November 26, 2020: Thanksgiving - Trump Thanks Himself

 

11/26/20: President Trump’s Thanksgiving antics perfectly encapsulate all that has gone before, marking his presidency as a travesty, from opening oath of office to, now, his refusal to accept his humbling defeat.

 

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Trump was supposed be thanking the troops, but he was really thanking himself.

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First, on the simplest level, we had golf. Thursday the president played Round #313 since taking office. This from a man who railed constantly at his predecessor for playing “more golf than Tiger Woods.”

 

Most human beings would be embarrassed by such hypocrisy. Not Trump. He never admits he was wrong. He never admits a mistake. He never apologizes for anything he does. The poor lug has less self-awareness than a head of lettuce.

 

And he won’t admit defeat.

 

After another morning frittered away on the links, Trump returned to the White House and dialed up a cross-section of active duty troops around the world. It’s a Thanksgiving tradition for presidents to call our servicemen and women and thank them for defending the country, so the rest of us can enjoy our mashed potatoes and gravy – and our golfing – in peace.

The F-35 was authorized in 2006 

 

But this was Trump talking to active duty troops – and that meant presidential bragging  – mixed with presidential venting. The conference call began with Trump calling the troops “great people.” He said he was “thrilled to be online with heroic members of the United States military.” He called them, “incredible people,” and wished them a Happy Thanksgiving, as planned.

 

Having used up almost a minute, Trump turned to patting himself on the back. He told our fighting men and women around the world: “We’re going to have a great year. We have a year coming up, the foundations are ready for one of the best years we’ve ever had.”

 

Why were we in for “one of the best years we’ve ever had?”

 

Trump. Trump’s leadership. Trump was supposed to be thanking the troops, but he was really thanking himself.

 

Units from all six U.S. military branches were represented, including his own baby, the U.S. Space Force. Trump did thank everyone for the “sacrifices” they made, all so far from home on the holiday. He did not mention his grueling round of golf. He did not mention that thousands of Americans were dying daily from COVID-19. “Our nation is doing very well,” he said.

 

Pat, pat.

 

He thanked Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Redhair and the U.S. Army’s 36th Infantry Division. He thanked Colonel Andrew Priddy and his Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force in Kuwait. Then he got down to the main business of the call. Thanking himself. “We’ve been building up our military. We spent $2.5 trillion in the last three and a half years,” he told the troops, “and we’ve never had anything like it in terms of equipment and all of the elements that we put together. Space Force, we’re very proud of. Brand new. Nobody thought that could happen. So we spent 2.5 – think of that, $2.5 trillion.”

 

He did not mention having run up the biggest federal deficits in history. He did not mention that in President Obama’s time in office, the U.S. spent more on defense every year than the next seven nations combined.

 

He thanked himself for providing the troops, “All new tanks and missiles, and rockets and everything is tippy top.”

 

He acknowledged our men and women at sea next: “Also with us are our men and women of the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Winston Churchill. It’s a beauty led by commander Timothy Shanley.”

 

This was another chance to brag. “Your magnificent ship is a powerful symbol of peace through strength. And that’s what we have now is peace through strength,” Trump said. “You look at what’s going on, no wars. They’re saying, ‘Wow, the president. Four years, no wars.’ We stopped the wars and we won, as you know, 100% of the ISIS caliphate in Syria, Iraq.”

 

He says, “we,” but he clearly means, “Me.”

 

Wow, the president!

 

Trump doesn’t say so out loud, but what Trump is thankful for on Thanksgiving is himself.

 

He definitely does not mention the Kurds, our most loyal allies in the fight against ISIS. He does not acknowledge the thousands of Kurdish fighters who died, so U.S. troops would not die instead.

 

He does not mention how he screwed the Kurds.

 

The president introduces Major Tommy Rutherford and his 386 men on the other end of the phone conference line. Their Air Force unit is doing logistics work, “including transporting 18 tons of medical equipment during the China virus pandemic.” Next, he introduces Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lomeyer and the 11th Space Warning Squadron, at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado. Lomeyer’s unit is part of the Space Force. Trump wants everyone to remember, he created that new branch. All taxpayers had to do was foot the bill for a few hundred billion dollars more.

 

“And I never said it during a campaign, I said it after I became president. I saw what was happening with China and Russia and others. And it’s really something, so we’re very proud of it.”

 

Yes. Space Force! They would help protect us from missile attack from, say, North Korea, which Trump promised to disarm but never managed. Also, Space Force would save us if the Iranians kept producing more and more nuclear material, since Trump ripped up the Iran Deal (that had kept them from making any bombs at all for more than a decade). But yay! Space Force!

 

“Finally, Trump said, “we have with us members of the U.S. Coast Guard Port Security Unit 308 under Captain General Rocco…

 

(His last name was inaudible on the tape.)

 

At any rate, the president thanked the Coast Guard for the great job they were doing. And how was it possible that they were doing a great job? Now “we have all new ships coming to the Coast Guard. You had old ships, and they were as good as they could be, but they were very old. And now you have brand new Coast Guard ships, and it’s my honor to have gotten them for you.”

 

It dawned on Trump momentarily that the purpose of this call was to thank the men and women in uniform. “Today I send you the love, gratitude, respect, and prayers of our entire nation.” He wished them a Happy Thanksgiving again, told them they were doing an “incredible job.” He just couldn’t help himself. If Trump is talking, you know he’s almost sure to be talking about himself. He assured his listeners that “your country is doing well.” How so? “We just set a record in the stock market, over 30,000 in the Dow Jones Industrial Average,” he said, in typical, tone-deaf fashion.

 

You miss your families while you serve overseas? People shoot at you and try to blow you up? No big deal. The Dow Jones is up!

 

Trump continued:

 

Over 30,000, think of that. Nobody ever thought we were going to hit that during a pandemic. The whole world is suffering this tremendous pandemic, not just us. The world. And you wouldn’t know that to listen to the news reports, but the whole world is suffering and we are rounding the curve. The vaccines are being delivered, literally it’ll start next week and the week after.

 

And it’ll hit the frontline workers and seniors and doctors, nurses. A lot of people are going to start, and we’re going very quickly. Two companies already announced. A third one coming up, and a fourth and fifth one coming up soon also. Some people have called it a medical, really, a miracle. Could’ve taken four or five years to do this.

 

Normally it probably would’ve taken four or five years just getting it through the FDA.

 

At that point, several of our men and women overseas had a chance to talk briefly, or to be recognized by commanders. PFC Head from Sabine, Texas, got a shoutout. A Marine officer cited Sergeant Romero Vasquez, “sitting to my left. He’s from Los Angeles, California, and a great marine.”

 

Romero added a few words. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. President. Just talking to you in person, it’s a really great honor.”

 

Commander Shanley, CO of the USS Winston S. Churchill, talked about his 352 men and the 30,000 miles they’d sailed on their recent deployment. He introduced a number of sailors by name.

 

Trump saw another chance to brag. “Yeah, that’s great,” he interjected. “And your equipment is getting newer and newer, better and better. We’re building a lot of ships right now, as you know, and you’ll have them very soon. And I just want to congratulate you. Everybody, but I want to congratulate you.”

 

Really, he had just congratulated himself.

 

Major Rutherford, representing the Air Force, played it safe, stroking the president’s brittle ego. He told Trump he was “super excited to talk to you today.” He cited two members of the units he represented, who had been killed during deployment, Sergeant Oulette and Senior… The second name was inaudible on the tape. He called the fallen troops “great Americans,” and assured Trump “your conversation with us is a great morale boost, so much appreciated for you doing that sir.”

 

I almost expected the major to agree that the stock market hitting 30,000 made the sacrifice of those lives worthwhile.

 

“Well, I appreciate it. I love doing it, actually, and I’m very proud of it because we’ve spent so much,” Trump replied, sensing yet another opening for bragging. “When we took over, our military was very depleted. You know that very well. You know it probably better than most with the Air Force because the planes were old. They were tired and now you have all brand-new F-35s coming and others.”

 

I, for one, had not realized that planes could be tired. I had also not realized that all the F-35s were coming because of President Trump. I thought that Congress authorized their deployment many years ago.

 

I checked to be sure.

 

Yes, the first F-35’s were authorized in 2006.

 

Indeed, in a story from last year, pilots who had flown the F-35 in training and combat talked about “survivability.” The craft’s stealth capability would allow them to penetrate even the most sophisticated modern enemy air defenses. By 2019, Lockheed Martin had delivered 360 of these warplanes. But cost overruns had been massive. The final bill ran upwards of $400 billion.

 

Was the new aircraft worth it? Lieutenant Colonel David “Chip” Berke, an experienced Marine pilot had no doubt, as he once told Air & Space magazine. In an F-35, he said, “one of the most enjoyable things is being virtually undetectable until it’s way, way, way too late for the threat.” That is for the enemy air defenses, the threat, to react. If you managed the aircraft properly, he explained, “most of the time the threat doesn’t know you’re there. And that’s why I have extreme faith that the machine is going to be the most dominant aircraft ever built.” 

So, good job, President Trump! You had nothing to do with designing the warplane, getting the program authorized by Congress, or even paying your share of taxes to make it possible for our pilots to sit down in the cockpits of what we hope will be “the most dominant aircraft ever built.” 

But Trump didn’t just get the Air Force new planes, going back through a time warp to  2006. He did it all.

 

“And your tanks, your bombers, the whole thing, they’re all coming….,” he said. “When I came in four years ago, hard to believe almost four years ago, we were in sad shape and now we’re in phenomenal shape.”

 

Trump finally ran out of steam talking about himself. He finished up by talking again about what a great idea the U.S. Space Force was. He always believed the Space Force should be separate from the Air Force, “and as years go by, and as decades go by, people will see the importance of Space Force, there’s no question about it.”

 

No question at all.

 

*

 

BY NOW, nineteen minutes had elapsed. The president was tired of talking to the troops and decided to take questions from reporters. It was the first time since the November 3 election he had dared.

 

The first question (and every other one that followed) seemed to touch a raw nerve. A member of the press asked Trump, do you have “any big plans for your last Thanksgiving in the White House?”

 

This sparked one of the greatest diatribes in the history of the Presidency of the United States. For the sake of my readers, I will add context, as necessary, to what Trump said, and try to cut down as many of the repeats as I can.

 

He began:

 

Well, we don’t know what is last. If you look at what’s going on, you have to really take a look at what’s going on. They’re finding tremendous discrepancies in the votes. Nobody believes those numbers. Those numbers are incorrect numbers. Uh, a lot of numbers have already been reported that’s incorrect.

 

No one listening really has any idea what “numbers” the president is talking about or who is finding these “tremendous discrepancies” or where.

 

He continues:

 

You’re going to see things happening over the next week or two that are going to be shocking to people. Uh, if you look at the numbers in Michigan, if you look at the numbers in Pennsylvania, if you look at fraudulent voting and fraudulent votes. So I can’t say what’s first and what’s last in terms of, “Is this the last one or is this the first one of a second term?” We’ll see what happens.

 

He continues venting:

 

Nobody wants to see the kind of fraud that this election has, has uh, really come to represent. We are looking at things that are so bad in Georgia. They don’t want to show us signatures, the reason they don’t want to show us signatures is very simple. Because, uh, we will find thousands and thousands – A very close race, it’s hair thin.

 

Uh, but we’ll find thousands and thousands of discrepancies, fraud. Uh, why they aren’t wanting to show those signatures is amazing. Uh, they’re doing recounts, and even in the recount they found thousands of votes that were off. But now we want to look at the signatures, and you will find tens of thousands of false ballots, fro – forged ballots.

 

In point of fact, the recount in Georgia did not find “thousands of votes that were off.” When the hand recount was complete, Joe Biden’s lead in the state shrank from 13,558 to 12,284. The two biggest blunders of the entire Georgia election occurred in red counties, where Republicans controlled the count. In one red county alone, failure to upload votes from a memory card (properly tallied by the machines the state used) cost Trump 686 votes, which the recount caught.

 

No fraud was involved. No Democrats were involved in a plot. A Republican election official got fired, instead.

 

Yet, Trump saw crookery all over the place – although, oddly enough, never in any of the red states that went his way. Only in blue states. And red states that slipped from his orange grasp.

 

You’ll see it all over [he said of the fraud]. You’re going to see a lot of it. And, uh, you go to Pennsylvania, you saw the meeting we had yesterday with Pennsylvania. Uh, you saw people come up, and they went to vote and they said, “No, you can’t vote. Somebody else already sent in a ballot.” And a woman – But this is happening tens of thousands of times.

 

Trump cites one woman and multiplies her out to “tens of thousands of times.” If a person showed up to vote under such circumstances, they could cast a provisional vote; and the records could later be checked.

 

He rambled on:

 

I think it was 600 and some odd thousand, 687,000, uh, fraudulent votes cast in Pennsylvania. And I will tell you the, uh, if you look at the Statehouse now, the Republican Statehouse, they’re starting to see what’s going on there. But they’ve really known it for a long time. Then you go to Michigan and you look at what happened in Wayne County in Detroit.

 

I went through a list, I won almost every county and you see it. Almost every – By 78%, 72%, 68% going through the list. Then you get to Wayne and something happened. Tremendous numbers. You saw the canvassers, they refused to sign their document because they said, “We can’t sign a fraudulent document, horrible things went on.” That’s in Wayne County, Detroit.

 

*

 

WHEN I WAS TEACHING, I used to have a rule. If you used the words “things” or “things” in an essay, I’d give you an automatic “F.” You could rewrite what you had said for a higher grade; but you could not use words that had no meaning at all. “Horrible things,” happened in Detroit?

 

What?

 

Did cannibals eat Republicans who showed up to vote?

Michigan vote by county 2016.

 

 

Turnout turned out to be key.

 

You could do a little work if you wanted to get close to the truth. In 2016, Baraga County, in the Upper Peninsula, went for Trump over Clinton, 61.3% to 32.9%. Four years later, the same county went for Trump again: 62.2% to 36.6% for Joe Biden. Part of the Democratic gain could be attributed to the absence of the kind of third party candidates that cost Clinton so many votes four years ago. Marquette County, the only county in the Upper Peninsula to go blue in 2016, was the only county to go blue in 2020, too. In 2016, Clinton garnered 16,042 votes in Marquette County, and Trump scored 14,646. There was no “fix” four years later, no massive “fraud.” Trump had 16,236 votes in Marquette in 2020; but Biden had 20,465.

 

You could figure this out for yourself. Trump could figure it out too, assuming he wasn’t intellectually stunted. Cheboygan, in the Lower Peninsula, gave Trump 10,186 votes in 2020. Biden had 5,437. Trump had only 8,683 votes in Cheboygan four years before. Clinton had 4,302. Turnout across the state was much greater in the 2020 election and turnout turned out to be key.

 

Not fraud.

 

One of the few Michigan counties to change color in 2020, Leelanau, went blue for Biden. The Democratic challenger piled up 8,795 votes (51.9%), to 7,916 (46.7%) for Trump. Third party votes were a non-factor, with three candidates sharing 209. In 2016, Trump defeated Clinton there, 7,239 to 6,724. Gary Johnson siphoned off another 510 votes. Again, turnout was up for both sides. I checked Ogemaw County, picking at random. Trump improved there over 2016 by 1,400 votes. Biden did better than Hillary, but gained only 500. Lake County was the same. The Democratic challenger in 2020 outperformed Mrs. Clinton by 300 votes; Trump picked up 800. In Alcona County, Trump did 600 votes better in his second run.

 

The pattern was clear. Higher turnout in every county I checked, in red counties, big gains for the President of the United States. If some mysterious machine was cheating Trump out of votes, it wasn’t doing a very good job.

 

Only two other counties changed color in 2020: Saginaw and Kent. Joe Biden squeezed past Trump in Saginaw, 51,088 to 50,785. In Kent, Biden piled up 187,915 votes, where Trump had only 165,741. The numbers in Saginaw were not much different than four years before, only the narrow margin of victory flipped. In Kent, Trump improved his showing by 17,000 votes, but his share, percentagewise, slipped. Fraud wasn’t involved. Biden outperformed Clinton by nearly 40,000 votes because, as Michigan reporters noted, Kent County demographics were changing every year. In 2000, the county went for George W. Bush, giving him 59% of the vote. In 2008, Obama won Kent by a handful of votes, with 49%.  In 2016 Trump carried the county, but with only 47.7% of the vote. This time, his share slid to 45.9%, and heavy turnout gave Biden a fat win. Demographics explained the difference, not dead people voting from the grave.

 

The other blue counties showed similar gains in turnout, as did the red counties next door. Genesee went for Biden by more than 20,000. Clinton won by 18,000. One county east, Lapeer went for Trump by 19,000 in 2020, vs. 17,000 four years before. Oakland County, a Democratic bastion, went for Clinton by 54,000 votes in 2016, with Trump getting 43.2% of the vote. His percentage dipped to 42.2% this time around, certainly nothing unusual from election to election. Biden outperformed Clinton by 5% and rolled up a lead of 108,000.

 

Simply put, no wasted Green Party votes.

 

Wayne County – the focus of Trump’s entire attack on the Michigan results – shifted only slightly. Clinton earned 66.4% of the vote in 2016; Biden improved the Democratic share to 68.3%. Trump improved, too, from 29.3% to 30.3%. But in a county with 872,000 votes to be counted, a shift of one percent and higher turnout meant a huge lead for Joe Biden. Clinton won Wayne County four years earlier by 290,000 votes. Biden won Wayne by 333,000.

 

Again, you could look all this up. Trump could himself. The evidence of massive fraud just wasn’t there.

Michigan vote by county, 2020

 

 

It wasn’t looking good for Trump and his fans.

 

Trump continued to grumble. “Wisconsin they’re finding tremendous discrepancy,” he insisted. Yet, where the counting was going on, in Milwaukee County, Biden added 132 votes to his lead.

 

At 5:30 p.m. on Friday the Milwaukee County Board of Commissioners adjourned, noting that the recount demonstrated elections in the county were “fair, transparent, accurate and secure.”

 

Dane County, where the Trump campaign also asked for a recount, was livestreaming the process and officials expected to be done by Sunday.

 

Let’s just say, it wasn’t looking good for Trump and his fans.

 

Trump babbled on. He said he got 74 million votes, which was true, “but there were many ballots throw away, so I got much more than that,” which was a lie. “But I got 74 million, 74 million is 11 million more than last time.” Every one of his votes was legit. But Biden got more. “So, I don’t know what is going to happen. I know one thing,” Trump said, “Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes.” 

Trump noted that he got more votes than Ronald Reagan when he won 49 states. So how was it possible he didn’t win 49 states! He grumbled because Joe Biden “beat Barack Obama with, uh, the black vote.” He didn’t believe it, mostly because he didn’t want to believe it. “And if you look at the numbers, the numbers are, uh, false. The numbers are corrupt. It was a rigged election, 100%, and people know it.” 

Trump insisted people were “marching all over the United States…They know it was a rigged election.” 

The president started complaining about Georgia again. He whined about Dominion and their voting machines. “People say the votes are counted in foreign countries and much worse than that, by the way, with Dominion.” 

“People say.” 

Not exactly the kind of evidence you expect to hold up in court. (See, for example: 11/27/20.)

“What about the upcoming runoff election in Georgia, with two U.S. Senate seats at stake?” a reporter asked. 

Yeah, that was rigged too. 

“I spoke with the two great senators. They’re great senators, Kelly and David. I’ll probably be going on Saturday,” the president said. “We’re looking for a site. We’re going to have a tremendous turnout, and we seem to always have a good turnout. The people are very disappointed that we were robbed. We were robbed. I won that [state] by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

 

The recount said he lost by 12,000 plus. So how did he know that he won? “Everybody knows it,” the president said. “You go down the streets, there are Trump/Pence signs all over the place.” 

In other words, don’t count the votes. Just count yard signs. 

Trump insisted that Stacey Abrams had “pulled the wool” over the eyes of Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State. 

“He said he donated to you,” a reporter chimed in. 

Trump ignored that statement and complained again about not being able to see the signatures on every Georgia ballot. He complained again about the vote in all the Michigan counties going against him. “The whole thing, one after another after another,” he said (which was wrong) “and then you get to Detroit and it’s more votes than people.” Dead people voting all over the place.

 

A reporter wondered if, on December 14, the Electoral College declared Biden the winner, would Trump concede?

 

“It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud,” he replied.

 

“But will you?” the reporter tried again.

 

Trump admitted that time to overturn the results of the election was not on his side. But “everything else is on our side. Facts are on our side. This was a massive fraud. This should never take place in this country. We’re like a third world country. We have machines that nobody knows what the hell they’re looking at.”

 

We know the machine votes and the hand recounts, so far, have varied almost not at all.

 

He was cheated in Georgia he said again. He was cheated in Pennsylvania. “It was a rigged election,” he said, repeating himself several times.

 

 

Are you not going to leave this building?

 

A reporter asked again, would he concede if the Electoral College selected Joe Biden?

 

“If they do, they made a mistake, because this election was a fraud.”

 

“But will you?” another reporter shouted.

 

Trump said again, “This election was a fraud. They have Biden beating Obama, and Obama’s vote, in areas that mattered in terms of the election, in swing states, and yet he’s losing to Obama all over the place, but he’s beating Obama in swing states, which are the states that mattered for purposes of the election.”

 

Would he concede?

 

“No, I can’t say that at all,” Trump said.

 

A reporter named Jeff Mason, representing Reuters, tried to rephrase the question. His words on tape are inaudible. Whatever he said, Trump bristled.

 

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

 

“Sorry, sir,” Mason can be heard responding, in an attempt to be polite.

 

Manners are not a strong suit of this president. “You’re just a lightweight,” he sneered. “Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the President of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

 

If this were Russia or China or Venezuela or Cuba, we know what would happen to Mason next.

 

Trump ignored any follow up and said he’d take another question.

 

The next reporter honed in: “If the electoral college does elect President-Elect Joe Biden, are you not going to leave this building?”

 

“Certainly I will. Certainly I will, and you know that,” Trump replied. “But I think that there will be a lot of things happening between now and [January 20], a lot of things. Massive fraud has been found. We’re like a third world country. We’re using computer equipment that can be hacked.”

 

According to the vote totals, he also lost Arizona. But the totals don’t matter. “Uh, I’ve had, uh, the biggest politicians in Arizona say there was no way you lost Arizona.”

 

He said there was no way he lost Pennsylvania either, what with Joe Biden saying he was “anti-fracking.”

 

No way did he lose.

 

He insisted he was going to win Wisconsin too. Yes, the vote right now was close. “But when you look at the massive discrepancy that we’ll be revealing, that’s already been revealed, everybody knows it, they just don’t want to play. Between big tech and the fake news media, you just put out, like, this little railroad train.”

 

To be honest, listening to this diatribe, myself, I have no idea what “little railroad train” he means. I just know that in Milwaukee County the recount has added to Biden’s lead. Trump still isn’t buying the math. “No,” he grumbles, “I think it’s not right that he’s trying to pick a cabinet.”

 

As if he’s the next President of the United States…

 

Trump has faith, in the end, that he’s going to win. “But I can’t imagine whether it’s courts or legislatures, if you’re going to catch hundreds of thousands of false ballots, and I’m talking in each state, and just so you understand, many, many more votes that we’re talking about than we need.”

 

He can’t see any way he’s going to lose.

 

“We have tens of thousands votes more than we need in all cases, okay?” he says. “In all cases. So, I think you’re gonna see something. I mean, I think it’s gonna be a very big story….It’s gonna be not only a big story, it’s the most important story of our time.”

 

A reporter wonders if he plans to run again in 2024?

 

Trump makes it clear he expects to win in 2020, instead. “This has a long way to go. You’re gonna find tremendous fraud,” he says. “You’re gonna find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state. You’re gonna find fraud of many, many times the votes that I need. Again, we’re not talking about less votes, where, you know, 20 votes, but it doesn’t turn the election. No, we’re talking about thousands and thousands of votes beyond what we need to turn a state.”

 

We know that Trump had called Joe Biden “the worst candidate” ever to run for president. In Trump’s mind there’s no way he could lose to the worst candidate in history, no matter what the math is. There’s “no way that Biden got 80 million votes. By the way, the only way he got 80 million votes is through a massive fraud. There’s no way that he got 80 million votes.”

 

(A twisted narcissist, Trump can’t face reality. Short of therapy, he never will.)

 

Trump promises he will release the evidence soon and the courts will see it and lawmakers, too, and even the reporters will see it, and a miracle will occur, and he will win a second term.

 

He takes a few minutes to brag about all the accomplishments his administration has had. He insists that Joe Biden can’t take “credit for the vaccines.” Joe Biden, he says, “failed with the swine flu, H1N1, totally failed with the swine flu, don’t let him take credit for the vaccines because the vaccines were me, and I pushed people harder than they’ve ever been pushed before.”

 

That may be true, the pushing, at least. But the death toll from the swine flu, irrelevant as it is, was still only 12,469.

 

So, yeah. The math is the math. Nearly twenty times more Americans have died from the COVID-19 virus. You would think even a man as secure in his ignorance as Trump could figure it out.

 

He’s boasting again, not doing math. What he had done, he says, was push the federal agencies to act. “It’s a medical miracle,” he insists.

 

Then he reverts to complaining about the election again:

 

Don’t let anyone try and take credit for it, but with all of the things I’ve done, this could be the most important because there’s been voter fraud going on, but never at this scale. Tens of millions of ballots have been sent out to people that didn’t even want them. Many people, and I know you’ve heard, many people have received two, three, and four ballots, and many people have taken those two, three, and four ballots and they voted them.

 

This election was a fraud. This, it was a rigged election. I mean, I hate to say it, but this was a rigged, at the highest level it was a rigged election, so we have to figure it out…

 

Finally, Trump decides it’s time to wrap up. He says the media is dishonest and won’t report the truth.

 

He says “Big Tech” is dishonest too.

 

If the media were honest and Big Tech was fair, this wouldn’t even be a contest. Uh, and I would’ve won by a tremendous amount, a tremendous amount, and I did win by a tremendous amount, but it hasn’t been reported yet, but people understand what’s happened. They know what happened…

 

A reporter interrupts to ask, would he attend Joe Biden’s inauguration?

 

I don’t want to say that yet. I mean, I know the answer. I’ll be honest I know the answer – But I just don’t want to say it yet. Look, a thing like this possibly has never happened before, but maybe people just didn’t catch it, but we’ve caught it – we’ve caught, we’ve caught hundreds of thousands of votes.

 

After 45 minutes, Trump has vented enough. He exits the room, leaving a stunned press corps behind.

 

*

 

LATER THAT DAY, the president retweets Rep Matt Gaetz’s suggestion that he should take no chances on the way out the door, and should pardon himself.

 

*

 

AND ON THANKSGIVING DAY, the grim numbers are manifest again. Hospitalizations reach a new high, with 90,481 Americans too sick with the coronavirus to give up their beds.

 

Johns Hopkins University, which releases data more rapidly than CDC puts the death toll for this country at:

 

264,842.

 

The Viall family, almost without exception, is thankful on this holiday for good health (my wife and I are recovering from COVID, not headed for the hospital as so many Americans are) and the imminent removal of Trump from the office of the President of the United States.