Pop Stuff: Golden Goose, Rotten Egg

The normalization of bad behavior, followed by refusal to concede is playing out like a spectator sport

- SOLEIL NATHWANI

BY ONE TALLY, DONALD TRUMP IS THE BIGGEST LOSER IN AMERICA TODAY. Over seventy-eight million Americans decided, in casting a vote for now President-elect Joe Biden, to vote Trump out of office – the most votes cast for any president in American history and as such the most votes cast to oust the losing candidate. In the days since, President Trump, ever the sore loser, has been absorbed in litigating, as he calls it, ‘the rigged election’, rife with ‘fake votes’ and encouraging the seventy-three million-plus people that voted for him (the second-highest tally in American history) to mistrust the vote count. As America grappled with a massive second-wave surge in Covid-19 cases, her President essentially threw an equally giant size tantrum that included him proclaiming on Twitter ‘I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!’ shortly after every major news network in the country had decided that he was, in reality, on his way out. Twitter marked these and other tweets as misleading and television networks cut Trump off as he raged from the White House, during the vote count, that the election was being ‘stolen’ from him. In four years of incessant headlines usurped by a man who thrives on confrontation, attention, self-adulation and defying every imaginable rule of conduct, the days around the election literally trumped all the others.