By the Rules

 The one good thing that has come out of the Trump presidencies has been that he has shown that absolutely anyone can be president. Most should not, but if Trump can get in, you can't disqualify anyone for any reason. He set the bar low, for sure, but how could there be a bar at all after him?

People like to handicap potential presidential candidates all the time, just like sports fans do with ballplayers. The only thing worse than political punditry is sports punditry.  The latter is more brutal and soul and psyche stealing than politics. Get on a fan site and see sometime. Better yet, don't! Those people are fucking insane. 

Even though we are currently watching democracy being murdered in the streets and on TV, people are talking about who the next democratic president should be. Or shouldn't be. Oh, sure- all this horrible fascist, Project 2025 shit is just what republicans are doing on their term. They are unpopular and we'll take over on downs, just as we always do after they fail. Business as usual- just a little different with Trump. That's all. 

People are still talking about how Joe Biden shouldn't have been president because he was too old. And he shouldn't have run again because he got older and he should have dropped out sooner and let anyone but Kamala Harris run, because she's a woman and women can't get elected POTUS because America is not ready for a female president or for Universal Healthcare, now that I mention it. Plus, her laugh! OH MY GOD! For some the laugh alone was a dealbreaker. Yeah.

For 2028 there is talk of Harris running again. Has she changed her laugh? Has she not learned her lesson? Has she not figured out that America is just not ready for a woman president and might not ever be, now that I mention it again? And Pete Buttigieg. Sure, he's brilliant, poised and polished, but he's gay! He has a husband! Or he is a husband? Nobody knows how that works, but everybody knows that America is not ready for a gay POTUS. We know this because, like the females, we were never ready before, so how could we be now? 

Oh, for fuck's sake! I don't recall anyone declaring in 2016 that we were ready for an inexperienced, pretend billionaire game show host who had a history of fucking children. No other candidate had checked those boxes before. Why then? Trump didn't check ANY of the previous qualifying boxes for president, like governor of a state or senator of a state, the usual steppingstones on the road to the White House. He was (still is) an inveterate liar and conman, not to mention, a very unsuccessful businessman. (Six bankruptcies! You can convince unemployed miners in Appalachia that that is a common business strategy used by the best businessmen, but you can't convince the banks and bankruptcy courts that it's Business 101. Well, maybe he could...)

Anyway, he was THE least qualified candidate since anyone of the goofballs who have ever ran for office, anywhere on the internet for clicks and likes. 

There was no 'good' reason to elect him after 8 pretty damn good, successful years of Barack Hussein Obama. Funny I should mention his middle name because it's not funny that Trump still does. Very telling though because Trump still believes that that denigrates and defines Obama's presidency. In simple, racist minds, it does. Trump was the kind of dark horse, populist candidate you would run in 2016 after 8 bad years of a black president. We didn't have eight bad years of a black president though (you can look it up) but we did have eight years of a black president, and it was time to give a white guy a chance for a change. And since the democrats were running an extremely talented white woman, it was the perfect storm for Trump. He could get even for the black guy, AND thwart the woman. He could commandeer both the racist and misogynist vote (the republican party by definition) and bring America to its knees, probably in adulation, I guess(?). He lost to her by 3 million+ votes, but lucky for him (and the racist misogynists) we don't do our presidential elections as popularity contests. We do the archaic relic from the slavery days, The Electoral College. We are idiots. 

I've said for twelve years now that Trump was THE only republican running that election who could get close enough to Hillary Clinton to cheat and or 'work' The Electoral College to defeat her. I figure he did both. I don't even have to prove that. We go by gut feelings now that facts no longer matter. 

But that's history. You know what they say; "If you like your history, you can keep it!" 

The way things are now in 2026 and beyond- if you think about it- there are no longer qualifying boxes to check now that the worst candidate ever has become the worst president ever- twice. Three times by his idiotic estimation. If raping kids and grifting people and not being able to speak in complete, coherent sentences is not a disqualification, then being able to give birth or have a hearty laugh should not be either. I'm just saying that, if democracy can die by the rules, it can live by them too.