The 2020 Presidential Election was 10 days ago, and the vote counting continues, as it does, President-elect Joe Biden continues to expand his lead over President* Trump.
Even as a hand recount of votes in Georgia gets underway, Biden solidifies his lead in Arizona, and the Trump campaign itself admits its lawsuits will likely have no effect on the outcome there.
As the election comes to a close, it is clear the vote was not actually close. Biden won handily and will be sworn in as President on January 20. In the meantime, however, the poopy pants toddler Trump continues to disrupt, dismantle and demean American democracy, refusing to proceed with the Presidential Transition and making baseless claims of voter fraud. Court filings made by the Trump Campaign lack any evidence of fraud and are being dismissed on a regular basis. As one Twitter wag noted, these are less lawsuits than Twitter rants with filing fees.
Time to pour a nightcap and put the Trump Administration (and campaign) to bed, their court cases are going nowhere, and Biden is President. The perfect nightcap for the end of the Trump Administration and watching its “legal” challenges fail comes from Kara Newman’s great book Nightcap called Open & Shut. The Open & Shut is a Scaffa, a room temperature cocktail, involving no ice. The Open & Shut is:
1.5 oz Amaro Lucano
.5 oz Cognac
Combine in a rocks glass (no ice) stir and garnish with a lemon or orange peel.
We’re not done with Trump yet, but The End Is Nigh is the cocktail to help get to january 20
I do not identify as a Baby Boomer, though some demographers do put me there. But I definitely arrived at the transition from Baby Boomers to Gen X. For more than a week now, however, Jim Morrison singing The End has been playing on continuous loop in my head. For much of that time it was unclear if the Lizard King was signing about The End of Trump or the end of American Democracy. Still, with the election of Joe Biden as President, we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
We are truly at the End of an Error, but like the old joke, it is still not clear if that light is the exit or an oncoming train. The long-term outlook is good, but from now until January 20, we may be in for a bumpy ride.
Last night, after Biden was confirmed to have won the election, Jim Morrison began to fade from my mind as the spontaneous celebrations around the world as street parties and church bells signaled the rejoicing that America rejected a fascist dictatorship. From there, things got weird.
The scary weird happened in Harrisburg, Penn. where some 2,000 heavily armed Trump Brown Shirts showed up to whine about the loss. If Y’all Qaeda and Meal Team Six is going to continue this behavior, then each state’s National Guard should have very clear rules of engagement around when to take prisoners and when to use deadly force to protect institutions of American government from armed anti-American terrorist groups. The weird, weird also happened in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where Rudy Giuliani proved the Hunter Thompson maxim that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. When Rudy’s obituary is written, right next to his 9/11 performance there will be a few lines about his press conference yesterday at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Over the next two months we can only hope this Administration continues to be The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. With looming criminal indictments and creditors demanding payment, Trump will be a cornered rat who feels the walls closing in every day closer to Jan. 20 we get. The End is coming for Bunker Boy, but it is likely going to take us a few cocktails to make it to January.
As you make your plans for getting to Inauguration Day, have a The End Is Nigh cocktail. From Neal Bodenheimer at The Cure New Orleans, The End Is Nigh is:
1.5 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye (Old Overholt Bonded Rye)
1 oz Bonal
.25 oz Amaro Sibilla
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Combine ingredients in a mixing glass. Stir 40 revolutions and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel.
Americans in 2020 got the message, voting matters, and days before election “day,” record numbers of people have already voted early or by mail. By this writing, about 92 million votes have been cast, or roughly 2/3 of the total votes cast in 2016.
Now the question is, whether all of those ballots will be counted. While there has been a record voter turnout, there has also been a record number of legal actions taken to limit voting and ballot counting.
Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed around the country, by Republicans, to stop voting, or counting votes. After slowing the U.S. Postal Service, the GOP is fighting to make sure ballots received (but not postmarked) after election day are not counted.
As Politico noted a few days ago, “Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump.”
Since 2016, Trump has made no secret of his authoritarian desire to be President for Life. But now it seems he wants to be “President for Life” because it may save his life. Notwithstanding all the likely prosecutions awaiting Trump once he is no longer President*, when he leaves office he will not be of much value to those he owes hundreds of millions of dollars, or to Putin. The Secret Service will no longer be around to protect him.
Another part of the analysis from Politico said, “The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map — a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximize Trump’s chances of winning a contest in which he’s all but certain to earn less than 50 percent of the vote.”
As a Chicago Cubs fan, I have my own theory about why counting all the votes will bring an end to the Trump presidency. In 2016, shortly before Trump “won” the presidency, the Cubs won the World series for the first time since 1908. When Trump “won” the election, I felt guilty. The Cubs ending their curse must have brought on a new curse, the Curse of Trump. Another thing happened in 1908, 65.4 percent of all eligible voters in America voted in the Presidential Election, won by William Howard Taft. No election since 1908 has seen that high a percentage of voters cast ballots. We are poised to break that turnout percentage in 2020. I believe breaking that record should undue the Cubs-Trump curse.
The amount of voting we have seen shows that Republicans have not been as effective at suppressing the vote as they would have liked. Now they are working on suppressing the vote counting.
In addition to limiting the time for valid ballots to arrive, they have also limited the processing time frame for vote-by-mail ballots, ensuring results will not be known on election night Tuesday. Republicans have made it clear they will then claim votes tallied after election night are illegitimate and seek to have their partisan-stacked courts decide the election in their favor to preserve minority rule.
As you prepare for Election Day, have a Suppressor #21, a low alcohol cocktail from the Ticonderoga Club in Atlanta. While Georgia is a hot spot for Republican voter suppression efforts, the Ticonderoga Club Suppressor cocktails are about the low ABV and that’s good as you’ll want to keep your wits about you to be on your toes for GOP shenanigans.
Gin & Bitters 
You must be logged in to post a comment.