to accept the results if he won, so nobody was expecting anything approaching class. Still, the level of scumbagery can still shock. We’re a nation where things like this simply do not happen. You can whine and be douchey when you lose, but eventually you act like a fucking grown-up and start to transition your ass out. This isn’t North Korea. Or China. Or Moscow. Go start planning your Presidential library. Or, in Trump’s case…..a sharpie coloring room.

There’s still so much to do. Georgia run-offs will determine control of the Senate. Rancid bootlicking filth like McConnell and Lindsey Graham are still out there (we rigged the election but let them win?), traitors both. As I type this the future of Obamacare is once again in question. The Supreme Court will decide, a court that now includes Trump’s hand-picked haters. The results could be catastrophic for millions. And he would quite willingly do this for spite alone. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about anybody. And once again the entire Republican party is mute, still somehow in thrall to a vicious thug.

Right now it’s less like installing a successor and more like overthrowing a dictator. And the “fuck your feelings get over it snowflakes, you lost” crowd are suddenly incredibly butt-hurt, and in droves have taken their social media ball to a place that promises no fact checking and unlimited hate speech. It’s quite adorable. I suspect the FBI will be watching them closely in the upcoming days…..as right now Parler seems like something straight out of a Timothy McVeigh wet dream.

Keep on keeping on. The arc of justice. Our better angels. All of that.

And this just in….Philadelphia is organizing a run from the Four Seasons Hotel to the Four Seasons Landscaping company and calling it the “Fraud Street Run”, which makes me even more proud to be from Pennsylvania. And an American.

In a bit..

–tf