Eugenio Magdalena
4 min readMay 21, 2021

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No one fits the meaning of the Spanish word better…

“Hortera”…

… Trump has been a tawdry man all of his life…

Photo: The “hortera” Trump’s Hotel & Casino Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City.

The Spaniards, especially people from Madrid, frequently use that word to refer, pejoratively, to newcomers to Madrid, the city capital, people easily identifiable for their lack of manners, tasteless dressing, peculiar talking, etc.

“Hillibilly”, is probably the English equivalent word.

As with almost everything that Trump touches, his lavish and extravagant Hotel &Casino Taj Mahal, ended up bankrupt.

Photo:https://images.news18.com/ibnlive/uploads/2020/02/Trump-Taj-Mahal-21.jpg

Only a sick and feverish mind (like Trump’s) able to first imagine, and later convert in reality, something as tasteless, tacky, hortera, as the Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, would be able to establish as one of the objectives of the “Audit” of the votes of the 2020 Presidential election going on in Arizona, “to look for traces of bamboo among the paper of Biden’s votes”, just in case those votes have been sent from China. (!) (Or is it South Korea?).

In his obsession to avoid being considered a loser, Trump hired to do the “Audit”, Cyber Ninjas, a firm of one of his sycophants, Doug Logan, who was not only part of the mob who assaulted the Capitol on January the 6th, but also declared publicly before, his belief on the existence of an electoral conspiracy against Trump.

That conspiracy theory was advanced on the social media accounts of Cyber Ninjas and Logan himself before the posts were stricken.

Grant Woods, Arizona’s Attorney General, who abandoned the Republican Party because of Trump, said to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“They lost, and they can’t get over it,” said Grant Woods, a former Republican Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat during Trump’s presidency. “And they don’t want to get over it because they want to continue to sow doubt about the election.”

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/arizona-election-audit-donald-trump-cyber-ninjas-20210510.html

Hortera!

Or to lie, as Trump did, with total disrespect for the officers (Republican) in charge of Arizona’s voter’s census, saying that a block of elector’s database in Maricopa County had been deleted, which almost instantly provoked an irate response from the county’s recorder Republican Stephen Richer, who called the “audit” a grift.

“Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged”, and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.”

https://www.azfamily.com/video/maricopa-county-recorder-stephen-richer-explains-his-stance-on-senate-audit/video_d74d9249-91c2-5444-b4f2-fe5b4c3f5905.html

Hortera!

But Arizona’s supervisors involved in the 2020 election, and in two recounts which followed it, do not consider this a real audit of the votes, but a dirty political Trump’s stratagem, to which the Republican party has regrettably adhered:

Video: https://youtu.be/iuw75vuT-tI

But Trump is already campaigning for the 2022 Legislative elections and does not expect to discover any fraud with the “Audit”. The whole exercise —and Trump’s new set of lies — are simple “hortera” reinforcements of his Big Lie to the Americans, and are simply a bad loser’s way to create doubts about the validity of the 2020 election, among the general public.

“…amid increasing scrutiny of the audit, which many experts say is not credible and will only further undermine confidence in the 2020 race.”

As @ Dr. Thomas J. West III wrote in an article in Medium:

“The GOP, meanwhile, continues to go all-in, with both voters and elected officials launching audit, after audit, after audit, most of which are sketchy and almost all of which are likely to turn up no evidence of massive fraud.”

At: https://medium.com/reluctant-moderation/republican-voters-deserve-more-than-the-big-lie-e164636708ee

But the sick mind of Trump, who shamelessly thinks half of the American voters are just gullible enough to swallow any of his lies, irrespective of its ridiculousness, taking advantage of the Republican control of Arizona’s Assembly, which submissively authorized the “Audit”, is going ahead with the ludicrous exercise, showing little or no respect for the Republican themselves, and for the other half of the U.S. voters, who elected Biden.

The wasteful “Audits” will likely continue State by State, in those State-Assemblies controlled by the Republicans, well into the mid-term 2022 Legislative Elections, with the sole aim of supporting Trump’s Big Lie.

That, of course, will only happen if enough fools continue to send their donations to finance the futile exercise, which in the words of Arizona’s Supervisor’s Chairman, Republican Jack Sellers “is a grift disguised as an audit”

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Eugenio Magdalena

Eugenio is a disabled Economist (UCAB, Caracas), cursed a post-graduate Diploma in Marketing (Strathclyde University, Scotland, UK), and an MBA (England, UK).