“So What” – Is That Our Future?
So what if Donald Trump cheated on his 3 wives, paid off porn stars to shut them up about his “relationship” with them and went bankrupt 6 times. He was still elected President of the United States in 2016.
So what if under Trump’s separation policy in 2018, U.S. border agents snatched breast-feeding babies away from their mothers? Illegal babies don’t have rights in the U.S.
So what if wildfires raged across California in 2020? Trump said California caused it because the state wasn’t sweeping up enough dead leaves on forest grounds.
So what if 19 Uvalde elementary school children and 2 teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde on May 24, 2022. Trump told the NRA 3 days later at its annual convention in Houston that mental illness caused the massacre, not an AR 15. While in office, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims1. After his defeat, sixty lawsuits2 claiming fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election failed in state after state and before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yet the Pew Research Center found in October 2021, that “two-thirds of Republicans wanted Trump to retain a major political role” and ”44% wanted him to run again.” And a January 1, 2022 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that “about 1 in 3 Americans say at times “violence against the government can be justified.”
Is that what the majority of Americans want? Here are the results on 2 important issues.
In a poll before the Uvalde massacre, a majority of Americans replied that “Congress should pass gun control legislation.”3 Two days after the Uvalde massacre, the Associated Press reported the U.S. is still “divided along partisan lines.”
A majority of Americans also favor upholding Roe v Wade. According to the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll, “64 percent of Americans “ don’t want it overturned and “34 percent of Republicans” also oppose overturning it. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court will likely gut Roe v Wade this month.
Our divisions in great measure are rooted in the Electoral College. Wyoming is a red state with 581,349 people. California is a blue state with almost 40 million people. Yet, each state has 2 senators even though California’s population is 70 times larger than Wyoming’s population.
Since America was founded, there have been at least 700 proposals to abolish or reform the electoral college.4 James Madison, a U.S. president that American historians call the “Father of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” said the Electoral College was a “source of injustice.”
Over the 246 years of this country’s existence, there have been 58 presidential elections. In 5 of these elections - “including those for two of the past three presidents” - the winner of the Electoral College vote didn’t win the popular vote.
In 2000, Al Gore got 50,999,987 popular votes and George Bush got 50,456,002 - 543,895 fewer votes than Gore received. Yet the Electoral College awarded Bush 271 electoral votes to Al Gore’s 266 votes, making Bush president of the United States, even though he lost the popular vote.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton got “nearly 2.9 million votes” more than Donald Trump. Yet Trump got 304 Electoral College votes. Although Clinton won the popular vote, she only got 227 electoral votes, making Trump President of the United States.
This year, 19 Republican states enacted “33 laws making it harder to vote,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice and “25 Democratic states passed laws” making it easier to vote.
The choice in upcoming elections is clear.
Will the popular vote win?
Or the “So What” vote, allowing hard right conservatives to control and continue increasing their power over our country?
1. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/
2. politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/joe-biden/joe-biden-right-more-60-trumps-election-lawsuits-l/
3. thehill.com/policy/national-security/3500861-majority-in-new-poll-favors-stricter-gun-control-measures/
4. fairvote.org/past_attempts_at_reform
Jodie Sinclair is an award-winning writer who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and resides in Bandera, Texas.