Collective Trauma from losing an election: the Republicans want the Democrats to suffer for their heretical attitudes.

Women are being trolled with the taunt “Your body, my choice” and President-elect Trump has announced his nomination of Matt Gaetz, former congressman, for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz will be completely focused on revenge. In addition, Trump states that he intends to pursue recess appointments immediately and asks the Senate to go into recess for the minimum two weeks needed.

We should also note that Mr. Gaetz was supposed to receive a report this week on the House Ethics Committee’s long-running investigation of his participation in drug and under-age sex parties while he was in Congress. He resigned just a few hours before the report was to be delivered, putting himself out of the reach of the investigation.

Mr. Trump has successfully engaged in the same behavior, stalling the four criminal cases against him until the clock runs out. He has made full use of the Democratic administration’s almost two-year delay in delivering indictments for his incitement to insurrection and retention of classified documents (with obstruction).

It is clear that Biden’s main fault was that he was too nice. Biden should have allowed or prompted his Attorney General to proceed immediately with the case against Trump. Biden should have trumpeted his own accomplishments, loudly, far and wide. Where is his press conference announcing that the economy of the USA is the “envy of the world” (per the Economist magazine)?

One last question: why didn’t the Harris campaign know that there were ten million Democrats who planned to sit out the election– the ten million that Harris needed to win?

It is clear from the final voting numbers that Trump retained all but a couple of million of his die-hard followers– he received almost the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020. But Harris in 2024 received over ten million votes less than Biden in 2020, indicating that many Democratic voters sat out the election.

It was also clear from Trump’s campaigning style that he had no interest in courting voters beyond his hard base. He made it all about his grievances and revenge, and allowed the voters to pursue their prejudiced views on inflation and immigration. No-one who voted against him before would ever vote for him again.

It may have been a mistake to campaign with never-Trump Republicans. The time may have been better spent trying to find and motivate those Democrats who were not going to vote at all.

The less said about the new Health and Human Services chief, the better.