Trumpism Defeated in the Recall

No one expected Newsom could fight

Having failed to capture the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and previously failing by 7 million votes to win the 2020 election, and even as Arizona Republicans are still not releasing the results of their Cyber Ninja recount, Trumpism persists. The Trumpsters decided to take on California Gov. Gavin Newsom believing that he was vulnerable and weak.  Well, on Sept. 14 this turned out to not be true. Newsom came out swinging and clobbered the pro-recall proponents almost two to one.

RLn predicted months ago in a previous article that, “Trump may have been defeated but Trumpism was still alive.”  While the corpse of California’s recall election is fresh, I’d like to pronounce that Trumpism is now dead! Well, maybe just gasping for oxygen on an ICU ventilator like so many of the anti-vaxxers who are now clogging up our nation’s hospitals — some 95% of the patients and 99% of the recent deaths from the delta variant are unvaccinated. There’s a correlation between the two.

The virus doesn’t care about your politics, or if you think masks are an infringement on your personal liberties or cultural biases — viruses do what they do to spread and survive.  Actually for all of those science deniers (the ones who don’t believe in evolution) the COVID-19 virus is the perfect example of evolution in real time. This disease will keep morphing once every million or so replications, which happens inside just one infected person and then a variant evolves and is passed on to the next. It only stops when a victim dies before they reinfect someone else — thus the mask mandates — or if we vaccinate enough people to create herd immunity. At this point no one really knows how many variants there actually are.

The curious thing is that the coronavirus may do for the Democrats nationally what they appear less likely to do for themselves — defeat the far right Trumplicans.

However, speaking of politics, the Trump variant that infected California has just been defeated with a vaccine called the “Popular Vote.” And I hope that this infection is actually dead, dead, dead, but we must remain vigilant so that a new variant does not emerge!  Like the one candidate Larry Elder attempted to cook up before the polls even opened when he called this election “a fraud,” mimicking the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election. Luckily the California legislature won’t be calling in the Cyber Ninjas to do a recount on non-existent voter fraud.

What is most impressive is how the golden boy of California politics, Gavin Newsom, has successfully fought this recall and called it out for what it is “the Republican recall.” What democrats here and perhaps across the nation are surprised by is how well articulated Newsom’s counter attack was and how effective the No Recall campaign surged in the final weeks and made common cause with a variety of Liberal to progressive groups.  Have the Democrats finally found their unity or was this the self-defense promulgated by a common enemy?

Newsom’s beating the recall by 65 to 34 percentage points will more than likely stop any serious contenders from coming after him in the 2022 regular election. Or at least give Republicans pause in trying to unseat one of the most popular governors ever. 

Still, it’s interesting how the recall movement came about and that it is also being used against LA County District Attorney George Gascon and Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin and others throughout the state. These elected officials are being pelted with many of the same wild-eyed grievances that were lobbed at Newsom. In Newsom’s case, the recall elevated him to the national stage as the defender of liberal Democrats — a kind of Saint George who knows how to slay the dragon of Trumpism. 

As COVID-19 surges in many red states, what we may well witness is the far right Trumplicans being defeated more by their own stupidity about the virus than by anything else that Democrats might say or do.  We should be so lucky if the rest of the nation follows suit in the midterm elections next year.