The Big Lie Is Getting Told (Again)
Whether Trump wins or loses, America has already lost
Editor’s Note: Are you, like Matt, happy the election is over, and everyone accepted the results, behaving like responsible citizens of a functioning democracy who love their country and are prepared to take a loss even if it means preserving our system of government/highest ideals? Sorry, the election’s not over. And there’s almost zero chance the aforementioned will happen. Matt believes in telling hard truth, even when he’s lying. He was just toying with reverse psychology, trying to make you feel better. Because look at you, you’re a mess. Pull it together. Settle down. And send questions about whatever’s troubling you to askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Double Questions:
Dear Matt,
Don't care who wins, half the country will be irate either way. I am a human that would not like to participate in the civil war. Where would you suggest riding it out? Idaho? They have remote locations and too many potatoes. I don't want to have to go to Canada if it's avoidable. But I think I would love it there. Honestly, as long as we're together I think we'll be fine. We can meet wherever you like.
Best,
Jeremy D.
Dear Matt,
What in the name of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and whatever other MAGA Steves there are will you do if Trump wins? Go into witness protection?
Rachael S.
In answer to the first question, I love both Canada (except for the place being overrun by Canadians) and potatoes (invest in a good mandoline slicer and try these fantastic garlic potatoes, which crisp up nicely when baked in a cast iron skillet). But your best bet for dodging civil war is probably to hide in plain sight at Mar-a-Lago. A place where you know none of the MAGAbots will do any actual fighting, because they are men with soft hands who can’t risk injury to their meme-ing fingers. (The Meme Wars being where the real fighting happens.) The only hardship you’d have to withstand is gnawing through overdone steak drowned in ketchup and/or sitting through Mr. Trump playing the theme from Cats on a loop. Which is why personally, I’d rather take my chances on the battlefield. I really can’t stand Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In answer to the second question, if Trump wins, I’ll probably do what I always do when an undesirable takes the Oval Office. I’ll put on the war paint, tape up my fists of fury, grab my bear spray and Kevlar and CamelBak (it’s important to stay hydrated while overthrowing your country), and head down to the Capitol, filling my adult diaper so I have materials with which to fingerpaint slurs on the walls of The Speaker’s office while I take a stand for overriding the people’s will by beating the snot out of cops with American flagpoles.
Or wait, the Trumpsters already did that last cycle, didn’t they? Since I hate to be a walking cliché, I’ll probably just sit defeated on my couch, suck on it hard, drink heavily, and hope for better days in four-to-twelve years, or whenever His Majesty and his congressional/judicial enablers deem it appropriate for Mr. Trump to relinquish his emperorship.
I don’t pretend to know what will happen next Tuesday, and the swing-state margins are razor-thin enough that anyone who says they do is lying. Though since they have a 50/50 chance of being right, they will claim they knew all along after the fact. But one thing I do know with 150 percent certainty is that win or lose, Trump (and Trumpsters) will claim he won.
The table has already been set. The Big Lie that got told endlessly for four years after the last election is now getting told preemptively in this one, just in case it’s needed.
MAGA lawyers are already gumming up the courts with faux grievances. Trump’s shine boy, Elon Musk — the man who puts the “ass” in Asperger’s — has already opened up a voter-fraud complaint line on his money-hemorrhaging disinformation depot. Trump’s amen chorus of rubber-stampers and knob-polishers – the farm-team demagogues who took the stage at Trump’s Nerf Riefenstahl rally at Madison Square Garden the other night — have already tried to put the fix in for the fix, claiming the only way Kamala Harris could win is by fraud.
And Trump himself, of course, is actively doing the same. Who could blame him, if you’re not offended by lying? After all, he’s no longer just lying to regain the presidency, as he was in 2020. He’s now lying to retain his freedom. Since no second term means no firing prosecutors who could still possibly inflict prison time on him. Depending on whether the Supreme Court that Trump partially stacked sees it his way. (Thus far, they mostly have.)
What his tail-sniffing sheeple miss in perpetuating such bunkum are some incontrovertible facts, namely:
1. The country is roughly divided by half, along party lines, and the swing state polls show the same. Even if Trump is slightly ahead by most counts, everything now basically lies within the margin of error, meaning turnout will be the story. (As well as mail-in ballots, which Trumpsters spent four years denigrating, before they decided they needed them to win late in the fourth quarter.)
2. Whatever Kamala Harris’s deficiencies as a candidate, she enjoys the best get-out-the-vote chum of all-time. No, not pro-choicers who are irate about Roe being overturned. And no, not being veep to a guy who just might’ve accidentally called MAGAbots “garbage” when (rightly) criticizing them for calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Garden rally. (Could someone please take Grandpa Joe to The Home already? We promise to visit quarterly, and bring ice cream.) But rather, Harris has the good fortune to be running against a megalomaniac with strongman tendencies whose life and candidacy is wholly governed by revenge fantasies, who has threatened to imprison his critics, and who thinks the meaning of “free press” is that he’s free to shut them down if he doesn’t like them.
3. In an evenly divided country, Republicans have been losing presidential elections for a long time. Even when they win, they kind of lose, enjoying only one popular vote victory since 2004, and only two since I graduated high school in 1988.
So is it completely implausible for Harris to win without fraud, even if she’s not sitting on the polling lead that Biden enjoyed in 2020, or Hillary Clinton did in 2016? No, it’s not. She’s running against a crackpot, so what this election ends up being a referendum on is the nation’s tolerance for insanity and chaos. Not reassuring, admittedly, since the nation seems to have a high tolerance for both. But just how high remains an open question.
Which is why Trumpsters are not just being disingenuous, but recklessly and dangerously misleading when they pretend that the only way Trump loses is by fraud. Yet whether Trump wins or loses, America has already lost. Because such notions reflexively unsubscribe Trump’s followers from democracy herself. The only reason democracy works — and has for a quarter of a millennium in our country — is because it is a compact, a gentlemen’s agreement. A handshake deal to abide by the rules, even if we don’t like the outcome. By throwing out the rulebook, just because the outcome isn’t to your liking, well, you’re not only undermining faith in one election, but in our entire system — the one that has successfully allowed us to agree to disagree for two-and-half centuries, without shooting things out in the streets. (Minus a civil war, which may be wished upon us again by people who refuse to take “no” for an answer.)
I don’t call those people “garbage.” Or pretend that they’re not my fellow Americans, even if I’ve been serially disappointed in them. I don’t even want them not to be, since many are both friends and family. They are indeed my fellow citizens. But with American rights come American responsibilities, “responsibility” once being a buzzword of the Republican party, before they became lousy with grievance-grouping anarchists. So no, I don’t want them not to be Americans. I just want them to act like they are.
Or this beautiful thing of ours — the greatest damn experiment in the history of the world — might cease to be.
Bonus Tracks To Get You Through Election Day: For those with troubled minds, here’s Lightin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb doing the blues standard, “Trouble in Mind”:
And here’s Gladys Knight & The Pips, with an underplayed gem that just might lift you out of those blues, “Still Such A Thing”:
And since I name-checked cast-iron skillets in my lede, and can’t think of another excuse I’ll have to play this song, here’s a gorgeous tune from Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, doing “Cast Iron Skillet”