CommentsGUEST WORDS--After fuming at rainy France and coming home to hordes of brown women legislators and that damn lurking Mr. Mueller, the Angry Toddler-In-Chief has reportedly "retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment," spending his unpresidential time sulking, brooding, looking for someone to blame, and spewing batshit conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
In "an exclusive, wide-ranging interview" Wednesday with right-wing hacks at the Daily Caller, Trump raved about the Florida recounts and Broward County's "disgrace" of an Elections Supervisor, who is daring to count all the votes - "in violation of Florida reporting law," laments the Caller - when, he said, they should have just called it that night when his guy was ahead.
Now, he babbled, “Well, many votes were added to that, and you know what’s going on. And now they have mixed them up. They mixed the votes up and now you can’t find the ones that were put in, they just put ’em in to a batch.”
Trump fondly recalled his Great Electoral Triumph of two years ago - "And I won by, you know, I won by a lot of votes. I call it four Yankee stadiums” - before charging "Republicans don't win and that's because of potentially illegal votes," even though the last time he waved that red-herring in the paranoid air, in 2016, the Washington Post found just four cases of voter fraud in the country, three of whom were Trump voters, and Florida election officials say they have "seen no evidence of criminal activity at this time."
Still, Trump barreled wildly along: "When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It's really a disgrace what’s going on." Uh huh.
And besides, he fulminated, “If you buy a box of cereal - you have a voter ID.” He sneered that when you talk about voter ID, “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of...But voter ID is a very important thing.” To which many on Planet Earth eagerly chimed in to note that cereal is also a very important thing - as is the fact that the President of the United States is both not well, and such an ignorant clown he thinks you need a voter ID to buy cereal.
Faced with the choice of horror at the surreal circus in which we find ourselves and hilarity at the comic possibilities, Twitter, as is its wont, chose the latter. What followed was a barrage of photos of bad disguises - "My cat voted three times" and jubilant cereal jokes, queries, confessions and philosophical debates.
"I think what he's saying," mused one tweeter, "is that if you buy a box of cereal, you can use that as ID. Though I hope it's just the box top as trying to fold a box and put it in your wallet would not be easy.
I think my ID will be Captain Crunch." Others happily chose their own IDs (Trix, Cinnamon Toast Crunch), wondered if you could buy Capt. Crunch with a military ID, suggested getting your ID by sending in two box tops to Kellogg’s, worried what happens if you get a decoder ring instead, boasted about the last time they managed to buy cereal without getting carded, and posed the possibility of just bringing their cereal receipts to polling places to skip bureaucratic hassles.
"What about your hot cereals - do you need a passport for that?" came one prudent question. And from a miscreant: "My grocery store doesn't ID me for cereal, so sometimes I buy a box then go outside and put on a hat then come back in and buy ANOTHER BOX OF CEREAL.
It's amazing the crap I get away with." Yeah, it's going around.
(Abby Zimet writes for Common Dreams … where this perspective was first posted.)
-cw
