The Trump Election: When Numbers Speak Louder than Words
Amidst all the confusion surrounding the current political landscape, everything can be summed up by two numbers. The first number is 306. That’s the number of electoral votes President Donald J. Trump earned on election night (74 more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton).
The second number is 20,000. The second number represents the highest Dow Jones closing number in history. This mark was reached only 5 days into the Trump Administration.
There’s no question that Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as our 45th President last Friday was seen from wildly varying perspectives. To some his Presidency represents a doomsday scenario. To others, his Presidency marks a return to common sense. I fall into the latter category. I prefer a President who values issues such as national security more than they do political correctness. I’m not opposed to any reasonable measures Trump takes if it ensures the safety of me and my family. I also don’t care who Trump has to aggravate in order to make this country stronger economically. Trump is now the President of the United States and for the first time in a long while, we finally have a President who is going to put America first. Unfortunately, confusion is all too prevalent.
I hear and see one thing in the media and I see something totally different in reality. As we saw in this election, numbers can lie. Poll after poll showed Clinton easily winning. Clearly those polls were wrong either due to poor design or a deliberate intent to deceive (likely both). The media still conducts polls, most of which are designed to discredit Trump. I fail to see how anyone can take those polls seriously. They were clearly wrong before so why should I believe them now?
Fortunately, some numbers do having meaning. The only Presidential poll that counts are the actual votes cast by the voters. The Electoral College wasn’t a secret. Individuals cast votes, which in turn translate into electoral votes. The United States is a republic, not a pure democracy. The Electoral College is a valid method to prevent the majority from always controlling the minority. This concept has led to positive things such as Civil Rights. No system is going to produce the outcome every person desires every time. All that can be said is that it has worked for nearly 250 years and it will continue to work. I don’t see how it would be a positive thing for the voters of New York and California to determine the results of every election.
Trump won the Electoral College by a wide margin. The popular vote in each individual state is important but not the overall popular vote. The number 306 is all that matters. However, the media tries to tell us that Trump’s Presidency is illegitimate because Clinton won the overall national popular vote. Did I miss something? I was always told if you participate in a contest with pre-defined rules and you win…you win. No arguments or ambiguity.
Here is a good analogy: Suppose a team wins a baseball game 3-1 and there were no controversial calls by the umpires. Would it matter if the pitcher for the losing team pitched a complete game and struck out 27 batters? Absolutely not. While it would be an amazing performance worthy of the record books, those strikeouts wouldn’t matter if that same pitcher gave up 3 solo home runs. In baseball, the team that scores the most runs wins. The pitcher of record is credited with a win or loss depending on when the winning run is scored. This is often at odds with the pitcher’s actual performance. Hypothetically a pitcher could allow only 1 run but lose the game if his team fails to score. By the same token, a pitcher who allows 8 runs could conceivably be credited with a win if his team scores 10 runs. Major League Baseball has been in existence for well over 100 years and so far no one has demanded a rules change. If you apply this to the election, you can say Hillary’s team had more strikeouts, but Trump’s team scored more runs. The runs are all that count. The rest are just ancillary statistics.
Why is the media fixated on the popular vote tally? Clinton received 66 million votes and Trump received 63 million votes. The difference of 3 million votes (roughly 2% of all votes) does not make Trump’s victory illegitimate. If Clinton received 100 million votes and Trump received 29 million votes and somehow won the Electoral College by 1 vote then a good case could be made that the system failed. Am I missing something? The media acts as though Trump is a madman placed into office by bigots and racists. This means the media believe 63 million Americans are complete idiots. That’s a very large number. It stands to reason they had legitimate reasons to vote for Trump.
As a loyal American, I would never condone another country interfering in our elections. Even if I concede that the Russians did try to undermine Hillary by leaking e-mails to WikiLeaks, I don’t believe it had any impact on the result. The mainstream media acted as the varsity cheerleading squad for Clinton. It was non-stop Trump bashing. Clinton was portrayed as some sort of righteous defender of the American way of life. Just as I condemn the Russians, I also condemn the mainstream media. Do they have some sort of inherent right to interfere in elections? The fact that Clinton received debate questions ahead of time and was given editorial power over media coverage of her, in my mind, constitutes a deliberate and coordinated effort to rig the election. To say the Russians were able to achieve a level of influence over the American voter that surpassed the influence of the American media over the American voter is a stretch. It would be akin to blaming a small group of fans in the cheap seats causing a basketball player to miss a crucial shot. If the game is in front of 15,000 people, and all but 50 of them are rooting for that player, it wouldn’t make sense to blame the small group for creating an unacceptable distraction.
If I believed what the media and Trump protestors had to say about the situation, then at the very moment Trump became President I should have anticipated the onset of complete insanity. It should have ushered in the beginning of End Times prophecy as described in the Bible. The entire country should have immediately descended into absolute chaos as nuclear bombs began raining down on us.
When it comes to the stock market, the only numbers that matter for a day are the closing numbers. That is why the number 20,000 is so important. People can be intimidated into saying one thing, but when it comes to money, they will act according to their assessment of reality. You can’t make up a number for the Dow Jones. That number is a reflection of investor expectations and/or fears on a given day. I’ve seen articles trying to downplay this record high. That’s all well and good, but short-term, that closing number tells me that investors are currently optimistic about America’s prospects under the Trump Administration. If the market had suddenly plummeted after Trump’s victory and got even worse once he was inaugurated, that would terrify me. It would indicate that investors anticipate a complete disaster. Currently, the market trends indicate that investors expect greater prosperity under Trump. Clearly they aren’t subscribing to the media’s view of Trump as a walking disaster and complete lunatic. The market would not be performing well if a complete breakdown of civilization was anticipated.
Despite what people want me to think, all I know is that Trump is now President and America is still standing. The real question becomes: Would a true patriot ever want a duly elected President to fail? There is a fine line between hatred of an individual and hatred of the Office he now represents.
