Leaf removal – Trump uses his characteristic “You’re fired!” phrase again – The voter fraud hotline – Evening statistics
An uneventful day, after the activities of last week. The Indian summer, as it is called here, is still continuing. It will be warm tomorrow as well; then rain on Wednesday and more seasonal temperatures are expected to follow. I spent a good deal of the afternoon removing leaves from the lawn, using a lawn mower instead of a leaf blower. This method is not only easier, but it results in bits of leaves remaining on the grass to act as a mulch.
Matters were less humdrum In the public arena today. Donald Trump has reacted to his defeat in a characteristic manner: by firing someone, of course. The sacrificial victim of the day is Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Since in all likelihood Esper would have been forced to depart once Biden took over and since also he would not intervene in the scapegoating of Brett Crozier, I feel little sympathy for him. He will not be the only person to lose his position as a result of Trump’s defeat. Ivanka Trump will no longer occupy her post as “special advisor to the President” once the Presidential office is occupied by a man who is not her father. She will thereupon be forced to join the ever-swelling ranks of the unemployed, albeit she will be in a somewhat different situation than most of the others in that category. She and her husband will have to struggle together somehow on the interest of their fifty-to-a-hundred million dollar estate.
Trump has set up a “voter fraud hotline” that encourages people to report suspected instances of fraud in the polls, however fallacious they may be, and it has met with all of the success it deserves. Various pranksters from Tik-Tok and Twitter users have flooded it with spam calls, in some cases going viral with the results. One example is Alex Hirsch, creator of the Disney Channel show Gravity Falls, who made a recording of his prank call to report an attempt of interference at a poll by the “Hamburglar” (a character from MacDonaldland fantasy-land). The video has been viewed nearly half a million times since Friday. As a result, the Trump team keeps changing the number, in the vain hope of discouraging such jokes; the only response is that the pranksters redirect their calls to the new number. Despite Trump’s use of Twitter, he never has really understood the impact of Internet. He ought to have learned something about it by this time, considering how various social media groups flooded his first post-shutdown rally on June 20th in Tulsa with fake applications to attend, so that the number of people who actually showed up was, from his point of view, disappointingly low.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide 51,232,442; # of deaths worldwide: 1,268,905; # of cases U.S.: 10,421,076; # of deaths; U.S.: 244,448.