In poll position for the end of the Donald Trump nightmare - Steve Cardownie

By this time next week the winner between the Democrat Party candidate, Joe Biden or the incumbent Republican Donald Trump in the race to be the next President of The United States will be all but over.
President Donald Trump holds a rally this week in Lititz, Pennsylvania.President Donald Trump holds a rally this week in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
President Donald Trump holds a rally this week in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

The outcome of next Tuesday’s election might well drag on for some time though particularly as Donald Trump has not yet said that there would be a seamless transfer of power once the result is known. He has repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, peddling myths that postal balloting in particular is open to widespread fraud despite evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately all the signs are that if he is beaten he will go anything but quietly.

His record in office is such that it is a wonder that the race is as close as it is. He has made many false or misleading statements during his presidency leading to commentators and fact checkers declaring it is unprecedented in American politics. By August this year , The Washington Post’s Fact Checker database had totalled up 22,247 false or misleading statements and yet he still has a substantial sympathetic core of the electorate who are prepared to back him nevertheless, invariably citing a “left-wing” media campaign which has been spreading “fake news” about Trump since his inauguration.

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Doctor Donnel Stern Ph.D wrote in the Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2019 that “We expect politicians to stretch the truth. But Trump is a whole different animal,” because Trump “lies as a policy,” and he will say anything” to satisfy his supporters or himself. A journalist with the Los Angeles Times, Mark Barabak, wrote that “ White House scholars and other students of government agree that there has never been a president like Donald Trump, whose volume of falsehoods, misstatements and serial exaggerations” are unparalleled.

Several fact checking sites regularly check the president such as PolitiFact which awarded Trump it’s “Lie of the Year” accolade in 2015, 2017 and 2019; or FactCheck.org which dubbed Trump “King of the Whoppers” in 2015.

In October 2019,The Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter encapsulated the situation thus “A thousand days of Trump. We often hear from readers wondering how President Trump’s penchant for falsehoods stacks up in comparison to previous presidents. But there is no comparison: Trump exists in a league of his own. Deception, misdirection, gaslighting, revisionism, absurd boasts, and in some cases, provable lies, are core to his politics.”

Although Joe Biden is around ten points ahead in the opinion polls many commentators are reluctant to plump for him just yet. At the last election Hilary Clinton was also ahead at this stage, albeit by just over 3 points and although she secured 3 million more popular votes than Trump she lost the Election due to the USA’s peculiar voting system. But while a normal-sized polling error was sufficient to allow for the Trump victory, it would take a much bigger and much unlikelier, polling error for Trump to win.

I, for one, am looking forward to the election coverage and the news that Trump has lost!

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