By Paul Gable
American voters hoping for change in the politics of Washington, D.C. got shafted by the Donald Trump campaign for president.
These are the voters that carried Trump through the primaries, solidly rejecting one establishment candidate after another to give Trump a first ballot nomination.
These are the voters who believed Trump was a breath of fresh air for the Republican Party ready to remake the party and remake the federal government.
What nobody realized was that Trump wasn’t in the election to head a populist movement and didn’t have any programs or policies to change anything.
Trump was in the election to further boost his own gigantic ego, period.
Trump lives in his own alternate reality – one where he’s the smartest, the most dynamic, the most successful person on earth and one in which he always wins.
And when he doesn’t win, it’s not his fault. It is due to the nefarious deeds of others.
We went through Trump’s version of reality politics when he thought he was going to come up short of the delegates necessary to secure a first ballot nomination from the Republican Party.
Then it was his opponents and party officials who were conspiring to steal the nomination from Trump.
Now, it’s Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, the media and Wall Street, among many, who are conspiring to steal the general election from Trump.
Nobody is stealing this election from Trump. He is losing it on his own merits (maybe we should call them demerits).
I read several months ago where a Republican political operative called Trump an “egomaniacal buffoon.” The Donald has proved the truth of that statement on the campaign trail ever since.
Trump should have listened to the words of the first Republican president in American History – “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln
Trump should not have tried to fool himself and the American voters into believing he was a serious candidate.
This is a presidential election the Republicans not only could have won, but should have won.
Hillary Clinton certainly is a vulnerable candidate, on her own merits. Even a mediocre Republican candidate should have defeated Clinton.
Instead the Republicans nominated Trump who evidently thought campaigning was just another version of reality television where he was the headliner.
In the meantime, a majority of American voters, dissatisfied with the gridlock in Washington and the seeming inability of either party to do anything meaningful to break that gridlock, will have to wait at least four more years.
At least baseball got it right in 2016. The Cleveland Indians, who have not won the World Series since 1948, and the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t even been in a World Series since 1945 (last won in 1908), will be vying for the title of World Series champion. That’s change.
Speak Up…