As I’ve grown older – and I doubt if this is typical – my opinion of my fellow Americans has improved, which makes me somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects for our democracy. 

Of course, I could be wrong, as I often am. One MAGA juror could lynch each of the Trump trials.^[1] Thanks to the Electoral College, the Petulant One could be reelected, and then, aided and abbeted by right wing SCOTUS justices, pardon himself and his cronies, transform the nation into a full-on Kleptocracy, a fascistic regime that bans public libraries and reconfigures them into massage parlors run under the auspices of the Kushner crime family.

But I really doubt Trump will be reelected. 

I suspect most Americans care about, rather than hate, each other. Most people believe in the credo live and let live. Most accept gays and biracial marriages and haven’t amassed an armory of assault weapons in preparation for a second civil war. Even my acquaintances who voted for Trump shy away from admitting they’d vote for him now. Of course, the voting booth is private and all that jazz, but why would a rational person cast a ballot for a venom-spitting narcissistic whiner who buries a former wife on his golf course to save money and then doesn’t bother to tend to her grave. 

His megalomania knows no bounds, whether he’s shilling trading cards that depict him as a superhero or idiotically claiming that Hawai’i’s wildfires would not have occurred if he – the Climate-Change-Denier-in-Chief – had been president. If he were in office, the Ukraine war would not have occurred, and if reelected, he’ll end it overnight. 

As they say in Queens, “yeah right.”

Although millions of people worship Trump, they make up approximately 30% of the population. The problem lies, of course, in the primary nominating system where fanatics of both parties have a greater say because harried citizens who don’t spend their evenings watching Fox News or MSNBC don’t vote in primaries. Many can’t take off work on a Tuesday, not to mention that fighting traffic after eight hours of labor to stand in line at an elementary school isn’t nearly as pleasant as dropping into a neighborhood bar and having a couple before heading home. 

Image on the right by Jenny Kroik of The New Yorker

The general election, on the other hand, is a different story.

For example, the Dodd decision has riled up women, young people, and those of us who disdain forced birth, especially for children impregnated via rape, victims of incest, mothers facing difficult choices with fetuses with severe birth defects, and women whose health could be harmed because of unusual medical situations. When free choice referenda have appeared on ballots, even in the reddest of states voters have opted for choice rather than forced birth. This is a problem up-and-down the ballot for Republicans outside the hinterlands.

Like I say, I could be wrong. Joe Biden isn’t popular, and we have RFK, Jr. and Cornel West siphoning votes, and perhaps a third party a la Nader and Jill Stine could gum up the works, but I suspect Nader voters who aided and abetted the election of W. Bush and those Stine voters who were sure that Hillary was a shoo-in regret their decisions.

At least I hope they do.

PS. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the insurrection, the illegal possession of top secret documents and his refusal to turn them over, and his paying hush money to a porn star. It’s downright exhausting. 

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^[1] If you feel you need to explain your jokes – lynch = hung, a hung jury ha-ha ­– perhaps the jokes suck.