The awful man: a reflection in one sentence

In which, just for kicks, I distill into a single sentence some thoughts on Trump's call to the Georgia Secretary of State.

As you read of or listen to the awful man's shakedown call to the Georgia Secretary of State; as you hear the awful man ramble, haphazardly, on his desire for the will of the people and the result of the election to be overturned, offering no evidence other than speculation and wish, never sharing anything resembling proof, using words like “rumor has it,” as if that mattered, returning, as always, to the size of the crowds at his rallies, as if that mattered, and saying, over and over, “we won Georgia” (a strange use of the word “won,” when the vote count, and the recount, and the other recount, and the electoral college certification, and all legal decisions indicate they did not win Georgia); as you see the awful man alternately flatter and threaten the Georgia officials, begging this man Raffensburger to just cheat, saying “all we have to do is find eleven thousand votes,” as if cheating should be so easy for this man Raffensburger, as it always has been for him, the awful man; and then as you also read the next day’s OpEd from the ten living Secretaries of Defense, who represent what we once thought was the widest range of ideologies, back when we assumed that public officials were, at least, bound by a general concern for the national welfare, and not motivated only by cruelty, insecurity, and greed, like the awful man; and as you realize that the only reason these Secretaries of Defense banded together to write this thing is because they know that the awful man poses an awful threat to the nation — as you consider all this, remember, please, that none of this would have happened — none of it! — were it not for the fact that our nation includes, stunningly, something like seventy million voters, your fellow citizens and mine, who believe such a man, such an awful man — a crook, a mobster, not just metaphorically, but quite literally; a man whose ties to organized crime are multi-generational, a man whose casinos have paid fines for money laundering, whose son exclaimed “I love it” when presented with the opportunity to cheat in the last election, whose son-in-law set up a backchannel to Russian oligarchs, who pardoned, among others, his daughter's father-in-law of federal financial crimes, who conditioned military and financial aid to the Ukrainians on the Ukrainian president “doing us a favor, though” — anyway, as I was saying, remember that something like seventy million voters, your fellow citizens and mine, when entrusted with the precious, solemn duty of deciding which fellow citizen should lead our nation, decided to choose this awful man, and they did so because, apparently, they really do not like liberals or taxes or immigrants, and also because, apparently, they were once entertained by the version of himself that the awful man once portrayed on a television game show.

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William Faulkner, who famously wrote really long sentences.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/William_Faulkner_1954_%282%29_%28photo_by_Carl_van_Vechten%29.jpg