Over the years, I’ve received my share of green-ink author’s mail. You know, from folks who’ve discovered an exciting variety of textual special effects: lurid colours, freaky fonts, creative insertions of upper case, frenzies of inverted commas around standard vocabulary and lashings of exclamation marks. Calling these letters ‘fan mail’ would be a stretch. They are universally hostile, and their authors are crazy. Rule of thumb: DO NOT ‘respond’!
Trump wants to run, but he wants to lose – and throwing the contest should prove a cinch
But how do you ignore green-ink communiqués sent to the world at large from a former president of the United States? Especially one who has declared an intention to run again and who still has a plausible shot at a major party’s nomination, if not at re-election?
Last week, you-know-who messaged the American people on his bespoke social media platform, Truth Social: ‘So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!’
Personally, I would dismiss as electorally preposterous any candidate for an office still, however nominally, regarded as the most powerful in the world who as an adult in his seventies has still not mastered his native language’s most primitive rules of capitalisation and punctuation. But maybe that’s just me. Still, before a couple of years ago, virtually every American voter would have summarily disregarded as a serious contender any presidential candidate who proposed ‘terminating’ the Constitution under any circumstances, much less solely to helicopter himself into the White House absent all those pesky ‘rules, regulations, and articles’ of due process.
Look, I realise how cuckoo American politics has got since 2016, but sometimes we ought to return to first principles.
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