A beast vulnerable to both big game hunters and the lowly tick. French Museum workers taking an exhibit down l’escalier. A picture of a picture in a Bordeaux Musee.

Trump will lose. In this mind there is no way Donald Trump will be able to resume his assault on our democracy from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. 

The ABCs are against him. 

A. his dementia is peaking out. 

B. Americans are now seeing him as I saw him when I predicted in 1992 he was the future of the GOP.

C. He’s on the verge of becoming old news and 

D. We are no longer the casually racist nation his career has depended on for the last 40 years. 

This is me, the optimist.

Trump will win. This is my fevered brain anticipating the next 50 days before the general election. It fears the fatalism of “what do you have to lose?” voters who don’t understand what they have to lose. It fears that the mantra “you never had it so good” will take root in their amnesia. 

This pessimist’s mind imagines 11,780 Georgia votes being cast should Trumpers figure out early voting is not a trick. This war against early voting came from a man who expects rising seas will give Mar-A-Lago more beachfront.  

It was experience that told me that Donald Trump would bat Republican empty suits aside in the 2016 primaries. GOP donors had spent three decades purging any Republican with a speck of independence or integrity out of the party. 

I began sculpting my fears in snow when Trump won the South Carolina primary.  Snow’s impermanence drove me to resume writing for the Reader.  There, here, I could critique a President who was a worthy heel for the World Wrestling Federation. Here I could warn that chastity belt Bible thumpers would take an unwary America back to the Dark Ages of drowning witches.

I have always considered myself an optimist. In 1992 I dedicated a disappointing book to my recently deceased Father. I wrote: “In memory of ‘The Optimist’.”  

As a 13-year-old Daniel Marsh Welty told his parents who they should vote for, despised big city political bosses, championed a liberal dark horse, Wendell Willkie, who opposed FDR’s winning a third term. Willkie did this without really criticizing the New Deal. 

This was heresy. It set the hair of future John Birchers on fire. To these GOP bank rollers taxing the rich to give the poor jobs and dignity was “Marxism.” 

It’s worth considering what their candidate, Kansas Governor Alf Landon, who was crushed by FDR in 1936’s election, said of Roosevelt years later – that he saved America.

I am still rooting for optimism despite well documented stories in papers like the NY Times and Washington Post that make clear billions of people are creating an Earth so damaged and toxic that it will no longer support God’s creation or the billions of us dependent on Earth’s bounty. As I have written before “We are the meteor” now heading straight for Ronald Reagan’s “shining  city on a hill.”

And its not just Birchers or Trump menacing our future. Its Trump’s pals like Vladimir Putin. Vlad’s ignoring methane bubbling up from Siberia’s vast melting permafrost and igniting massive fires worldwide. 

To restore the hated world of Stalin he’s also hurling poisonous heavy metallic explosives into the fertile land of Ukraine, poisoning it.  Soon it will match the 475 mile long front lines of World War One, where farmers are now forbidden to plant grains to feed the world. Staying off the land also protects them from blowing their legs off by tripping century old landmines and buried ordnance.

I’m reminded of an episode from PBS’s program Nature.

It followed an African giraffe so covered in ticks that all its vigor had been sucked out. It collapsed in a heap for scavengers to plunder. 

Trump America is a land where parasites abound like our Congressman Pete Stauber. He’s a coward and traitor who did not defend the 2020 election. He’s a threat to democracy. I take no comfort in his justification that he’s simply trying to preserve “our way of life.”  

Sure, Pete. Go ahead and put obstetricians in prison. If you run again I’ll do the same thing I’ve done for the last four election cycles. I will pony up $300 to put my name on the ballot. I’ll be a tick on a tick.
I hope American’s famous pragmatism prevails in this election. I don’t want to run for Congress again. I may be of two minds but I’m not out of my mind.

Welty lets it all hang out at lincolndemocrat.com.