The Road to the Recount

Opinion By: Kathy Kahn

While most media outlets have declared former Vice President Joe Biden the winner of the November 2 Presidential Election, current POTUS Donald Trump is primed to challenge the mail-in balloting fiasco that is still unfolding across the USA. Trump and a cadre of attorneys are primed to take the demand for a recount all the way to the Supreme Court.

No one disputes that most Americans have grown weary of the never-ending battle between the Trump and House of Representatives, “blue” State Governors and like-minded officials since his 2016 win against Hillary Clinton. The many months of impeachment hearings that yielded nothing took a toll on a weary population, who were ready for Congress and the President to move forward on issues that would benefit the country at large.

Granted, Trump is not a politician and certainly doesn’t portray the veneer the public has come to expect from its elected officials—the majority of whom are poised, polished, carefully scripted and rarely argumentative with the press. Trump has broken a different “glass ceiling” that’s been mostly overlooked by the mass media: he is the only President in our collective memories that has never held public office.

No one can dispute that Donald Trump often goes off-script—and has a penchant for adding “really, really great” to “really, really horrible” to the topic du jour.   As a result, protagonists portray him as both bigot and draft dodger with zero public speaking skills.  Supporters dispute the labels, save for perhaps the POTUS’s inability to mimic the late Pres. Ronald Reagan in his delivery.

Whatever Donald Trump is or isn’t in the minds of the public at large, the fact remains he is a legally elected President of the United States who has called into serious question the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and the method by which they were obtained. Those in the know say without hesitation that those questionable ballots will be addressed in a court of law.

Whatever ails disgruntled Americans over the current President, one distinction separates him from his predecessors, all of whom were seasoned politicians—Trump has done wonders for America’s economy and provided pathways to financial parity for all Americans, regardless of race, color or creed.

The handling of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic—taking into account note the mishandling and underreported 2008 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic that continues to haunt the world— by any world leader can be called into question. Sweden, for example, never imposed a lockdown of any type, while Italy and others in Europe imposed a total lockdown.

Despite best predictions by scientists, health experts and snake oil salesmen, it was neither prudent nor possible to gauge just how severe the virus could become, since news out of the Peoples’ Republic of China remains to this day slim and none. When Trump announced at the end of October that several companies were racing to find a vaccine, and that he expected one would be forthcoming “very, very soon,” that pronouncement was met with the usual skepticism—until Pfizer announced just ten days later that a vaccine with a 90 percent success rate had been formulated.   If Trump’s delivery of the news that a vaccine was imminent had rankled reporters, he was, nonetheless, correct.

The brouhaha over questionable ballots has been an American staple for hundreds of years. Congress would be doing the people a service by creating a means to conduct a National vote without fear of some being tainted.

There is no doubt Americans are exhausted from the battle between the White House, Congress, CNN and others, while independent thinkers are fatigued by the rhetoric and ballyhoo on both sides of the aisle.  Americans—whether black, white, brown, red, yellow or a combination of all of the foregoing, are beginning to wonder why the words of Martin Luther King have lost their meaning.

Dr. King fervently dreamed that one day, people would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. Today, emphasis has shifted to skin color first and content of character second. A return to the philosophy he espoused would better serve us all as Americans.