The 2020 election has been one of the more contentious during my lifetime, but not in the way you might think. For a lot of people abortion, party lines, immigrants, the environment, and all the other long-standing debates are still the most important; there are a lot of random factors in play this year -- the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, politicians lying -- but the only thing that is really new is Covid-19, and that's not actually a major campaign issue, despite the candidates trying to make it one; both parties want to do what's best for the economy, want to preserve the rights of local jurisdictions to make their own rules on public behavior, want a vaccine, want this over with.

What is new is that the old president is not a politician, but a media personality. He came in amongst sex scandals, tax scandals, embezzlement, and high drama of every sort. When he was accused of rape -- again -- he responded by saying random things until everyone forgot the old scandal and focused on the new ones. It worked -- tax returns have been in the news more often than presidential rape for four long years.

So what do you do when you think the worst thing in America is unborn babies being murdered, and the only person in a position to support this battle is the tongue-tied American version of Silvio Berlusconi? Well, you ignore most of what is going on. It's easy enough, most people are; Donald Trump moves through scandals quickly enough that you only have time to react to whatever hits Twitter first; policy is hardly ever in the news, and in fact, news is hardly ever in the news; Donald will saying something just so he has the chance to retract it, contradict it, or forget it two days later.

But there is another option: try to make Donald make sense. He likes this -- he's happy to say that reporters are liars, that he is a genius, playing the game on a level that we can't understand, and that facts are there to be ignored.

And so... Donald mixed up in the sex trafficking trade? He's undercover for the FBI, here to save America from the Dark State. Donald stealing money from children with cancer? Fake news; Donald is so rich that he doesn't even need to take his presidential salary, why bother to commit fraud? Donald caught lying? Well, we've been through this; it's all just a big smear campaign.

The existence of people willing to buy into nutty conspiracy theories has muddled the waters; people no longer have faith in other people. So when Trump tells his next big lie -- that he won the election, and won't leave the White House -- people aren't worried that he really did win, but they are worried that if he sticks to this lie, maybe there will be angry armed nutcases out there willing to shoot up a school or two while the secret service escort him from the White House. Or worse, maybe there are nutcases in the secret service.

This certainly isn't the first conspiracy theory that involved a president, or the first where a bomb or anthrax packet might not be set off by a domestic terrorist who got a little too wrapped up in it. We see those all the time. But this may be the first time where the general public are uncertain if a substantial amount of the government might have bought into the conspiracy to the point where American Democracy might just... stop.

Don't worry, it won't. But the crazy times haven't ended just yet. E2 is fortunate enough to be documenting a sample of the crazy for future generations to see, and that is not a bad thing.

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