Trump: The Snake Oil Salesman

Former President Donald Trump–the self-proclaimed “law-and-order” president who held up a Bible for a photo op in front of a historic church near the White House to prove it just over one year ago–comes here tomorrow to my home state of Arizona to hold what he calls a Save America rally. It’s largely because Arizona was a big-time red state he won in the 2016 presidential election and lost in the 2020 election. Then he started crying out like a bad loser, claiming election fraud, and sending people here and there to contest the 2020 election results in various states. Trump and other Republicans brought 60 lawsuits for that purpose and won a big fat ZERO for all sixty. Moreover, the Congress officially confirmed the Electoral College results on Certification Day, when Trump caused the Capitol riot, by affirming that Joe Biden had indeed won the election. Yet over eight months after the election to this very day, way over half of all registered Republican voters still claim Trump is right, that there was election fraud in 2020 to the extent that he really won the election and Joe Biden didn’t. Trump, therefore, is just like a snake oil salesman at some carnival in the early days of this republic, claiming he had a remedy for solving a problem (except that problem doesn’t even exist) and you need to buy it from him.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “snake oil” as “a quack remedy or panacea.” A panacea is a difficulty or a disease. Trump claims to be able to solve the difficulty of an election fraud (except no such difficulty exists) by getting states to recount their ballots. He convinced this Republican state I live in, Arizona, to do just that. The Republican-controlled state legislature decided to have a ballot recount. To make matters worse, they hired an outfit to do it based in Florida that had no experience in election ballot counts whatsoever. On top of that, their name is Cyber Ninjas, which really sounds like they have added to a clown show here, which is what it is. The state legislators in charge of this recount said it wouldn’t take more than three weeks. Here it is now three months, and they still aren’t saying when it will be finished.

Yet these Republican legislators’ hero snake oil salesman will be here tomorrow to cheer them on to try to find enough extra votes to make Trump, instead of Biden, the winner here. Trump’s strategy is that if these Republican state legislators can pull off such a thing here in Arizona, maybe it can happen in other swing states as well and thereby throw Biden out of office and put Trump back in to turn the White House back into a Black House as it was when it was darkened by the snake oil salesman.

This Arizona recount is actually only in one county, Maricopa County, where I live, where Phoenix is, and where 80.5 per cent of all Arizona votes came from in the 2020 election. Biden won over 45,000 more Maricopa votes than Trump did, which was 2.2 per cent more than Trump. So, the Cyber Ninjas have to do some fast manipulations of ballots to come up with over 45,000 more votes for their snake oil salesman to prove election fraud and therefore that he really won the election. Since the Ninjas haven’t told us anything yet, three months later, I doubt they are going to produce any snake oil. Yet the snake oil salesman will be here tomorrow nonetheless, “stirring up the crazies,” as our beloved, Republican Arizona Senator John McCain had called Trump’s followers here. Trump will be keeping their hopes up for their salesman to supposedly run again for president in 2024, that is, if he’s not in prison by then for selling nothing but snake oil that is FAKE NEWS!