There are several reasons why Donald Trump hates Fareed Zakaria, one of CNN’s best pundits.
For one, he hates CNN; and, second, Zakaria’s a Muslim, though he describes himself as a secular and nonpracticing Muslim. His three children have not been raised as Muslims, and his ex-wife is Christian.
Zakaria is from Mumbai, a big big city in India. Trump, who knows very little about anything, is unaware that India, though a predominantly Hindu country, led by his close personal friend, ultra-right Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, has the second largest number of Muslims in the world (1,370,000), after Indonesia.
On his Fareed Zakaria GPS show, Zakaria commented — as numerous other pundits have, recently — about what to expect on Election Night, November 3.
So much of it has to do with the fact that we here in the US are accustomed to The Media telling us Right Away who won our presidential elections.
But we all remember 2000, when the hanging chads scandal in swing-state Florida was eventually resolved in the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, in a decision that the Court itself said is not supposed to be treated as precedent — But.
Now, with Trump in the White House, and way behind in the polls, Zakaria is predictting that:
(1) Because of COVID-19, many voters are unwilling to endanger themselves by voting in person — look what happened in Wisconsin’s primary on April 7, a primary in which many thousands of Badger Staters didn’t vote because of the pandemic — in a state with a Democratic Governor, Tony Evers, and a Republican legislature; a state with a conservative majority on its Supreme Court (in Wisconsin, Justices of the Supreme Court are elected — a really bad idea).
(2) Because Trump claims — as usual, without evidence — that fraud occurs in mail-in voting — when the returns begin coming into our living rooms during the evening of November 3 — and because Republican voters, following Their Leader (should we say America’s Fuehrer?), insist on voting in person — and because the authorities in charge of counting votes in our 50 States and the District of Columbia will be seriously inundated by absentee ballots and mailed-in ballots — the early returns will show Trump leading in the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina — and because Democrats tend to vote by mail — Trump will claim victory before all the ballots are counted.
Yet, a Republican election lawyer with 38 years of experience, Ben Ginsburg, says authoritatively that there is very, very scant evidence of election fraud, period, including with respect to mailed-in ballots (https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/09/11/spacex-falcon-9-polar-orbit-launch-orig.cnn-business/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/).
But then, as the days and weeks go by, the election officials will duly count the massive influx of mailed-in ballots, and — you know what’s coming — Uncle Joe Biden will surge into the lead, and he’ll win the (outdated, in our view) Electoral College.
And then Trump, El Desperado, will declare a national emergency, declaring that the mailed-in ballots are all invalid — even though Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley has already said that the military will not intervene in the case of a disputed presidential election.
Which is why, as usual, we turned to — who else? — associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, a mole meticulously trained by DNC Chair Tom Perez and by your solitary reporter. Jones is with Trump 24/7.
And because she never lives his side, Jones already knows that, indeed, Trump has firm plans in place to have his Acting Homeland Security Secretary, Chad Wolf; his CIA, and the numerous pro-Trump militias (there are lots of those) capture the governors and duly designated election officials in all the key swing states, after Biden surges into the lead, and declare the results of the election invalid.
Can anybody explain to our vast corps of associate solitary reporters why we live in such interesting times?