Election Math: Who Needs Trump Most? No Question It's The Left

In Alexander Payne’s brilliant dark comedy Election (1999), a hapless civics teacher (Matthew Broderick) is tasked with overseeing an election for high-school government. The only candidate to file for president is a Hillary Clinton protegé named Tracy Flick (played wonderfully by Reese Witherspoon). 

Broderick’s character Jim McAllister loathes Flick’s earnest, perky, rapacious nature— especially after his best friend at school is fired for a tryst with Flick. So he convinces the school’s QB (a gormless Chris Klein) to run against her. On election day, McAllister hides two Flick votes to allow the QB to win. Sadly for him, the janitor finds the ballots in the garbage (one cast by the QB who feels it unseemly to vote for himself). 

Flick is declared the winner. McAllister loses his job, his wife and his reputation.

On November 3, 2020, that will be considered a fair election compared to what will unfold in the U.S. presidential race. Current opinions suggest that Donald Trump may appear to be the victor on election night. But in the following days or weeks— as happened in the 2018 midterms— a flood of Democratic votes will miraculously appear via mail and other unconventional sources.

Biden will suddenly be elected president. The Republicans will then litigate the result for as long as, say, the Democrats have actively resisted Trump’s 2016 win. (Which is now almost four years) Chaos will ensue. Actually, chaos is what we have now. Anarchy will ensue.

Or, if Trump somehow wins the electoral college again, Democrats will fill the streets claiming voter suppression. (Okay they’re already in the streets.) They’ll again blame the electorate college system as racist or sexist or something-something. If there are any statues left, they’ll tear them down. Anarchy will ensue.

(Here, Michael Anton games out the possibilities in The Coming Coup. https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/)

So get the popcorn, choose your beverage and hunker down as sanity make a left turn at Albuquerque. We’d say it will make a great satire someday, but the facts defy a witty embellishment such as Payne’s Election. Fact is funnier than fiction.

At the heart of this drama, of course, will be the oversized figure of Trump. Both sides need him urgently. His followers in the GOP need him to wash away the eight years of Barack Obama’s mock piety and social engineering. Most have few illusions about Trump. They’ll admit he’s a hustler, a Lothario, a religious fraud and an impulsive attention seeker. And that they wish he’d cut down on the tweeting by about 97 percent.

The best his followers can say is that he’s acted on the platform he announced as he came down the escalator in 2016 to announce his candidacy. But he doesn’t take a backward step to the Left. He’s loyal. And that counts for a lot.

But as we’ve seen with the Atlantic’s “Trump Calls Veterans Sucker and Losers” gambit, the GOP need is small potatoes next to the compelling need for Trump on the Left. They have very ambitious social and economic goals. Goals that exceed what most in middle America might want to enact. Obama’s supporters in 2008 might have laughed at the radical agenda being proposed by Kamala Harris. Sorry, by Joe Biden. (That’s one of their most ambitious goals.)

To achieve a political climate so rancorous, so riven by hate, that it makes the DEM platform sound cogent you need a real villain. For the Left, moderates to maniacs, Trump has been tailor-made for the role of Dr. Evil, the cruel genius who has denied them their birthright as stewards of the nation.

His sins have been countless, according to Nancy “Combover” Pelosi. The most diabolical deed, the most unforgivable sin against humanity was, of course, defeating their presumptive Queen Hillary in 2016. 

The Left likes to get its way. So when Trump took the oath of office, a lot of Democrat grandees found themselves out of work and, most fiendishly, out of power for four years. This could not be allowed to stand. 

Fancying themselves the French Maquis or the Chetniks of WW II fame, they organized a resistance to Trump’s mandate. They created the image of #OrangeManBad: a racist, mysoginist, self-dealing sexual deviant who’s also (pause for breath) a tax cheat, Russian plant, nepotistic fraud, oppressor of blacks, fossil-fuel fanatic, draft dodger, foreign-policy disaster, Twitter scumbag, Covid-19 denier, bleach ingestor, Nazi coddler, intolerant boss, tonsorial disaster who wears his ties too long.

And these are the kinder words they say.

Few humans could carry such a burden. But Trump has borne all of these insults— and more  from the likes of Bette Midler, Rob Reiner, Alyssa Milano, John Cusack, the cast of Hamilton and the caterer at the Hollywood Diner. Every day brings a new “blockbuster” or “game changer” from CNN. MSNBC, the New York Times or the Washington Post— all aimed at flushing Trump down the commode of history. And he barely flinches. Or shuts up.

Of course it’s all been preaching to the choir. He’s never changing. And there are few, if any, unconvinced voters at this point. The Trump character assassination from the culture industry and academia is aimed at stiffening the spine of liberals, whose backbones are notoriously gelatinous in a crunch. 

To bolster their wavering courage, the Left now employs the armies of #BLM and antifa in the streets of Democratic cities (they wouldn’t dare test Salt Lake City). It is meant to  suggest a party willing to match the NRA faction supporting Trump in the trenches.

Will it work? Does it even matter? Barring a shock revelation that Trump is Putin’s Manchurian candidate or Joe Biden has fracking shares the outcome could still be in dispute when 2024 rolls around. So settle in to see which party gets to claim Trump as the secret weapon that got them elected.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.