Election Insanity: Donald Trump Keeps Using Smear Tactics in 2020

In 2016, Donald Trump, the person who has replaced P.T. Barnum as the greatest salesman, hype-master, and genius marketer in American history, successfully deployed the election insanity tactic of branding Hillary Clinton as “crooked Hillary” who deserved to be locked up in jail. He did so by portraying her legal $250,000 paid speaking fees as corporate pay-offs, falsely portraying her deletion of 30,000 emails as illegal, and wrongly calling her execution of a uranium sale to Russia a bribe to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

What Is Election Insanity?

A commonly accepted definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Election insanity was a tactic deployed in 2016 that produced an unexpected but desired result. The same tactic of election insanity is now being redeployed for the 2020 election cycle. Will voters react any differenty? Trump's election insanity is not in question because he does not expect different results, but if the results are the same, it will mean the ones the tactic is deployed upon are definitely suffering from election insanity.

3 years after the accusations made against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, none of that election insanity has produced a single charge of illegality against Clinton, even though President Trump has an Attorney General in William Barr who acts as his personal dispenser of punitive justice.

Trump Uses the Same Tactics in 2020

Now in preparation for the 2020 election, President Trump is deploying the same tactic of election insanity against presidential candidates Joe Biden, by branding him as a crook who has corrupted government service for the personal gain of his son, and to Elizabeth Warren by branding her a liar about family heritage to advance her career as a Harvard law professor. In both instances, President Trump’s election insanity is not in question because he expects the same successful results that he got in 2016.

Joe Biden and Ukraine

In 2014, Ukraine had a revolution that ousted the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych because of massive corruption in his administration. A pro-Western president, Petro Poroshenko was elected in a democratic election to replace Yanukovych. Then-President Barack Obama's administration was prepared to work with the new government, a position that was shared and supported by most European governments as well as both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. All were concerned though with the country's deep-rooted corruption that had plagued the country ever since it gained independence in the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.

Former President Obama made former Vice President Joe Biden his Ukraine point man. In 2015 by Biden’s own account on one of his several trips to Ukraine, he told the country's leaders that they wouldn’t get the $1 billion in American loan guarantees if they didn’t fire Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor at the time. President Trump’s 2020 reelection strategy is to portray this as Biden’s illegal attempt to protect his son, Hunter Biden, from prosecution since Hunter was at that time serving on the Board of Directors of a Ukrainian energy company named Burisma.

But as Tom Malinowski, a former assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, tweeted this week, “All of us working on Ukraine wanted this prosecutor gone, because he was NOT prosecuting corruption. So did the Europeans. So did the IMF. This didn't come from Joe Biden—he just delivered our message.”

In reality, Biden pressuring Ukraine to fire a corrupt prosecutor and hire an honest prosecutor, as Ukraine eventually did, making it more likely to put Hunter in harm’s way of prosecution. Especially since Burisma was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky an oligarch of questionable character. As Oliver Bullough, a British journalist who has covered Zlochevsky and his questionable business practices explained in an op-ed he wrote, President Trump, Rudy Giuliani and anyone else accusing Joe and Hunter Biden of corruption is “putting two and two together—and coming up with 22.”

At a campaign-style rally in Montana, President Trump challenged and taunted Senator Elizabeth Warren for her claims of Native American ancestry, calling her "Pocahontas." He suggested that if he were to debate her in 2020, he would give her one of those take-home DNA kits "they sell on television for $2." He also said "I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity paid for by Trump if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian," Trump said as the crowd cheered.

Senator Warren did release a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had Native American ancestry in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations. The analysis of Sen. Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis. Although Sen. Warren provided the proof President Trump told a reporter that he would be would only make the promised donation "if I can test her personally”

In terms of President Trump’s claim that Sen. Warren used Native American heritage to advance her career as a Harvard law professor, the Boston Globe reached out to all of the still-living professors who were eligible to vote on whether to offer her a tenured position at the Harvard law school in 1993. All of them said her Native American heritage was never a factor in the vote to award her tenure.

Although President Trump is repeating manipulating the facts, lying about the facts, and spreading fake news about Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren like he did with Hillary Clinton in 2016, he is not suffering from election insanity because he expects the same result as 2016 in 2020.

The question of election insanity lies with those Americans who relax, sit back, do nothing, and accept manipulated facts, lies, and fake news. They're expecting a different result like they expected a different result in 2016! Will Americans realize that history could repeat itself, and will they get out the vote in time to shape a different outcome for the 2020 election?