HILLARY'S TRUMP OF GLOOM

I began watching the returns coming in on CNN last night, and it certainly was interesting. The pundits for the most part acted like they were at a wake. CNN held off calling Trump the winner in states where he obviously had won as their vote-count expert examined the states county-by-county desperately looking for some hope that Hillary could pull it out. It went something like this “Well, here in Transylvania, with 97 % of the vote tallied and Trump holding a 100,000 vote lead, Clinton can still pull it out because they haven’t finished counting the votes in Precinct 37 of Philharmonica, a historically Democratic stronghold.” Never mind that there were only 10,000 votes in Precinct 37 of Philharmonica.

I started swapping around between CNN and MSNBC, and the guys at MSNBC seemed to be taking it a little better, but they were still dragging their feet on calling states where Trump seemed to hold a commanding lead. Swapping over to FOX, I saw less gloom and doom, and more willingness to call states for Trump. An online check with a neutral source (the BBC) tended to validate FOX’s courage in going ahead and calling states for Trump.

Then somewhere between 2:00 and 2:30 John Podesta came out and told the somber crowd at the Clinton “victory” party to go home, that Clinton would have a statement the next morning. The next thing that I remember happening is some pundits talking about Clinton challenging the election results, and the illegitimacy of a Trump presidency because Clinton was probably going to win the popular vote. Seems to me like just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump had undermined the very foundation of American Democracy by suggesting that he might challenge the election results. I guess whether democracy is undermined depends completely upon who is challenging the election results.

Before we go any further, let it be known that I did not vote for Trump. I didn’t vote for Clinton either. I voted for the guy who thought Aleppo was a brand of dog food. In doing that, I have found common ground for agreement with Colin Kaepernick, who voted for None of the Above.

I really was upset that Trump got the Republican nomination, because I believed that he was Hillary Clinton’s best shot at getting elected president. I kept saying to myself and anyone else who would listen “If the Republicans had nominated a decent candidate, we’d have a Republican in the White House for the next four years.” I felt that Clinton was so marred by scandal that only someone who was obviously unqualified could lose to her. I was wrong. She was so marred by scandal that even someone who was obviously unqualified could beat her. I wonder how many Democrats this morning are saying “If we had nominated a decent candidate, we’d have a Democrat in the White House for the next four years.”

That’s one of the two things that I haven’t heard the Wednesday morning experts talk about as a factor in her defeat—her trail of scandal from Whitewater through Benghazi to the email fiasco with stop-offs at other scandals too numerous to mention. My fear of a Trump presidency almost persuaded me to vote for her, but her record of scandal was too great and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Another major factor that nobody seems to be talking about is the Second Amendment. I’m not talking about the NRA—I’m talking about the Second Amendment. The media demonizes the NRA as a powerful lobby which whips up public opposition to gun control. The NRA isn’t creating that public sentiment, it’s getting out in front of an already-existing public sentiment. The public knows that Clinton, like many “gun control” advocates, doesn’t want gun control, she wants gun elimination. If she had been elected president and gotten the opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court Justices, that is quite possibly what we would have gotten—gun elimination along the lines of Australia and England. The specter of that possibility almost, but not quite, persuaded me to vote for Trump.

So now, because the Democrats fielded such a flawed nominee, we have the least-qualified President-elect in history. He can, however, become one of the most successful Presidents of the Twenty-First Century if he does two things: (1) He must gather around himself a cadre of the most qualified people he can find to run the various executive offices, and (2) he must get out of their way and let them run the country. It would be nice if Trump assumed as great a role in running the United States government as Queen Elizabeth takes in running the United Kingdom's government. He could show up for ribbon-cuttings and other public ceremonies while people who knew what they were doing actually ran the country.