Moving Forward

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

As most of you know, my day job is being a trauma surgeon.

One of the cornerstones of trauma surgery is to continue to get better. In order to do this, we sit down and have a weekly conference to discuss complications and deaths. What could we have done better? Did we do everything possible? Was this complication unavoidable?

As you can imagine, these conferences can be extremely revealing. The cornerstone of the conference is an open and honest discussion coupled with a critical review of the pertinent medical literature. Without this, we just have opinions. Opinion will not move you forward. We always strive to get better.

2024 Election

This brings me to our recent election. I have followed elections closely for over a quarter of a century. I have not had much time to sit down and crunch all the numbers, but the numbers I have seen simply do not make a lot of sense.

For the first time I can remember, fewer people voted in the 2024 election than in the 2020 election: there were 4 million fewer voters than there were people who voted in 2020. This is crazy. Where did all those missing voters go? We had all that reporting about high turnout and a lot of enthusiasm, but yet fewer people turned out? Was the reporting wrong? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it doesn’t make any sense to me.

It is always important to sit down and take a deep breath after an election. The initial punditry is usually wrong. If you look at a map of the election, you see all of this red, so you’d assume that this means overwhelming support for the Republican Party.

This isn’t true. Instead, the Republican Party had small victories in many different states. This year, the Republican Party did win the popular vote. This hasn’t happened since George W. Bush won the popular vote back in 2004, 20 years ago. Again, please don’t let anybody tell you that this was a landslide or mandate victory. Instead, this was a narrow victory. Donald Trump won 49.9% and Kamala Harris won 48.3%.

That’s a 1.6% difference. Now, 336 million people currently live in the United States. Of those, 244 million (67%) are eligible to vote. And of those, just under 154 million people actually cast votes in the 2024 election. So the difference in vote totals between the two main candidates—2,291,105 votes out of 244 million eligible voters—was 0.09%. That is not a mandate!

There were seven swing states, and Donald Trump won each one: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. I have no idea how that happened. In each one of those swing states, the overall turnout was higher than in 2020.

But it might be the message—or propaganda—that’s been out there. For nearly two years, voters were told the US economy was terrible, and inflation was out of control. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden took the fall, even though the economy has rebounded.

In fact, unemployment is low, and wages are actually up. Most Americans are making more now than they were two to two and a half years ago. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and the Fed worked day and night to bring down inflation. Our economy is healthier than any other industrial nation, yet the voters were not happy.

Um, the Economic Reality

Despite the “smart” folks telling us that the voters were unhappy about the economy, I’m not buying it. We just had Black Friday. If the economy were bad, one would expect the Black Friday sales to be in the toilet. Walmart, Target, and Amazon would be crying the blues. They ain’t. Black Friday sales were up 10.2% over last year. This was the best Black Friday ever!! So it’s hard to swallow that Americans are all worried about the economy.

Oh, and Americans spent a record $6.1 billion on Thanksgiving Day. I’m not sure what anyone would buy on Thanksgiving, but some Americans were clearly in the buying mood.

Decision Making

I would like to tell you that humans sit down and logically make decisions. We all get out a legal pad, and on one side of the legal pad, we put all of the positive aspects of the question, and then on the other side, we will put all of the negative aspects of the question. Then, we weigh the good versus the bad and make our decisions.

Nope. That’s not how we make decisions.

Instead, many of our decisions are made without much input from our brains. This sounds crazy, but it’s true. Think about how you got to work yesterday. Unless there was a major car crash, you didn’t really think about it. You got in the car, and you drove; you didn’t think about your routes; you just went to work. A lot of our decisions are made based on emotion and not logic. This person makes me feel good, whereas this person makes me feel bad. Donald Trump convinced the majority of Americans that our country was under siege and he was going to make a safe. That’s the bottom line. He convinced more Americans that he was going to keep them safe.

Hunter Biden

This was a no-brainer. The Republicans relentlessly pursued Hunter Biden. They turned his life upside down because he was the son of a sitting president. His problem, like many of us, was that he was not perfect.

He was in fact far from perfect, and because of that, the Republicans knew that they would find something. They just needed to keep digging. They found it. Hunter Biden had lied on a gun application about his drug use several years ago. He also owed the IRS a significant amount of money.  The Republicans painted these offenses as the worst ever. No criminal in the history of criminality could’ve possibly done any worse.

None of this would have come to light if we lived in a fair and just world. If it had come to light, then Hunter Biden would’ve been asked to pay some penalty, and everything would’ve gone away, but the Republicans would not have let it go. Unless Joe Biden wanted to see his son behind bars nearly indefinitely, he needed to do something. The other day, President Joe Biden pardoned his son. In my opinion, it was simply the right thing to do.

Let the Circus Begin

It seems that Donald Trump was sitting on the toilet watching Fox News, and then it hit him—“Let’s nominate Matt Gaetz for Attorney General.” To say that Matt Gates is unqualified to be Attorney General of the United States should be evident to anyone with a working brain.

Now, I am determined not to let Donald Trump cause me to have a heart attack. I’m not going to hang on to his every word. I’m not going to follow his every tweet. I have my sanity to protect—to say nothing of my common sense.

Donald Trump is going to nominate a large number of people who are barely qualified or completely unqualified for the job. Just think Linda McMahon in charge of Education. Putin’s friend Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. It’s a long list.

In doing this, Donald Trump is following a Republican playbook. Remember Hurricane Katrina? This hurricane devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Do you remember who was the director of FEMA at the time? Michael Brown. He had no emergency management experience. He was the Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. This was his claim to fame before he was nominated to be the General Counsel at FEMA in 2001.

Michael Brown’s handling of Katrina has been widely seen as a disaster. This really shouldn’t be a surprise. All of our government agencies actually do something. Whether it is the CDC, FEMA, or the director of the CIA, all these agencies need competent leadership. Unfortunately, we will not see that in the next four years. If, by chance, we see competent leadership, it will have been 100% by accident.

Let Kindness Guide Our Way

To quote Frank Sinatra’s song, “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Let’s be good to each other. Love our family. Lead by an example of love, kindness, and forgiveness. Let’s not let Donald Trump rain on our parade.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.