Musings & Thoughts for Monday, November 9, 2020, or: Why I Voted for Joe Biden Redux

Author’s Note: Parts of this blog post originally appeared on my personal Facebook page.

Hi, there, Dear Reader. It’s mid-morning (almost 7 AM Eastern as I start this post) here in New Hometown, Florida. Currently, the temperature is 75˚F (24˚C) under partly cloudy skies. The sun rose just one minute ago, so there’s not much “daylight” out there, and with humidity at 89% and a strong 25 MPH (41 KM/H) wind blowing from the east-northeast, the feels-like temperature is 75˚F (24˚C). Today’s forecast calls for scattered rain showers and a high of 82˚F (28˚C); tonight we can expect cloudy skies and a low temperature of 75˚F (24˚C).

It’s six days after Election Day 2020, and President Donald J. Trump is still refusing to concede defeat, even though former Vice President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the projected winners of the Presidential election and the Electoral College doesn’t finalize the process till the electors cast their votes on December 14. His reaction to the loss has been predictably Trumpian – he continues to tweet accusations that there was massive voter fraud involving the mail-in ballots, and he spent quite a bit of time last night on Twitter, retweeting clips from Trump-friendly conservative commentators repeating the “we wuz robbed” conspiracy theories and railing against the media for “calling” the election.

For instance, 17 hours ago, Trump tweeted:

Since when does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be? We have all learned a lot in the last two weeks!

So, of course, Trump will – true to form – try to challenge the nation’s choice by taking his “fake news” about widespread voter fraud and other Democratic-inspired shenanigans to overturn the election returns, while his loyalists in and outside government try to impede the transition process by any means necessary – including patently illegal ones.

For instance, the Trump Administration official charged with releasing the necessary funds to begin the transition, General Services Administration head Emily Murphy, refuses to do so. Per a story in Politico.com:

Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), must make an “ascertainment” that Biden has won the presidency before the transition can contact federal agencies or access the millions of dollars set aside for the team. While the Associated Press and POLITICO have determined that Biden has won the election, President Donald Trump has not conceded and recounts are ongoing. “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement Saturday. “Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”

This has put Murphy in an awkward position.

As a rule, the GSA avoids any hint of partisanship. Even as the media declared Biden the winner on Saturday, the GSA was reluctant to immediately follow, saying in a statement that “an ascertainment has not yet been made. GSA and its Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.”

Ugh. I’ve never seen a President and an Administration so openly disdainful toward the democratic process, the free press, and the express wishes of 75,000,000 Americans who voted for change in the 2020 elections.

You know, I voted for Joe Biden not only as a rejection of Donald J. Trump’s policies, public utterances, and personal conduct during his one term as President, but also because there is no way I can forget how he publicly mocked Serge Kovaleski, a reporter for The New York Times who – like me – is physically disabled, at a November 2015 campaign rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Per the Wikipedia entry on Kovaleski:

“You’ve got to see this guy: ‘Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember,’ he’s going like ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said.’ ” Trump bent his wrist and flailed his arms repeatedly as he spoke, drawing laughter from the audience.

I was born and lived in Miami, Florida for most of my life. As a result, many of my friends and high school classmates are Cuban-American. And while it is fair to say that not all of them vote Republican or support Trump or Trump’s policies, it is also accurate to point out that most of them do.

With that particular group in mind, yesterday morning I wrote this on my Facebook timeline:

To my Trump-supporting friends:

If you ever wondered why I do not like Donald Trump (either as President or as a person), look no further than this (image).

I do not know Serge Kovaleski, the South African-born investigative reporter for the New York Times that Trump mocked in November of 2015, when the now lame-duck President was still “Candidate Trump.” And since I don’t have a digital subscription to the Times, I have never read any of his stories.

What I DO know is that back when I was an independent voter and still trying to decide which party to back (remember, in April Hillary Clinton was not the nominee) or which candidate I liked, I already knew Trump was never going to get my vote. Ever.

Why?

Well, it’s not because I hate America (I don’t). It’s not because I want Communism (some of you call it socialism, but that’s because Communists hijacked the term and perverted it), because I do not want socialism. And I do not want “free stuff,” either.

My reasons for not liking Trump are many. Most of them have nothing to do with politics, but rather with his character as a person. He is, as the late, great Tara Brock[1] used to say jokingly about students who cut up too much in her class, “rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.” (Ms. Brock, of course, was kidding, and we knew she was kidding. When I say it about Donald Trump, though, I mean it.)

I don’t know how to perform the mental gymnastics I see my Trump-supporting friends do when they try to defend “their” President. I do have – unfortunately – a long memory for many of the things Trump has done in his previous life as a “businessman,” including calling news media outlets (often the same ones he derides now as FAKE NEWS in his role as (blessedly) “lame duck Prez”) and pretending to be a Trump Organization PR staffer to feed reporters self-serving reports about himself. He also stiffed contractors who worked on his buildings, changed political parties several times when it proved expedient, was unfaithful to all three of his wives, and his charity was shut down for fraudulent behavior.

And, of course, Trump is a bigot, despite his appointment of a black neurosurgeon (and former Presidential candidate), Ben Carson, as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (a role for which Carson was not qualified). See, Carson is a black man, but he is the type of black man who ingratiates himself with the white elites out of financial and social gain and tends to identify with said white elites. He’s not necessarily EVIL in the same way that Stephen Miller is EVIL, but he’s like the French who collaborated with Nazi Germany for venal self-interest and ideological sympathies.

Trump and his father Fred were notoriously discriminatory against blacks and other minorities when they were basically NYC slumlords. The Department of Justice even took them to court back in the 1970s for that. And Trump is known to say racist things, such as the comment that his black accountants are lazy and untrustworthy, and that he prefers that his money-counters be Jewish.

I also recall that when five black and Latino teenagers (the Central Park Five) were coerced into making a false confession after a young white banker was assaulted and raped by a serial rapist (who later confessed) and thus wrongfully prosecuted and convicted, it was Donald J. Trump who placed full-page ads in several NYC newspapers calling for the restoration of the death penalty and calling for the execution of these young men. To this day, Trump insists that the Central Park Five are guilty and that the State of New York erred in vacating their conviction and paying them restitution for their wrongful prosecution and incarceration.

Well…I could cite a million other reasons why I rejected Trump in 2016 (much to your dismay), but the incident where he mocked Serge Kovaleski was the one defining moment in the 2016 Republican campaign that “sealed the deal” for me.

Why?

As all of you who know me in person are aware, I have cerebral palsy. I am lucky that I have a relatively mild case of it, but it still has caused me a lot of heartache and frustration since I was a kid. I have a tough time controlling involuntary muscle movements, which makes me feel somewhat insecure and not-quite-attractive to the opposite sex. (And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but it’ll suffice.)

And I am sure that you know I studied journalism in high school and college. I wanted to be a reporter like Kovaleski. I identify as a journalist, even though I don’t have a degree, and I take “your” President’s and your party’s attacks on the free press both personally and seriously.

So when many of you, especially my high school classmates, decided to embrace Trump over any other Republican candidate, not only was I sad, but I was morally outraged and utterly disappointed that you, people I liked and even loved, could support a man who is so venal, dishonest, and mean-spirited.

That is my main reason for not joining the MAGA red-cap brigade.

And that, Dear Reader, is why I did not vote for Donald Trump, either in 2016 or in 2020.

Sources:

Meet Washington’s most powerful woman (temporarily) by ALEX THOMPSON , MEGAN CASSELLA, ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN, THEODORIC MEYER and DANIEL LIPPMAN  Published on Politico.com on 11/07/2020 06:05 PM EST

Serge F. Kovaleski Wikipedia entry

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[1] My 10^th grade English teacher, who died unexpectedly a little over a year ago, only 10 months after retiring from the Miami-Dade Public School system.