Today is Thursday, October 31, 2024. It’s Halloween and what is more scary to me is the possibility of a second Trump term emerging from the results of next week’s election. To me, that’s truly scary – more scary than the Frankenstein monster or Dracula or any of the other Universal classic monsters. As of now, various polling has found a tight race throughout the short campaign between Harris and Trump.

With only five days left until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former insurrectionist Donald Dump are both in the pivotal background states of Nevada and Arizona today, according to Live Updates for CNN in an article entitled “Harris and Trump campaign in Southwest with 5 days until election” by Antoinette Radford, Jessie Yeung, Maureen Choudhury, Elise Hammond, Aditi Sangal, Tori B. Powell, and Kaanita Iyer.

Surprisingly, there is no clear leader between the two disparate opponents in the southern battlegrounds of Georgia and North Carolina, new CNN polls show, amid a locked race nationwide.

Vice President Kamala Harris has spoken in Reno, Nevada, while earlier today, she spoke in Phoenix, Arizona. But before you may think that Donald Dump will quietly go forth into that good night on Election Day, think again. His troop of MAGA activists – actually, think lunatics – are already outlining a step-by-step guide designed to undermine the results if their Golden Idol falls short again. They are working hard to say that the election was rigged when it wasn’t. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results. So here we will experience deja vu once more.

This plotting by MAGA activists is covered in a CNN Investigates article entitled ‘January 6th is going to be pretty fun’: How MAGA activists are preparing to undermine the election if Trump loses” by Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, and Donie O’Sullivan.

For months, these activists have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. They have been priming gullible Trump supporters into believing the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud.

One of these “activists” is Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Drumpf, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month, “I have a plan and strategy. And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”

Dump’s allies – and the former insurrectionist himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons, and political rallies in key states. Some Dump backers, including pastors associated with Christian nationalist ideas, have described the election as a fight between good and evil, describing Harris as the anti-Christ or suggesting that God has anointed Dump as the victor. Oh, give me a break; here’s that same old bullshit from so-called Christian leaders who have gotten it definitely wrong once more: where Dump is certainly the anti-Christ and Harris is the heroine on a stallion carrying the banner of democracy with her into the voting booth.

As you know, Dump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden didn’t truly materialize until after the election. They were largely improvised and ad hoc, with a flurry of hastily filed lawsuits that went nowhere and efforts to convince state legislators to block certification that fell way short.

But this time around, these activists are way ahead of the game, unfortunately. They have been planning to undermine a potential Harris victory well in advance of the election, showing their desperation and their knowledge that they are indeed going to lose to Harris, in my opinion, with some even arguing that state legislators should simply ignore the election results and award electoral votes to Drumpf by default.

To combat this disruption on the part of Dump loyalists this time, Congress passed a measure in 2022 that makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, and with Dump now out of office, he and his allies cannot wield levers of the executive branch to try to influence the election. However, experts say that the people involved in these conspiracy theory-driven efforts appear to be better organized, more determined and, in some cases, more extreme than four years ago.

Another thing we should be aware of is that some extremists are already preparing for violent activity should Harris claim victory in what they regard as a fraudulent win. Again, this is all bullshit and you see all of this only on the repugnican far right, never on the Democratic side. The American people do not need to experience this kind of seismic activity surrounding an election which was never seen before the Era of Dump. I believe we will be also better prepared this time if violence were to break out again on January 6. Which might mean that more people will die this time than on January 6, 2021. Anything to put a nail in the coffin of Trumpism will be most welcomed.

One of the more ridiculous conspiracy theories is this one spewed by a prominent Tennessee pastor, who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6th riot, who told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the country will be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be manmade” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote. This follows the canard that the weather is controlled by Democrats stated by stupid representatives in Congress after the two storms that ravaged Florida earlier in the month. The name of that pastor is Greg Locke for those who would like to know who would mouth such an absurd theory.

Locke, the pastor, also foolishly claimed that “If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one.” This exactly mirrors what the Orange Turd vociferously declared in some far-right interview some months ago.

All I can say is that I pray that millions of disaffected Drumpf voters go out on Election Day to send Dump back to the dustheap of history, making it certainly obvious who the victor really is in this pivotal race.

And so it went!

This is San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples.

This is the house of Octavius Quartio in Pompeii.

Here is a seagull seen sitting on a ledge in the Garden of Augustus on Capri.

This is the Villa Rufolo in Ravello.

This is Amalfi.

Here is Andy Warhol’s iconic images of that 50s sex bombshell, Marilyn Monroe in the museum in Naples.

Here are three images of Elvis, also by Andy Warhol, in the same Naples museum.

Here is a luscious dessert of chocolate panna cotta that I ate in Flash, a Milan restaurant near our hotel.

More of Mount Vesuvius encircled by those clouds!