Trump lost, but his followers still dictate policy

Twenty months after the presidential election, boats motor along the New River with “Trump Won” flags flying and very, very loud country music blasting from the cockpit. It’s not enough to “own the libs,” they intend to bust their eardrums. Around town, “Trump Won” flags and banners flutter from pick-up trucks and frontyard flag poles, warning those outside the sway of QAnon that the 2020 election ain’t over.

“Let’s go Brandon” banners hang from houses, forcing neighbors to explain a vulgar euphemism to the kids. Even among the multi-million-dollar waterfront mansions along North Gordon Road in Fort Lauderdale, residents have suffered, for months, the middleschool scenario of a fading Brandon banner draped from a neighbor’s house.

Trump zealots cling to the Big Lie with angry militancy. As if daring someone, anyone, to claim otherwise. As if the Jan. 6 desecration of the U.S. Capitol was fair warning for how they’ll deal with latte-drinking libs, fems, gays, techies, immigrants, environmentalists, professors, BLM sympathizers and wimps plotting to take away their AR-15s.

There has never been an election aftermath, not in my memory, so fraught with incivility.

Trumpsters dismiss the 81,268,924 Americans who voted against their candidate as unworthy of consideration. They shrug off Trump’s 7.1 million vote deficit as immaterial.

Instead, his supporters cite QAnon conspiracy theories. Or they embrace woeful arguments offered by Trump’s cabal of unscrupulous lawyers, whose lawsuits alleging election fraud have been tossed, so far, 63 times. According to the Washington Post, judges rejecting election fraud lawsuits include 38 Republican appointees, including several chosen by Trump himself.

He just flat out lost. Flags, banners, empty lawsuits and a redneck insurrection can’t undo the electoral math.

Trump lost, yet Trumpism, the loud, angry, confrontational F-U populism he stoked, has prevailed. The minority party, which thanks to the self-obsessed Trump’s ineptitude lost the White House and both congressional chambers, has retained its grip on American governance.

When it comes to assault weapons, abortion rights, climate change, pandemic policies, immigration, statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, recreational marijuana, health care, mass transportation and alternative energy, right-wing populists still control the agenda. And that agenda is no, no, no, all down the line.

Republicans maintain minority rule, thanks to a Constitution — crafted to favor an agrarian society — that lends rural, small-state, religious conservatives disproportionate clout in the Electoral College (giving a Wyoming voter 3.5 times more power than a Floridian). Same formula applies to the U.S. Senate, where in an evenly divided chamber, Democrats represent 41.5 million more constituents than their Republican counterparts.

Because Republicans are far cleverer than Democrats in the dark art of gerrymandering, they also enjoy outsized oomph in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in state legislatures. For example, in Florida, a state in which Democrats lag Republicans in voter registration by less than a percentage point, the GOP has 101 seats in the upper and lower chambers of the state legislature, compared to 58 occupied by Dems.

Now it appears that a very conservative Supreme Court, thanks to three appointments by a president elected with 2.9 million fewer votes than his 2016 Democratic opponent, has decided states can outlaw or sharply limit abortion rights.

Red states will do just that. Essentially, a religious minority will be dictating an anti-abortion policy that, according to a string of national polls, 60 to 75 percent of Americans (and Floridians) oppose.

A right-wing minority continues to block gun control measures also supported by a substantial majority of Americans, including red-flag laws, universal background checks, preventing the mentally deranged from buying guns and bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Big majorities support vaccine mandates, legalized recreational marijuana, climate change mitigation, investment in public transit, transitioning off fossil fuels, expanding access to Medicare and Medicaid. But the minority party says no. More like hell no.

The New York Times reported Thursday that “at least a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys” — a gun-toting, alt-right, neo-fascist, anti-feminist, ultra-nationalist outfit

— have wormed their way onto the MiamiDade Republican Executive Committee. They include two members facing criminal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: one for obstructing Congress, the other for interfering with a police officer.

Enrique Tarrio, the national chairman of the Proud Boys, is in jail, awaiting trial on conspiracy charges in connection with the capitol insurrection. Tarrio, an ex-con from Miami, is also the former Florida state director of Latinos for Trump.

Which says something about the political-fringe weirdness infecting the GOP. This is sure not your father’s (or Jeb Bush’s) Republican Party.