The 2020 election results won’t be final until the ballot challenges and court cases are decided, and the process could be long and involved. Given the information available as I write, the odds favor Biden winning and Trump losing. If this proves to be the case, what will it mean for the country?
To begin with, it will not mean that Joe Biden is the only, or even the most important winner. After all, how could he be? He spent most of the campaign hiding from the public, including sycophantic media folk. On the rare occasions when he spoke to small gatherings of voters, he seldom ventured beyond enumerating the ways he hated his opponent, and even that was done from a teleprompter. When he said he had a plan, it usually turned out to be something the President had already done. When he waxed impromptu, often as not he forgot the office he was running for or even, in one case, the name “God.” And try as he might to move spryly and speak clearly, he couldn’t disguise the shuffling walk and verbal confusion that are common indications of early onset dementia.
So who will the other winners be? The list is long. Planned Parenthood and the abortionists they champion. Illegal aliens and the “coyotes” that profit from transporting them. Rioters and looters. The dishonest, self-serving politicians who fabricated stories of Russian “collusion” to undermine the Trump presidency. The officials in the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ who carried out the plan. Members of the Mueller commission who labored, at great expense to taxpayers, to prove a mythical case for impeachment. Government bureaucrats and congressmen of both parties who resented the President for his political sins of keeping campaign promises and refusing to join their self-serving club. Legions of journalists who enthusiastically violated their professional code of ethics by creating false narratives about the President. Arrogant social media mavens who prevented positive stories about the administration from reaching their users.
Winners will be found beyond our borders as well as within. They include oligarchs in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Ayatollahs in Iran, Chinese Communist leaders, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom have dreamed of having a “friend” in the White House who will not only be sympathetic to their wishes but generous in responding to them, and who will rejoice that those dreams have come true.
One other group of winners deserves special mention—the many Catholic bishops who redefined the virtue of justice as “social justice,” a term more compatible with Socialism than the Gospel; who transformed Jesus’ message of loving one’s neighbor into a doctrine of “open borders” and “redistribution of wealth”; and who gave their blessing to voting for candidates who support abortion because it is not, they claimed, the paramount moral issue but “only one issue among many.” These messages from the Magisterium—by definition, “masters” of the Church—surely encouraged many Catholic voters to support Biden. (Writing this paragraph calls to my mind the sorrowful passage in Luke 19:41, which says that when Jesus approached Jerusalem, “he wept over it.”)
The list of losers will also be long. Blacks and Hispanics. Suburban men and women. Small business owners, particularly in large cities such as Portland Oregon, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore. Workers whose jobs will once again be sent to China and other foreign countries. Coal miners and workers of every kind in the oil and gas industries. School children. Wage earners. Taxpayers. Retirees. And most of all, the legions of citizens who unwisely chose to get their news from the mainstream and social media and were manipulated into voting against their own and the country’s interests.
Finally, the list of losers will include the man who devoted himself tirelessly to serving the American people while refusing to accept a salary for his work—President Donald J. Trump—although in the larger sense he is not a loser at all but a victim. Amazingly, throughout his four years in office, he more than held his own against his detractors, even while achieving memorable and often unprecedented improvements in domestic and foreign affairs and advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East. His loss of the election will not have ben caused by any failure as President—far from it—but instead from the cumulative effect of four years of assault against him from Democrats, liberal Republicans posing as conservatives, Christian clerics who have forgotten the distinction between saying “Lord, Lord” and doing God’s will (Matt 7:21), and propagandizing media.
As I conclude this brief analysis of the election, one powerful image surrounds the sadness I feel for the country and its beleaguered President. That image is of the Lord saying to President Trump, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I wish to echo that message: “Thank you, Mr. President for your shining and tireless example of love for your country and your fellow citizens. I am confident that history will bestow on you the positive assessment you richly deserve.”
Copyright © 2020 by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. All rights reserved
