Fight Song

In these last two weeks, Trump cannot extort us.

When we fight.

Years ago, my daughter’s school had to cancel a class-president election. Too many kids had refused to vote. They didn’t want to upset the person they didn’t vote for.

Don’t make anyone mad. 

What a ghastly civics lesson. America is founded on adversarial systems, including the courts, the press, activism, and political campaigns.  Engaged citizenship requires a extremely high tolerance for confrontation—and even a taste and talent for it. That’s why Kamala Harris is so good at it.

If your opponent knows you’d rather be kind than fight to win, he’s instantly got the upper hand.

Now Trump is running an intimidation-and-extortion campaign. He wants to terrify people into supporting him. He also wants to make it clear that if he loses the election, he will lose his shit.

The threat is summed up in what he told donors in August: “We gotta win and if we don’t win this country is going to hell.”

But there’s another threat for which there’s actual precedent. The country won’t go to hell, but Trump will. He himself is “fucking crazy”—his words—and he’ll unleash fire and fury if he loses.

Having said months ago that his campaign should “focus on the cheating,” Trump has also added time and time and time again and dozens more times that he won’t accept a loss. 

Who cares, bud? I’m mad as hell I didn’t get a Nobel Prize in economics. But every time Trump says he wont accept a loss he terrifies people. Because in 2020, in a world-historical act of sore loserdom, Trump promoted his Big Lie, in which he and his lackeys bellowed actual gibberish in courts and at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. No one believed them, so they turned violent.