I had to pick myself up from the floor after Donald Trump astounded us all at the close of the debate when he refused to commit to accepting election results. “I will keep you in suspense.” he quipped. What, is that treasonous? CNBC within 2 hours of the debate posted a hint for spin strategy, citing the theft of Al Gore’s presidency by the highest court in the land. Trump didn’t take the hint; he doubled down by telling a rally yesterday that he would only accept the results if he won. Ah, the suspense is over! Trump’s dictatorial head had resurfaced momentarily, smoothed by his rationale that he was merely preserving his right to challenge the results. Really? As if this path is not available to every candidate in this country who has ever run for any office, from dog catcher to president.  Then he created a fiction about Gore. Trump asserted that if Gore had agreed to concede the election 3 weeks before, he would have waived his right to legally challenge the results (not what CNBC had in mind). Bullshit! Nobody would have asked the question of Gore because we could never have imagined that any candidate would refuse to follow the traditional concession to the victor. Trump, as a frequent legal petitioner, knows that there is no suit that a well compensated lawyer won’t file. And the RNC has a gaggle of lawyers just chomping at the bit to take any legal action that would rocket them into the Supreme Court. No one in this country surrenders the right to legal action with a statement. The rich and famous know that all too well. Trump boosters may fall for this crap, no one else should. Well Giuliani will pretend to, so he can spout it to the media. His lips are so securely attached to the candidate’s anus that he just swallows it directly.

There is no similarity with Gore. First it never crossed Gore’s mind to question the integrity of the electoral process BEFORE Election Day. Secondly, like his predecessors, he conceded the election after the polls closed. It was only later that the recount in Florida was automatically triggered by state law because the totals were so close. The saga of the hanging chads in the recount is legendary. Gore had nothing to do with it. The Supreme Court case challenged the recount results.

It appears that Trump has found his way into yet another subterranean pocket of skepticism about “the system” among his followers who get their news from Facebook and Twitter supplemented by talk radio, Fox News. They suffer from the illusion that belief is a substitute for facts, which they consider to be molded by the political bent of the presenter, not based in reality. There are no fact-checkers among Trumpophants; Trump is truth, facts in the liberal media are not. It turns out that in states where voter ID laws have been overturned, like South Carolina, the notion that there is widespread voter fraud has been promoted by both neighbors and social media sources. There is no amount of reports or research that can convince them otherwise.

Since Trump dropped his debate zinger, I can’t resist a comment on the debate itself. Trump was holding his own in the first 30 minutes of the debate. He talked policy in a semi-cogent manner as best he could with his eighth grade vocabulary studded with adjectives and over the top hyperbole. His Wharton degree  must have been earned by a surrogate because beyond the tax code, which his accountants have mined over the years, the level of understanding of economic policy he displayed during the debate could have fit in a thimble. He has yet to explain how the fall in federal income from the largest corporate and personal tax cuts for the wealthy in recent history would not result in ballooning the federal deficit. His best effort was to ballyhoo the explosive US economic growth created from the tax windfall. He was predicting a rise in GDP as high as 5%. This ignores the failure of economies in Europe and Japan to recover from the recession and the collapse of commodities export economies due to low prices in gasoline and most commodity prices. These facts are part of the reason why the US economy isn’t growing faster. Even China’s economic growth has fallen in half and that’s with governmental subsidy and manipulation of statistics. Trump cited India’s 8% growth in GDP which is of course not a capitalist economy. The fly in the ointment is simply who in the rest of the world will buy the products of expanded US production if the rest of the world has negative GDPs. Even Donald Trump can’t single-handedly dissolve the global economy.

But soon after the 30 minute mark passed, Trump started to descend into the hyperbole,  awash in his frequently repeated signature phrases, and the snarled insult. That nasty woman quip about Hillary had him trending on Twitter, but with real badass nasty women, not Trumpophants. The Donald, when asked what he would do about Medicare and Social Security, deflected to his tax cuts, rightly debunked by Chris Wallace as unrelated, and then raced into his Obamacare rampage. Trump has been remarkably silent on the Republican dubbed “entitlements” during the campaign, perhaps to avoid alienating some recipients in his base. With both programs facing empty coffers, the most likely future is lower benefits; it’s either that or higher payroll taxes. Was the pivot savvy politics? Was it being unnerved from needling by Hillary? Alternatively, we might want to consider his age. After all, his 70 years is increasingly visible on his face. Perhaps, under the stress of debate performance, the facts injected into his brain by Kellyanne’s debate prep escaped his aging senior neural network and he had to rely on the freewheeling reality show barker personna to get him through. This might also explain how he can look straight into a camera and lie, despite the presence of videotapes to document it. He may be simply “acting”, in the dramatic sense of the word or he may be in the throes of a “senior moment”.

The closing statements fully displayed the contrast between our 2 candidates. Clinton presented her vision for the country, starting with bringing the country together and proceeding to building on the economic recovery, committing the country to clean energy policy and reduction of carbon emission, renewing the country’s infrastructure. She didn’t mention Trump at all. Trump began with his usual litany of doom, threw in a few barbs at Hillary and finished with his Make America Great tagline. In the very complex world in which we live, crises are  looming everywhere in our country and throughout the world. Which one sounds like the best President?

Let’s send Trump a message he can’t challenge-Hillary in a landslide.

I’m ready to put the campaigns in my rearview after voting today. At least 140,000 fellow Georgians joined me in the voting booth. From now on, I’m sticking with my comedy newspersons-Trevor Noah, Seth Meyer, Samantha B and Jon Oliver for the latest campaign news. A laugh is better than crying a river over the dark cloud that is threatening to engulf our democracy.

As Donald Trump sinks in the polls, he’s preparing the ground for an unfavorable outcome, at least from his perspective. He’s sowing seeds of doubt about the integrity of our democratic process and it’s cherished voting process. He’s shouted foul before- first, when Ted Cruz beat him out of Nevada delegates by savvy political maneuvering that surprised Trump. The Donald, arrogant enough to believe his winning personality would carry him to delegate victory, hadn’t bother to engage in the nitty-gritty details of party organizing. He was smarting at being outmaneuvered. The election process is rigged! The Republican and Democratic Parties are private organizations that make their own rules. For most of their histories, it was common knowledge that they named their nominees through backroom deals and the duty of the party faithful was to manufacture hoopla at the convention naming the anointed favorite and work in the precincts to deliver the vote.There’s a great passage in, Lyndon Johnson’s biography, that details the loss of his first Senate race because he failed to bribe the judges who certified county elections at the pivotal moment.

Faced with an avalanche of opposition to his candidacy from Republican Party luminaries, Trump donned the mantle of unfair practice to exclaim that he would not fall victim to party maneuvering. As the other candidates fell victim to dried up funding streams, Trump rightly predicted that his popularity would pressure the party into crowning him their candidate. But it didn’t hurt to fire up his disgruntled base, already strong believers in betrayal by the powers that be, with talk of dishonest secret deals to once again exclude his throng of the country’s bedrock members. “We’re the people who make America what it is and we will make America great.” And then there was the looming threat of an independent candidacy that would fatally gut the Republican party.

Now, before any votes have been cast, Trump and his surrogates are proclaiming the election is rigged. Like most of what Trump says, assertions of widespread voter fraud are pure smoke and mirrors. Recent investigations, performed in response to various state efforts to require mandatory IDs, have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare and generally isolated cases. So with only innuendo, Trump is using the specter of widespread voter fraud to enlist online volunteer poll watchers from his supporters. There doesn’t seem to be any vetting process for them. Some Trumpophants have suggested vigilante watches at polls to insure that “the right people are voting.”

I don’t doubt that the Donald’s sowing seeds of distrust in the voting process before actual election results is simply his megalomaniacal need to always be ‘winning.” After all, it’s always first and foremost about him. And it’s never his fault. He’s demonstrated a pea sized historical perspective with a worldview as broad as a grain of sand, so a long term investment in the country’s welfare isn’t his cup of tea. Since Trump, high atop his podium, hasn’t had a lot of opportunity to mix with his followers, he is likely to underestimate their smoldering potential for violence. Sure, his rally crowds have attacked protesters in their midst, cheered on by their candidate. And then there is the supporter, interviewed by the Wall St Journal, who advocated “taking out Hillary Clinton” if she was elected. The Donald may think this is entertaining, but the reality of violence erupting after a Clinton victory looms large among his supporters. He doesn’t quite understand the forces of destruction he has unleashed. But then again, he’s touting an overthrow of the establishment, to which of course he belongs but his supporters don’t seem to realize.

His admiration for Vladimir Putin is no accident. He admires a boss, who calls the shots. This is how he’s operated his businesses and The Apprentice TV world. The CEO model bears no resemblance to our form of government; Putin’s dictatorship dressed up as a Republic is even more iron clad than corporate governance, reinforced by guns, torture, and intimidation with the power of the state. Trump has confessed that he’s never met Putin, despite his earlier contention that they’d both been on a TV show. Given that Trump believes he is the only expert, it’s clear that he hasn’t bothered to acquaint himself with veteran Russian expert evaluations of Putin’s current strategies aimed ultimately at resurrecting the USSR, whose demise he considered tragic. Putin’s incursions into the Ukraine, his recent withdrawal from the nuclear treat, support for Assad in Syria and aggressive stances against the US are meant to reestablish the hegemony of the Russian bear on the world stage. Trump may not know Putin but Putin has Trump’s number. The Russian cyber hacks into Democratic Party emails and rumors of potential hacking of voting machines are meant to raise doubt about US elections. And here lies a tidy intersection with Mr Trump. Trump has neatly tucked himself into Putin’s pocket. Putin can relax and let Donald take the lead.

I’ve done what I can do. You need to do it too. Get out and vote for Clinton.