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So far, as the total vote in the presidential election gets finalized, Donald J. Trump’s national popular majority has fallen below 50% of voters. That means that more people actually voted for someone else than DJT. Trump got over 1 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, while Harris got approximately 8 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. That means that more people decided to either vote for another candidate other than Trump, or not vote at all.  Winning an election because more people grew apathetic about defending democracy, women’s rights or civil rights is not a mandate.  That means the nation-wide “mandate” DJT boasts about is not one.

Electorally, though, Trump did win over Harris by more than Biden won over him (which Trump still has not admitted to).  That could be looked at as a landslide if it were not for the fact that the electoral college was put into place by our forefathers because they felt that (mostly) white, male land owners should be the ones to vote, safeguarding democracy for themselves, a fact that kept women and slaves and the poor from fully participating in that democracy. I guess as DJT makes America great “again”, we’ll be headed back towards that kind “greatness”. DJT would still have won this election if measured only by the popular vote, but barely. Again, not a real mandate or a landslide.  And there is no such thing as a mandate within the electoral college:  it is what it is – winner take all.

This election was like no previous election. This year, we had the AI-powered internet and the ability to hear, see, and inculcate what mostly nefarious powers working from here at home or from abroad wanted us to hear, either to bring America down by division, hate, separation and/or bolster their powers through propaganda. Many voters took this nefarious propaganda, including Project 2025, along with Russian, Iranian, and Chinese on-line disinformation, in hook, line, and sinker.  Therefore, we get Trump, again, this time as a convicted felon who will now avoid justice (you got a “get out of jail card”?). Trump’s faux-mandate includes making the rich even richer. Is that really what Americans voted for? For instance, the net-worth of Trump’s proposed cabinet members, according to Laura Mannweiler of the U.S. News and World Report is at least $344.4 billion, where in contrast, the net-worth of Biden’s cabinet is $118 million:  that’s billions vs. millions. The federal government, like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich comments, is quickly become a government of America’s 815 billionaires, by those billionaires, and for those billionaires, returning “again” to the “great” days of the robber barons who once controlled our country before the Great Depression, FDR’s “new deal”, then WWII came along to reverse course.  Refusing to sign ethics pledges, Trump’s administration will be corruption on steroids and wants to make oligarchy permanent. In the meantime, if you can afford it, you can buy just about anything you want; isn’t life great.

To quote historian Heather Cox Richardson, authoritarian scholar “Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: ‘health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.’ The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz [already replaced by Pam Bondi, a staunch 2020 election denier and registered lobbyist for the country of Quatar], Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a ‘decapitation strike’,  destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.  Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States, [h]ow could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz [Bondi]; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.” American democracy is on the ropes, but throwing in the towel is not an option for those of us who care about whether democracy can “endure” as President Lincoln said at Gettysburg, so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.

The American voters (including me) have done this to themselves. American democracy’s experiment has veered off course, allowing our political system to evolve without strong enough checks and balances, without adequate restraints on politicians who take advantage of the weaknesses, while acquiescing our individual participatory responsibility in democracy to those whom we elect to represent us but who ultimately betray us and work for themselves. In the words of Malcolm X spoken over 50 years ago about those in power – but still apropos today – we’ve “been had, been taken, bamboozled, hoodwinked, led astray, run amuck”, exactly what the nefarious powers planned and are now executing to take down American democracy. It’s all for naught though; the trap is closed; collapse of global industrial and consumer civilization (GICC) is foregone, and Homo colossus (Catton, 1982) is going extinct.  Humans have created a thermodynamic “dissipative structure” called civilization which releases chaos of accelerated entropy into the natural operating systems on Earth, and Mother Nature is saying “no, no, no – you aren’t listening!”

Mother Nature has the only real mandate, period. And she has the power to enforce it, period.  Her mandate is not nefarious, period. It requires that humanity listen to her and no longer ego-centrically breach protocols she evolved over billions of years, period.  She will clean up our mess on her timetable and scale. All is not lost, though, as much smaller portions of humanity should make it through the ecological bottleneck of Overshoot now underway (though nothing is guaranteed). Those survivors will have embraced Nature’s primacy, will have learned to experience God within themselves and identify God’s oneness in everything around them, and then will live life according to that experienced knowledge in a sustainable way, becoming great stewards and custodians of Nature here on Earth. If we listen, learn, and live “Nature-first”, a post-GICC equilibrium should finally allow into Earth’s atmosphere the foretold “peace on Earth” for human beings. If…….

The views expressed by Bob Bates do not reflect the views of the staff or management at The Tullahoma News.