How Did Trump Win? And You Should Stock Up on Necessities.
There are more questions than answers right now. How did Trump win? Did he really win? What about Starlink?
This newsletter was going to be about surviving for the next four years. So very briefly here are the basics. I would recommend stocking up on food for a minimum of several weeks. Even better would be three months to a year. You're looking for items that you normally use with a good shelf life, canned goods, dried fruits and vegetables, rice, oats and pasta. Also clothing and cooking supplies, aluminum foil and vegetable oil. If you're good at growing things I would recommend stocking up on vegetable seeds.
If Trump goes through with the tariffs he has told us about, all imported items will be more expensive. Some food items are imported. And if a trade war reignites inflation, the big box stores will most likely hike their prices just because they can. Like they did in 2021-2022. Consider a well stocked pantry and closet as an investment. If you buy foods you would normally eat, and prices go up, you've saved some money. And if things really go haywire, you're in survival mode for several months, until things can normalize.
There have been a flood of unanswered questions about how Trump could have won. As of September 4, Vote.org had registered over a million voters since the beginning of 2024. A September 29 article in USA Today, updated on September 30, reported nearly half a million more registered voters in North Carolina than in 2020, with registration up in all battleground states. Michigan's registered voters had grown by around 350,000, Arizona by roughly 125,000 and Nevada by 260,000. This article does state that Republicans were making inroads compared to Democrats in four states that register by party affiliation. But using Arizona as an example, that still leaves almost 1.5 million voters who are unaffiliated.
I don't like rabbit holes. For a number of years I was not even a political person. But Donald Trump himself did say “We don't need votes…We've got all the votes.” That's led to speculation that there was some kind of master plan to alter the vote count. Is that even possible?
Before I give you the short answer, I'm going to qualify it. Hacking the vote is pretty far down the plausibility list. But the answer is yes. A voting machine is basically a computer and computers can be hacked. J. Alex Halderman verified that before a Senate Select Committee in 2017. The problem is that you have to have to introduce programming to instruct the machine to alter the totals for a given candidate or a given election. Since voting machines and tabulators are not connected to the internet during the election process, the programming would have to be physically introduced. (There are exceptions to the practice of isolating machines from the internet. According to an October 2024 AP article: “There are some jurisdictions in a few states that allow for ballot scanners in polling locations to transmit unofficial results, using a mobile private network, after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies have been removed.” Removing the flash drive or memory card would make it impossible to alter the official vote tally.)
Stephen Spoonerman offers another possibility, compromised software. To me, that idea is highly implausible. It was also what earned Fox News a three quarters of a billion dollars slap on the wrist in their legal confrontation with Dominion. However, I am in favor of asking for hand recounts in a sampling of swing state counties to verify that the vote was accurate. That's just common sense.
The most plausible theory that I've found involves voter roll purges, voter challenges and provisional ballots that are rejected. (As an example of provisional ballots being rejected, The 9th Street Journal reported that in the 2020 election, North Carolina rejected 73 percent of the provisional ballots cast by voters ages 18-25.)
Here's a YouTube video from Mark Thompson and Greg Palast that provides an in depth look at what happened.
There were also a number of people who stayed home or left the presidential vote blank as a protest against Netanyahu's war on Palestinian civilians. I can understand the pain of someone who has relatives in Palestine who are fighting to stay alive, or who has already lost loved ones.
It's almost a given that the voter purges and the restrictive voter laws passed since 2020 were instrumental in flipping at least some of the battleground states. In 1980 Paul Weyrich said that he didn't want everybody to vote. Republican states have been trying to make that a reality ever since. And since there is usually no violation of the letter of the law, we have a four year Nightmare in Orange ahead of us.
Our focus must be preparing for any eventuality, and staying healthy, both mentally and physically. Please check out the first link in Notes for a preparedness checklist from rahaeli on Bluesky.
A big thank you to everyone reading this. Please feel free to share, and let me know how you're doing in the comments. We survive the next four years by having each other's backs.
Notes:
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3labvxce57a2r
One can only imagine what is in store as the billionaires wreck havoc on a perfectly good economy, and likely get this nation into another world war. We can thank those so polarized to their causes and beliefs, that they didn't want or couldn't see the bigger picture. And for nation they 'pretend' to love, wave goodbye to a stable economy, a democracy of the people, and groceries no one will ever afford. Supply and demand will ensure that Trump, Vance and Musk and their ilk will be all set, but everyone else will be grovelling scraps off the floor.