The Disaster Trump Will Blame on Biden: Jobs, COVID, and Protests

The Biden - Trump election is very simple.

Trump's task is to convince voters that the bad numbers that so define America today - COVID deaths, lost jobs, and protests - are Joe Biden's fault and not Trump's.

Let's start with facts. This table shows the number of deaths from protests and from pandemics, and the number of jobs created or lost in the economy inherited or passed on.

The 1 death during the protests at Ferguson was Michael Brown's, the young man whose death triggered the protests. If more teenage white supremacists with AK-47s show up at protests, the death toll from these 2020 protests could continue to rise, making the contrast even more stark.

And of course 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day. A safe prediction is that between 200,000 to 300,000 Americans will have died from COVID by election day.

The job market each president inherited is an interesting metric. There were ways to calculate this that made the difference even more dramatic but I chose a simple measure: how many jobs were created in the twelve months before Obama or Trump took office?

The economy Obama and Biden inherited was in free fall. They were sworn in on 20 January 2009 and in that month the economy destroyed 784,000 jobs. Trump inherited an economy in the midst of the longest run of uninterrupted job creation in history. In the month that Trump was sworn in - January 2017 - the economy created 969,000 (yep, nearly a million) more jobs than the month in which Obama was sworn in. How much is a million? In a great decade the American economy creates about two million jobs per year. The two presidents inherited vastly different economies. So are the economies each passed on. (Or in Trump's case, will pass on.)

In the twelve months before Obama and Biden took office, the economy lost 4.3 million jobs. They handed off an economy to Trump and Pence that had created 2.5 million jobs in the previous year. Obama and Biden inherited a train wreck and passed along an economy that was on track for the longest uninterrupted streak of job creation on record. 

What has Trump done with this inheritance? In the last 12 months the American economy has destroyed 11.3 million jobs. The economy Obama and Biden inherited - one that had destroyed 4.3 million jobs in the previous year - was the worst in a lifetime. The one Trump is about to pass on is more than twice as bad.  

(It is worth noting that the man's main measure of productivity has gone up, though. Trump is tweeeting 6X as often as he did in his first six months in office - 33 times a day - so you can't really say that he's done nothing.)

The numbers under Trump are awful. Americans are traumatized by his leadership and incredibly dissatisfied with the way things are going.  Trump is going to tell his loyal followers what he tells them about all facts: these are fake. He's going to tell the swing voters, these numbers are Biden's fault.

The number of people who believe him is the most important number of all: that will determine in which direction these numbers go during the next four years.

How Trump Has Made Police and Protesters Feel the Same: Powerless, Angry, and Alienated

Trump's work isn't done until he's managed to divide everyone. His worldview is "us vs. them," whether the them is Chyna or blue states or guys who served in the military but weren't real heroes because they were captured or ...

He is addicted to conflict and does all he can to stir it up. He still has at least half a year left. He's not done dividing the country because his route to getting all the power he wants is to make everyone else - from protesters who are literally taking over streets to the police who can literally arrest people - feel frustrated and powerless.

"Us vs. them" is the construct. "Us" is the reality. If you want to keep engaging in the fiction of division, well there is drama in that, as there so often is with fiction. Some people who haven't figured out a purpose for their lives need that kind of shallow drama to substitute for a deeper meaning. But it comes with turmoil.

The reality is that you can't escape "us." The argument for globalization isn't to create a world where we impact each other; the point of globalization is to adapt to that world, to that reality. You can't have a great home in a bad neighborhood, or a peaceful, prosperous country in world in turmoil. Progress comes from regularly creating new partners, not new enemies. The reality is that all of us affect all of us.

In the short video in this link, a New York police leader says, "Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect ... Our legislators abandoned us. The press is vilifying us. It's disgusting."

Those of you who have been paying attention have heard Black protesters say very similar things with a very similar mix of anger and sadness.

You either go all in on "us" or you prepare for a life of conflict and manufactured scarcity. Because down the route of "us vs. them" are protesters and the police united by only one thing: a focus on how alienated and angry and unappreciated they feel. It's not just the police and protesters. The point is for everyone to feel this way. Because when normal people feel powerless, Trump feels powerful. That's the world Trump and a few chaos junkies thrive in. Normal, healthy people don't.

Tweet with video here.

What Would We Be Fixating on if Trump Didn't Control the Media Narrative?

Because Americans couldn't look away from Trump, they now can't look away from Trump. A question worth asking is What would Americans be fixating on if it weren't a topic that Trump pointed us towards?

For about a year, Americans (myself included) could not look away from the train wreck of a candidate who was Donald Trump. He offended everyone from veterans (dismissing McCain's sacrifice because he prefers heroes who weren't captured) to women (bragging about how he can grab anyone's pussy because he's a star) to anyone with a triple-digit IQ ("I know more than the generals," "I know all the words, all the best words"). He kept the country incredulous throughout his entire campaign. I honestly thought at one point that he'd made a bet with some friends about all the things he could get away with before finally dropping in the polls. (Of course now we realize he has no friends. He has only sycophants and people who fear him.)

We couldn't look away from the candidate and now the price we pay for our inability to simply dismiss him and move on with a normal campaign is that we now can't look away from the president. He might gut our healthcare. He may start a nuclear war. He might jettison an investigation that would prove he colluded with Putin to seize the White House. He might pardon any racist who has committed any crime. Now he is the most powerful leader in the world and the damage he can do is worse than any hurricane.

One of my beliefs about us is that what we fixate on we head towards. Like a little kid learning to ride a bike, we steer in the direction of the thing that captures our attention. It's worth being careful about what seizes your attention because - whether it's fear of being alone or poverty or looking foolish - what you fixate on could become your reality.

We're living towards the end of the information economy, a time when little seems capable of holding out attention. In every direction there is a new distraction and it seems shiny at first. Trump's genius was knowing how to seize and hold attention. Now, of course, what he does has very real consequences, whether it is failing to initiate aid to Puerto Rico, Florida or Texas or initiating nuclear war. Before we could not look away. Now we can't look away.

One thing we do know about Trump, though, is that he creates the biggest distractions when he has the most to hide. Talking about "fire and fury" with North Korea or tweeting about firing black athletes who protest are topics that are sure to horrify or embolden people and pundits. And as Twitter and the airwaves become full of these topics, less attention is paid to the mounting evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election.

What should the American people and pundits be angrily debating? Not taking a knee in protest. Instead, they should be angrily debating whether the same rules of the Olympics hold with our elections. In the Olympics, if they discover that the gold medal winner cheated, the silver medal winner gets the gold. Once we prove that Trump cheated to win the election, the presidency should go to Clinton. That seems both obvious to me and like a topic that Americans should fixate on. This is unprecedented in our history and, it seems to me, worthy of our focus. Let's start that conversation.

The Only Enemies Americans Ever Eradicated

We fought the British. We fought the Mexicans. We fought the Japanese. We fought the Vietnamese. When those battles were over there were still Brits, Mexicans, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

We also fought Confederates and Nazis. Two things that were different about these wars.

One, the death toll. Including all deaths during war, from the American Revolutionary War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not counting the deaths of Confederates), about one million American military have died. The number who died fighting Confederates and Nazis? 73% of that.

Two, when those wars were over, Confederates and Nazis had been eradicated. They no longer existed. We dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities but Japanese still existed at the end of that war. We took Texas and California from the Mexicans but Mexicans still existed at the end of the Mexican - American War. At the end of WWII there were no more Nazis. At the end of the Civil War there were no more Confederates. Those were the only times in history that Americans didn't just defeat an enemy but eradicated them. This would seem to make you a true American if you stand up against Confederates and Nazis

Until, of course, they started showing up at demonstrations within .... the United States.