Trump's Little (Imaginary) Pony

If ever I doubted that the President of the United States has slid headlong into Orwell-ville, I was convinced by his speech last Thursday evening, in which he perseverated for a rambling hour or so on his Stolen Election fantasy.

It’s a drearily familiar hobbyhorse for him, so I wasn’t too surprised to learn that two of the major networks declined to air the whole thing start to finish, instead making it available from their streaming platforms along with live comments and corrections. In fact, I admired them for their courage. These lies need no more traction.

But I also think Democratic strategist James Carville has a point: broadcasting the full speech without comment would have made it plainer to the American people that their president is “acting loonier than a toon,” in his words.

True to form, Trump castigated the offending networks for not bumping their prime-time programming for his sake and called for cancelling their broadcast licenses. More alarmingly, he used his bully pulpit to claim that the whole American electoral system is hopelessly corrupt and needs a federal overhaul. (Yes, he’s talking about the system that put him in the Oval Office twice. Go figure.)

This really does scare me, because however loonily he’s acting, he has a stable of sycophants who enable his fantasy, and he has the whip of federal enforcement at his fingertips.

There’s this old, meme-like story about a boy who wants a pony. You probably know it: this little boy hopes and prays that Santa will bring him a pony for Christmas. On Christmas morning he goes out to the stable and finds a pile of manure. He seizes a shovel and delves joyfully into it, saying, “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!”

Many, many honest people have spelunked that pile of horseshit about the stolen 2020 election. There is no pony in there. Our electoral system doesn’t need overhauling or federalizing; it just needs competent and good-faith administration by the states, which it mostly has, with very rare exceptions.

It’s time for the people around this president to stop enabling his loony fantasy. It’s time for them to put on their grown-up pants and break that news to him. If they won’t do it out of love for their country, then let them do it out of compassion for a sick man.