Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
The good news: As the year ends, Joe Biden is our President-elect after a massive (“landslide”) victory in the Electoral College and a dominant popular vote win over the hugely unpopular failed President, impeached criminal, and incompetent psychopath Donald Trump. Biden’s inauguration on January 20 won’t end all our problems, but it will officially end the nightmare of the Trump presidency—and give us a chance to stop all of Trump’s chaos, corruption and destruction.
The bad news: As the year ends, Trump is still stirring up a deranged minority of the country with fantasies about reversing the election result while also pardoning war criminals who enjoy killing innocent civilians. Also, if the last four years of Trump-inspired domestic terrorism wasn’t enough, there was a suicide bombing in Nashville on Christmas Day. And lunatic traitors are still urging Trump to declare martial law and destroy America as we know it.
While Trump keeps cheating at golf, raking in golf cart rental fees from the Secret Service, and plotting his next steps on the back nine, COVID-19 infections are racing toward 20 million and more than 1 in 1,000 Americans are already dead from a virus our M.I.A. Commander in Chief insists “affects virtually nobody.”
What now?
This year has been devastating for everyone. And millions are suffering and anxious. I’m optimistic that the incoming Biden-Harris administration will restore competence and that things will start getting better in 2021. But Trump still has three more weeks in the White House. So I’m not making any predictions for the year ahead.
Between now and January 20, Trump will keep doing his best to stir dissent, squeeze more cash out of his impoverished MAGA donors, and infect as many Americans as possible before Biden takes over. The Republicans are proving again and again that they do not give a shit about helping the other 99% maintain the ability to eat, buy gas or stay in their homes. And while Orange Mussolini could still go out with a whimper, we have to be prepared for the bang.
As I wrote when I launched this newsletter one year ago, only three things were certain as 2020 began:
- The lies will be endless.
- The distractions will be constant.
- The media will fail us.
Numbers One and Two were a given. Number Three came true, too.
Even if we set aside the election campaign, more than a third of a million Americans have died from a virus that other (poorer and/or more science-friendly) countries contained more effectively using cheap face coverings. It didn’t have to happen. Yet somehow the media have failed to convince a huge chunk of the country that masks work—or even that businesses had a legal right to require them.
The media failed in their coverage of Trump, too, of course. The very first issue of Unprecedented highlighted the kid-glove treatment of international money launderer and Chinese-trademark hoarder Ivanka Trump compared to the way they were already “asking questions” about Hunter Biden.
Also, as I pointed out in this newsletter repeatedly (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), the media mindlessly (and reliably) parroted Trump’s propaganda about the economy he created which, despite Trump’s claims that it was the “strongest in the history of the country” collapsed like a house of cards the moment he admitted COVID-19 was more than the “sniffles” and cases were not going down to zero.
Trump’s relentless stupidity about the virus was brought home more forcefully by TikTok stars like Sarah Cooper than by network stars like CNN’s Anderson Cooper (whose attempts at sanity could only go so far when his bosses continued to provide a platform for dickwads like Rick Santorum).
As for the election itself? All year long, Trump, Putin and the GOP waged a relentless war on US democracy: by seeking foreign dirt on opponents; with outrageous voter suppression efforts; through systematic destruction of the Postal Service; and more.
Yet somehow the media failed so badly to tell that story that nearly half the country now believes the ghost of Hugo Chavez switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden through servers in Germany owned by companies not actually involved in the election. The proof’s written in invisible ink in a binder Kayleigh McEnany held up on TV but John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are now part of the Deep State so they refuse to even look at it!
I’ve chronicled some of the insanity and horror of 2020 here on Substack (the full list of articles is available at: https://thedailyedge.substack.com/archive). As the pandemic began and the economy sank, I made the switch to making all of my articles free.
In addition to my own articles, I was also pleased to present many insightful interviews with experts on a variety of newsworthy topics:
April:
I asked media and consumer research guru Tony Cardinale about Stupidity in the Age of Coronavirus.
June:
I had more questions for Cardinale about Fox News and the COVID Catastrophe.
With Russia On My Mind, I interviewed Greg Olear, the author of 2018’s Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, for an update on what we knew then—and what we still might find out in the last 150 days before election day.
July:
I asked attorney, election integrity advocate and writer Jennifer Cohn to explain the many ways Trump, Putin, the GOP, Louis DeJoy and Karl Rove were Hacking Our Democracy—and what it would take for Democrats to defeat them anyway.
I asked Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of the newly published Strongmen, “Is Trump a Fascist?”
August:
Amid the ongoing protests following the death of George Floyd, I interviewed PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of the new book Dare to Speak, about Trump’s politicization of the First Amendment and whether or not it’s still possible to have an honest discussion in today’s tribalized, propaganda-driven world?
I featured a two-part interview with award-winning editor and environmental writer Charles Alexander about what it would take to counteract the global destruction wrought by 4-years of Trumpism in The Planet After Trump.
I asked Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., to explain his view that clinically diagnosing Trump as a Psychopath, based on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist — Revised (PCL-R), renders all other diagnoses obsolete—and allows us to focus on the real problem. He’s a psycho.
September:
I got serious with Jason Sattler, aka @LOLGOP, about the ways Trump could cheat his way to victory and the dangers another four years (or more) of Trump(s) in the White House would represent.
Watching Trump and his flailing campaign—along with the hypocritical Republicans in the Senate—immediately begin making moves to turn RBG’s death to their political advantage, I reached out to Dr. Vince Greenwood to ask what we might expect from The Frantic Psychopath.
October:
As Trump was nominating “Handmaid” Amy Coney Barrett to take RBG’s place on the SCOTUS while simultaneously hyping a Covid cure created using aborted fetal tissue, I turned to lawyer and author Amee Vanderpool, Twitter’s @girlsreallyrule and the editor of SHERO on Substack, to understand the stakes ahead for all women and men who care about reproductive freedom, healthcare and the future.
December:
With millions of Americans grieving lost family members, friends, neighbors and colleagues this holiday season, I interviewed Alex Goldstein about his @FacesOfCOVID project and how America has responded to—and processed—the coronavirus pandemic.
Thank you to all my readers
This was truly an unprecedented year and I’d like to thank all my readers. In my first year on Substack, 2,600 readers have signed up to receive this ad-free newsletter either free or paid. To those few who are reading this as paid subscribers, thanks especially to you for your support!
Thanks to shares by readers and my own posts on Twitter and Facebook, my articles frequently get read by several thousand people, sometimes tens of thousands of people. American Idiot, my best-read article of the year, has amassed more than 111,000 views.
While I’m not making any predictions for 2021, I’m still hoping that the third of my three goals for 2020 will be achieved on January 5th in Georgia.
As I said one year ago:
The most important thing we can all do is to ensure a Democrat wins in 2020 and Democrats retain the House and regain the Senate.
Two out of three ain’t bad. But three out three will make all the difference.
Peace to all. Wishing you a happy and healthy New Year.
Subscribe now to keep Unprecedented coming to your inbox in 2021! I’ll be keeping all articles FREE for the foreseeable future. So when you choose “None” you’ll actually get everything…
… If you’d like to support with a paid subscription, act now to save 30%…
… or introduce a friend to Unprecedented in 2021 with a gift subscription…
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.