Election post-mortem 11-8-2018

8, November 2018                       Election post-mortem         

The Republican Party hooked their wagons to Donald Trump and took a shellacking in the House. A visibly shaken and irritable president cut-off and snarled at reporters injecting some of hackneyed expressions to boot.

Imposing massive voter suppression, gerrymandering, limiting hours of operation at polling boots and targeting Democrats with hateful racist messages won notable victories in the Senate in rural states.

Independent thinkers all but vanished from the Republican Party choosing to exit with their spines intact.

The public should now brace themselves for the presidential campaign of 2020 which will be a repeat performance of the last two years punctuated with anger, division laced with mega doses of fear and perhaps violence. A no holds barred campaign will likely continue to entertain Trump’s base and drive them into a perpetual frenzy. The black hole of Trump will draw in all his sycophants and negate independent thinkers.

Julian E. Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, reflected on the somber mood of the nation, ““Trump’s tapped into something really powerful and really ugly in the American electorate and it’s going to be hard to put that back into the bottle.”

George Will summed up the ebb and flow of the election in his usual eloquent style, “political antibodies have strengthen the nation’s immune system.”

Strap on your seat belts it’s going to be another roller coaster ride.