I think everyone is aware that Bernie’s campaign essentially ended with his heart attack last week and he’s admitted that he’s “scaling back”.  Worse, it’s now being reported that his daughter in law, Rainè Riggs, died suddenly a few weeks ago from a rare disease.  Riggs was married to Levi Sanders, Bernie’s son.  I believe Bernie is done.

I personally thought it was a terrible idea for Bernie to run again this year when the stage was set  perfectly for him to be a major player in guiding the Democratic Party into the post Trump era.  I didn’t want it to end this way, though.

Last night I extricated myself from a FB conversation.  Yes, it was one of THOSE conversations, started by one of my conservative acquaintances who has become a Never Trumper.  A couple of days ago, he asked what act would turn his Trumpist friends against The Orange One.  The answer (nothing) was predictable; what was shocking was the nonsense they spewed in a continuous stream to justify that.  Intellectually, we all sense that Trumpists are unbalanced and misinformed.  When it’s laid out in plain English on social media, it makes your hair hurt.

One Trumpist would deflect all questions about Trump to Biden and his son, Hunter.  He would simply not address any of the issues about Ukraine or the thousands and thousands of easily disproven lies from Trump.  His source is Sean Hannity and he actually begged me to watch his show to “get the facts” that were going “to bury” Biden and his son.  He would only gloat about how Biden is “cooked” and would not even address the question.  Another Trumpist resorted to immediate grade school name calling and wanted to bet all comers $2,500 that Trump would not be impeached and that he would again be elected president.  He didn’t like I said I didn’t believe I wanted to bet on the level of stupidity of Trumpists.

One Trumpist kept quoting the Bible.  One even quoted Shakespeare, which I found entertaining.  One kept quoting the lies of Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, one of those fact free “investigative” books that makes people’s brains soft.  One said he would only vote against Trump if “he was convicted of a crime”.  He seemed puzzled when I said that was impossible since DOJ policy didn’t allow a sitting president to be indicted for crimes they committed.

The one who took the cake?  The QAnon Trumpist.  I have never had a social media conversation with anyone as unhinged as this one.  These folks are obsessed with pedophilia, and have this weird article of faith that the “Deep State”, whatever that is, is somehow covering up Hillary’s pedophilia ring that has “pedavores” as members.  I have no idea what a “pedavore” is, and don’t want to know.  This person was so unhinged that even the most Trumpist of Trumpists paused their ranting momentarily, one even saying, “I don’t even know what that means.”  I burst out laughing at that one, almost spilling my Jack on the rocks on my keyboard.

What I learned during this exchange was that to a person no level of corruption, criminality, or misconduct would cause a Trumpist to think again.  The really disheartening lesson was that how thoroughly these people are brainwashed with pure unadulterated bullshit.  We knew that the Hillary nonsense is encoded in the DNA – but right alongside those lies, the lies about Biden and his son have already been ingrained.  The facts have no bearing on these opinions; none.  I have finally given up even trying to talk to these people because I make no progress.  The message framing, as defined by George Lakoff, a linguist and retired professor of language at Berkeley, is perfect.  This message framing hits all the emotional buttons of fear, belonging, and Them vs. Us.  Once that kind of messaging becomes encoded, it’s almost impossible to alter it, and that’s what we’re witnessing.

These people are beyond reach of reason and critical thinking.  The only way they can be beaten is to neutralize them at the voting booth, and that requires the engagement in massive numbers of normal people who haven’t been brainwashed.  That is a huge task.

We all remember it – in the sunup to the 2016 Trump lied thousands of times over 6 years that Barack Obama was not born in the US.  The lie was outrageous, silly, and debunked before he spread it, but it didn’t matter to him.  Subscribing to Joseph Goebbel’s philosophy, of “The Big Lie“, Trump repeats his lies in a continuous loop no matter how outrageous, and the list is long; from his lies about immigrants, the border, the economy, environment, nonexistent voter fraud, the Clinton Foundation, and even the weather, no lie is too big for Trump. If it serves his purpose, lying is his first and only offensive tactic.

Carrying that tactic to 2020, you can read the roadmap.  It’s pretty obvious that Biden is the leading and strongest candidate against Trump, and he knows it.  That’s why 14 months out from the election Trump has implemented the strategy of the Big Lie.  And that Big Lie is that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden engaged in years of corruption and coverup of corruption with the government of Ukraine.  Never mind that there is ZERO evidence of any corruption or scandal; Trump and his henchmen have been prosecuting an offensive and defensive war against Biden, one to smear the Democratic frontrunner, and other to cover up the actual scandal, which is Trump and Giuliani soliciting the assistance of a foreign power to help him defeat an American political opponent.

Trump breathed life into the latest Big Lie today at the UN when he denied any wrongdoing in seeking foreign assistance in the next election by lying about the conversation saying he was withholding aid to Ukraine BECAUSE of the non-existent corruption between Biden and the government of Ukraine.  Did you see it?  Trump brushed aside his actual corruption by spinning the lie that he was actually trying to get Ukraine to stop helping Biden.  The notion of this lie is laughable, but it’s  not.  This is how it starts.  The echo chamber will pick it up, just like they picked up the birther lie, the Benghazi lie, the voter fraud lie, and even the weather lie.  By tomorrow, normal people will be slacked jawed when Trump’s bullshit will transform into an article of faith for his sycophants.

This WILL happen, and Biden’s team needs to be ready to aggressively call Trump’s bullshit uh, bullshit.

George Conway teamed up with Neal Katyal yesterday to opine on Trump’s latest outrage of holding up aid to Ukraine as inducement to dig dirt on Joe Biden.  Katyal was solicitor general in the Obama administration.  It’s become obvious now that the whistleblower case that Bill Barr is covering up is a blatant incident of Trump violating the Constitution and US law to induce a foreign power to assist him in defeating a domestic political opponent.  Another weekend must-read, this one is powerful.

In the NYTimes Opinion section, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain the GOP scorched earth strategy and how it’s destroying our democratic system.  Good read for a Saturday morning.

I believe most thoughtful Americans are more than a little concerned that, should Trump lose the election in 2020 he would refuse to concede and vacate office.  We’re getting a preview of that possibility right now in Israel as Netanyahu failed to get a majority of the votes last night in that country’s elections.  In his first speech after the election he refused to concede and blamed the media for biased coverage.  He went on to say that the Israeli government should be Zionist and not involve representatives of Arab heritage.  To be clear, 21% of the population of Israel are Arab muslims.

If you’re looking for a preview of 2020, here it is. Netanyahu just blamed his loss at the polls on the election.  Trump will do the same.  The only way Trump will ever leave office after an election defeat is to be be dragged out by his armpits.  Even his lawyer, Michael Cohen, said before Congress that if Trump loses the election next year that there will “never be a peaceful transition of power.”

It gives me cold chills thinking about it.