WELCOME TO REPUDIATION NATION! (FUELED BY TRUMP)

He believes he can repeat the perverse miracle of 2016. In fact, he is counting on it, because he has no other strategy. He has always been a one-trick pony.

He thinks he won the presidency because he was smarter than everyone else. In fact, he won it because he had an unpopular opponent, help from Russia, the spectacular blunder of James Comey, and the off-the-charts enthusiasm of angry white, blue collar men.

There were those in his inner circle who might tell him the truth – that the world has moved on and he has not. As far as we can tell, they have all been fired. Delivering the painful truth to Donald Trump is a well-understood political death wish.

No more McMaster. No more Mattis. No more Kelly. No more Tillerson. No more Gary Cohn, who failed to convince his boss that tariffs and trade wars are bad for farmers, bad for manufacturers, and bad for consumers.

Now there is no one left to say:

Mr. President, this might be considered unpresidential.

Mr. President, this appears to be bad strategy.

Mr. President, with all due respect, this is stupid.

And I think it is a very safe bet that there is nobody left inside the presidential bubble to say:

Mr. President, you are losing.

In mid-June, Trump’s internal pollsters gave him the news that he was losing to Joe Biden by double digits in his three most important states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where he beat Hillary Clinton by razor thin margins, giving him the Electoral College votes that were supposed to be hers.

And to make it worse, those poll results were leaked to the press. Trump then did what Trump does. He angrily threw sand from his sandbox. He denied that the poll results existed, then he called them fake polls, then he said he never trusted polls anyway. And then of course, he fired several of the pollsters.

He now has what he always wanted – the unfettered freedom to be himself, surrounded only by people who nod approval or remain silent.

So Trump gets to have his tweet storms and his rallies, delighting his base with his favorite hits: Obama was a failure, Hillary was a crook, immigrants are dangerous, Democrats are un-American, outspoken congresswomen of color are treasonous, and our economy is the best it has ever been.

We can see with our own eyes that his base eats it up and begs for more. We can absolutely rely on the fact that the Trump base will show up at the polls in 2020 and vote for him again, if he keeps them fed with white racist battle cries, while celebrating them as the real Americans.

Meanwhile, all of us are subjected to a daily barrage of assaults designed to wear us down, make us sick, and paralyze us with fear – to the absolute delight of the Donald Trump Fan Club.

And there is no one left to tell him that membership in his fan club is already maxed out, and that Repudiation Nation (that’s us!) grows larger and more energized with every racist tweet, every grotesque rally, every attack on environmental protection, every mass murder inspired by a thinly disguised hate message, and now every mention of the word: recession.

We should not be intimidated by his pornographic lounge act.

We should all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that Repudiation Nation showed its clout in the 2018 midterms, by flipping a whopping 41 seats in the House of Representatives. That big Blue Wave was led by high black voter turnout in the cities and high white (mainly women) voter turnout in the suburbs – both of which were lacking in 2016.

In 2020, that combination will win everywhere in the U.S., except for the deep red states, where Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats. But, in blue and purple states, when Democratic enthusiasm is high, that combination wins − even when Republican enthusiasm is just as high!

So, I am happy to tell you (yet again) that Donald Trump will not win re-election.

But there is really no reason for you to believe me.

Months before the 2016 election, a little-known political analyst, Rachel Bitecofer did what no major pollster or analyst had come close to doing. She predicted the 41-seat flip in the House, and she did it by predicting the exact districts that would be flipped. 

Her predictions were based on a model that she developed.

You may remember that as the 2018 midterms grew closer, analysts began replacing predictions of a Blue Wave to more of a blue trickle. Perhaps Democrats would win the House, but it would be by a small majority. Democratic optimism began evaporating. But Rachel did not budge from her wave prediction.

So, I think we should listen to what her model tells her about the 2020 election. Although the election is still over a year away, with the all-important primaries yet to take place, Rachel Bitecofer has already made her prediction – not about who will be the nominee, but about which party will win the election.

Let me say that again. She is predicting the outcome of the presidential election without knowing which Democratic challenger will be facing off against Donald Trump.

According to her model − the same model that predicted the 2018 midterm election with pinpoint accuracy − the Democratic candidate will win the election with at least 278 Electoral College votes. Trump will win at least 197, and there are 4 toss-up states.

But the critically important industrial states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not in her toss-up category. They are part of the 278. Trump still thinks he can win them, but he can’t. 

The Donald Trump Fan Club will be loud and confident up until the very last critical votes are counted, but Repudiation Nation will put an end to Godzilla.

Don’t be fooled by the con man’s bluster, which will remain loud, relentless, and unnerving. 

Just breathe, live, and keep committing random acts of sanity.

You’ve already taken two minutes out of your day to read this post, so why not take another few minutes to let Rachel Bitecofer tell you in her own words why you should sleep better.

It worked for me.


Bruce Coltin
Surviving Trump Two Minutes at a Time

THE TRAIN TO THE PRESIDENCY

In the days before the 2016 election, some big political bombs dropped on the Hillary Clinton campaign – Russians, Wikileaks, and Comey. But still most people and almost all pundits believed that her victory was inevitable. And why on earth was the Trump campaign wasting their time and resources on reliably blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?

What a bunch of amateurs! Those states were so in the Democratic bag that even Hillary wasn’t bothering with them.

However, there were a few pundits, most notably filmmaker, Michael Moore and former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, who warned us that we should in fact worry about those battle fields where the Red Army was showing up and the Blue Army was not.

They warned us that Hillary had not been listening to angry blue-collar voters, who were losing the jobs, the security, and most of all the respect that had made the party of FDR their political home for generations.

The 2016 election came down to 77,744 votes in three states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

When the dust settled, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), and Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes).

If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260.

She would have won those states if black voters had showed up in Obama numbers.

She would have won those states if so many white suburban women had not stayed home on election day or had not cast protest votes.

She would have won those states if white blue-collar voters who had voted for Obama had not felt so abandoned by the political establishment that they saw nothing to lose by voting for a wrecking ball.

In March of 2016, a tone-deaf Hillary Clinton, answered a question about her energy policy by saying, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Perhaps that was not the best way to win the support of those who had become losers in the new economy.

News reporters sat down and spoke with unemployed coal miners and their families, who were running low on money, hope, and dignity. Hillary tried but failed to undo the damage.

All Donald Trump needed to do was to declare himself their champion, promising to stop the “war on coal,” and bring back those jobs – as only he could. At every such opportunity, Donald Trump had an empty promise ready to go.

Michael Moore said this:

Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant, because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

By the time 2018 election campaigns came along, most 2016 wrong-way voters and stay-at-home voters realized that they had made a colossal mistake. On the campaign trail, Trump tried to sell caravan craziness, while Democrats pushed health care sanity. Republicans countered by trying to tell us that by dismantling Obamacare, they would make health care better than ever.

In congressional districts across the nation, the right Democratic candidates stepped forward – candidates, ranging from radically progressive to traditionally moderate, and right for their districts, and in essence said:

Do not listen to the Republican noise. They are desperate, out of ideas, and are owned by a narcissistic demagogue. They are peddling fear of immigrants and they are counting on you to buy it. But I know this district. I know the factories that are still closing, the middle-class jobs that are not coming back, the medical bills that are no longer covered.

And, the map flipped Blue in record numbers.

Now, the race for 2020 is underway, and it is possible that we will have as many as twenty-five or twenty-six contenders by the start of the debate season at the end of June. Many of you are worried that having too many contenders will result in handing the nomination to a candidate who will lose to Trump. I do not agree. I am happy to see so many quality job applicants, and I will be excited to see how each one of them performs on the debate stage.

At this point, I would not hazard a guess as to who the nominee will be, nor do I think there is a best fit for the times, based on race or gender. But I do think that the eventual winner will be the man or woman who genuinely understands the significance of this iconic story:

When FDR’s funeral train made its way along its route, greeted by large somber crowds, a man who was noticeably sobbing was asked:

Did you know the president?                                                                             

The sobbing man replied:

No, I didn’t know him, but he knew me.

        

I predict that after our ordeal of surviving Trump, the next President of the United States will be someone who knows that the coal miner is us.