All the money in the world raised and spent to advertise on social or corporate media couldn't have overcome the former guy's thousands of lies, massive emotional insecurity, and sinister self-dealing. Remember Abraham Lincoln's famous quote:
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.
This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.
What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.
This (below, excerpted from pages 43-44 of The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner) may be the most succinct explanation for why the former president lost the election in 2020.
... your ability to make a difference in the world is shaped by what other people think of you. Your capacity to alter the state of others depends on their trust in you. Your ability to empower others depends on their willingness to be influenced by you. Your power is constructed in the judgments and actions of others. This idea distills down to four principles:
Numerous natural state experiments demonstrate that Jack's [from Lord of the Flies] strategies of bullying, coercion, and violence do not prevail; rather, groups demonstrate an instinctive tendency to give power to individuals who bring the greatest benefit and least harm to individuals, to those who advance the greater good (Power Principle 5). To make abuses of power less likely, groups shape people's capacity to influence by constructing their reputations, which track their contributions to the greater good (Principle 6). Groups reward those who are good for the groups by affording them elevated status and esteem (Principle 7). And when an individual acts in ways that violate the greater good--the group's sense of its collective welfare--the group will resort to gossip and other reputational damage to diminish the influence of that individual (Principle 8).
These four principles center on a concept known as the greater good. This idea emerged from the eighteenth-century philosophical movement know as utilitarianism... to define what makes an action a good one to take. Their answer: an action is good to the degree that it advances the greater good, or what we might today call the collective well-being of a social network or, more broadly, the trust or strength of a society. Or..."The action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers, and that worst which, in like manner, occasions misery."
In November 2016, too many people were fooled.
In November 2020, enough people spoke with One VOICE and removed the power granted to him four years earlier, which he, every single damn day, abused to the overall detriment to the country and to the world. Like a three-year old toddler throwing a PROLONGED tantrum, the guy who never learned how to cope with being told no has not ended his tantrum and likely will not stop until society succeeds in isolating him in a 6 by 6 cell surrounded by concrete walls.
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