Don't Pack Your Bags for Canada Just Yet

There are reports that the Canadian immigration website went down last night due to excessive volume. Maybe it was Americans looking to flee to Canada, or maybe it was Trump's Russian hacking team performing yet another DDoS attack.  In any case, it's much too early to start thinking of moving to Canada.

Remember, in 2004 George Bush won reelection and Republicans took the House and Senate. That only lasted two years: they lost the Senate in 2006 and the House in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. The same thing happened again when Republicans took the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Republicans will try to spin the 2016 presidential election as some kind of mandate for Trump and their party. This is far from the truth: Trump lost the popular vote by more than 200,000, receiving only nine more than the 270 electoral votes required. Republicans lost seats in Congress: Democrats gained one seat in the Senate and at least five in the House, though Republicans do still retain control.

Democrats made gains in the Congress despite highly gerrymandered congressional districts, fielding a highly unpopular presidential candidate, and a never-ending drum beat of voter suppression and intimidation.

Trump won by playing the race, fear, and man cards against Hillary's diversity, progress and woman cards. Groups that had come out strongly in support of Obama (younger and minority voters) stayed home this time around, either because Republican manipulations of the system stopped them, swallowed the groundless Benghazi, email and foundation nonsense, or they just weren't into Clinton. Some of them may have swallowed Trump's "What have you got to lose?" line.

If Trump actually carries out all the promises he's made, people will quickly find out what they've got to lose. He has threatened hundreds of millions of Americans:

• Blacks: stop and frisk street harassment by cops
• Latinos: deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, which will inevitably mean harassment of millions of legal residents
• The press: threatening to sue anyone who writes anything bad about him (his supporters also threatened to string them up)
• Women: making abortion even harder to get and punishing women who get one
• Gays: Trump didn't talk about it much, but Republicans have vowed to overturn the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, and with Trump appointing Scalia's replacement they will almost certainly try to relitigate gay marriage
• College students: Sanders' and Clinton's college tuition proposals will go nowhere in the Trump administration
• Anyone with a pre-existing medical condition: Trump's plan to repeal Obamacare will allow insurance companies to reject anyone for any reason, and charge those they do enroll obscenely high premiums. Plus there won't be any premium subsidies from the government, just tax deductions -- which only the rich can use.
• Single parent households: Trump's plan will increase their taxes.

If Trump doesn't carry out those threats, he will turn out to be just another lying politician who made a bunch of promises he never intended to carry through on. He would face a huge backlash from the noisy minority of anti-establishment people who elected him. They would likely stay home in 2018, just like the people who were disappointed by Obama stayed home in 2010 and 2014.

Trump may even face mutiny from within the Republican Party if he tries to exact revenge on all the Republicans who denounced him after his pussy-bragging went public.

What this all means is that Republican electoral gains in this election will probably be short-lived.

The real question is how much damage will Trump and the Republicans do to the country in the meanwhile. Will they pack the Supreme Court with political yes-men? Will they destroy the tax system, the education system, the environment, the economy, the balance of trade, and relations with our closest foreign allies? Will they disenfranchise even more voters with pernicious laws to suppress Democratic and minority voters as they desperately cling to dwindling numbers and fading power?

Will the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, militias and alt-right nutjobs that Trump dredged out of the shadows be emboldened and harass more Latinos, murder more Muslims, burn more black churches, occupy more government facilities, and blow up more federal buildings?

If you pack up and go to Canada, yes they will. If you stay here and fight -- and vote -- the people who elected Trump will be dying off in greater and greater numbers in the next four, eight, sixteen years. They realize this, which means they're only going to get more vicious and desperate.

Sadly, the next few years promise to be very ugly. But time is not on their side.