Maggie's Farm

Imagine you live in a violence-affected city. It really doesn't matter who you voted for; It’s hard to imagine what normal people in cities like Seattle or Minneapolis or Portland or NYC or Houston or Dallas can be thinking now. It’s a little hard to reconcile paying down the tail-end of a 30-year mortgage on a property that is now declining in value, maybe plummeting depending on your part of town. On top of that, your property taxes will have to go up to fix the damage to city infrastructure – Trump has already signaled that he won’t bail out mayors/governors who dug themselves into a hole by pandering to the mob. Then there’s your insurance rates, on your home or business, assuming you still have one. And all this while your mayor proposes to de-fund law enforcement and divert money to ‘social programming’ where corruption and return-on-the-dollar is always the worst.

Regardless of party affiliation, a citizen is grounded to earth by the money they owe. Most people don’t have the luxury of voting for a party that proposes to squander the voter’s money while filling their nights with violence and their streets with smoking rubble. And yet there is a weird clarity right now for these people, that this would be precisely the outcome, planned and playing out in real time, much to their horror.

Trump's insistence that he stands ready to help when asked is a stroke of brilliance, because he then helps on his terms - while letting the mayors and governors own the mess they have created, 100%. He has limited deployment of Federal Law Enforcement to only protecting USG property. And you can see the desperation as the mayors try to pin their self-created months-long mob violence problems on the limited late presence of ICE and Homes - by calling them anonymous secret troops and so forth.

Pink? Maybe. As long as voting remains personal, private, and anonymous.