By Morf Morford
Tacoma Daily Index
2020: Bet you can’t top 2020!
2021: Hold my beer.
It seems like decades ago, but the year 2020 began relatively placidly, at least compared to January of 2021.
Yes, Australia had a record-setting fire season (with deaths of at least a billion animals), President Trump was impeached, and COVID emerged in the USA, but compared to the remainder of 2020, January of 2020 seemed quiet.
We all knew the first week of January 2021 would not be subdued; with a decisive Senate run-off election in Georgia (that will define the party in power nationally, hence the impact of the president, for the next four years) and on January 6th, the Electoral College would meet to make its final verdict on the 2020 election.
But, as always, and certainly for the previous four years, we should have been prepared for the wildest wild card of all – President Trump.
Before the first weekend of 2021 could pass, President Trump spent more than an hour cajoling and threatening the Secretary of State of Georgia to “find” or “recalculate” votes to swing the election results of November 2020.
Legal and Constitutional scholars debated the legal and ethical violations and implications, and Georgia election officials (and voters) did their best to ignore and deflect outside influences on their pivotal election – with the entire nation, if not whole world watching.
In other words, chaos, contention and confusion reigned.
Adding to the mix was the character trait of President Trump to “step on” his own message.
At his campaign stops, presumably for the local GOP candidates, he railed against the “unfair” and “stolen” recent election and the “corrupt” Georgia election officials (particularly Georgia’s Secretary of State) and then urged his audience to vote for the two GOP senators.
In other words, don’t trust this, or any election, but vote anyway.
On the (recorded) phone call, our deal-maker-in-chief sounded more like a B-movie mafia boss than a statesman, with menacing threats and implied accusations.
One of the many ironies was that the Secretary of State was a Republican and had publicly stated his support (and personal vote) for Mr. Trump.
Only two or three days into January and the new year, and already chaos, confusion, deception and intimidation were on display.
The meeting of the Electoral College, usually a perfunctory and ceremonial affair, would be nothing like usual, as a dozen GOP congress members vowed to “object” to the electoral decision.
The logical contradiction of many of the newly elected officials “objecting” to the electoral decision that brought them into office was not lost on some of their peers.
Mr. Trump called on Vice-President Pence to “come through for us” as he took on the (purely ceremonial) role of over-seeing the decision of the Electoral College.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, urged his supporters to gather and protest and expect things to “get wild” – which, as history books will note for centuries, they did.
One can only hope that such upheaval is more of a residue of the upheaval and animosity of 2020 than a sign of things to come in 2021.
By Friday of the first week of January Twitter had permanently closed President Trump’s Twitter account for a variety of policy violations. Myspace trends for the first time in decades.
The first week of January in summary;
– Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia, taking control of Senate
– US Capitol stormed by unruly and unregulated mobs, five people dead
– Biden’s electoral college victory certified
– Multiple Cabinet resignations and Articles of Impeachment drafted
– President Trump is permanently suspended from multiple social media platforms including Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook
The second week in January opened with even more verve and unintentional irony than the first.
On a national level, impeachment proceedings were considered (for the second time) against President Trump. The 25th Amendment was being considered as a mechanism to remove the president, and at the same time the 14th Amendment (related to advocacy of insurrection) was invoked to remove or prevent the installation of members of Congress who supported the siege of Capitol buildings.
The PGA of America cut ties to President Donald Trump when it voted to take the PGA Championship event away from his New Jersey golf course in 2022.
Deutsche Bank (https://thehill.com/policy/finance/533778-deutsche-bank-rules-out-future-business-with-trump-company), American Express and several other banks and financial institutions have cut all ties with Donald J. Trump, his family and any of his businesses. A partial, and ever-growing list can be found here: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/11/tracking-the-business-backlash-as-trump-brand-turns-toxic?
Leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Canada offered to send troops to protect the US capitol during the Biden inauguration.
By Tuesday of that week President Trump achieved something no other US president could have imagined – being impeached twice (by a bi-partisan vote) – within a single term.
And in interplanetary news
The CIA declassified two thousand documents on UFOs dating back to the 1970s.
And who, besides the illuminati, knew that Jewish space laser beams were a thing.
The final days of President Trump
In his closing days of office, President Trump finalized about 100 commutations and pardons, most, according to his staff were “transactions;” as Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani explained, the market value for a full pardon was $2 million.
Around the world
Immediately following the inauguration China announced that major figures from the Trump Adminstration would be banned from doing business in or with China.
With the rise in COVID and the corollary level of burn-out in the medical profession, we can turn to medically programmed robots to help us.
The economy?
Did you ever think you’d hear terms like “Biden Administration monitors GameStop” in the headlines?
In January of 2021 the New York Stock Exchange hit multiple records. From highs to record drops to day-trader distortion of stock prices in companies like GameStop, Blackberry and AMC.
If your bias is that the stock market is more casino than reliable economic indicator, you had plenty of evidence in the non-market based evaluation swings of those stocks.
Three wild Wednesdays in January
The first three Wednesdays of 2021, set the record for craziness. The first Wednesday, January 6th, saw the first armed siege of the Capitol Buildings for over two hundred years. For the first time, by a domestic, not a foreign set of attackers.
The second Wednesday, with only a week left of his presidency, saw President Trump impeached (for a second time).
The third Wednesday saw the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Washington D.C, was an armed camp with about 25,000 National Guard troops on hand.
The fourth Wednesday was blissfully boring by comparison.
On a related note, on that fateful fourth Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued the first ever domestic terrorism alert cautioning the public of potential attacks from “violent extremists.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/homeland-security-issues-domestic-terrorism-alert-due-to-violent-extremists/ar-BB1d9j4u#:
Poetry at the Superbowl
Amanda Gorman’s poem and her reading of it nearly stole the show at the presidential inauguration. But who ever would have expected a poetry reading at The Superbowl? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/amanda-gorman-to-read-poem-at-super-bowl?
2020 may have been a disaster in more ways than any of us could have imagined, but if it ends up bringing poetry to the Superbowl, maybe it was all worth it.
COVID in January
COVID cases increased to record levels in January. New variants emerged from Brazil and South Africa (among others) which may be resistant to the vaccine.
We ended January with more than 26 million COVID cases nationwide – that’s about one out of twelve. Just short of ten percent of us have been diagnosed with it.
Almost 450,000 deaths across our states so far, more than our deaths from World War II, about two each minute nationwide, has made us all numb to the statistics.
Long lines, production and distribution problems hamper the application of the vaccine.
This being the year of chaos and deception, usually with a side-order of violence and intimidation, as people were waiting in line for the vaccination, anti-vaxxers blocked the way and threatened both those giving the shots and those waiting to receive them. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/l-vaccine-site-temporarily-shuts-down-after-anti-vaxxers-block-entrance-1687601
The last days of the year of the Rat
The Chinese year of the rat technically ends in early February.
Imagine a cornered rat, frenzied and trapped, looking for any way out. That, for better or worse, sums up the closing days of a year which could not have had a better animal as its representative.
