Let's clear up some misconceptions about the election.
First, this wasn't a great Republican victory. Yes, the party may have won the election, but that was a byproduct of Trump winning it, and he's not a Republican no matter what label he was running under. Trump shares few if any of the values the GOP has championed in the past thirty years - he's a sleazebag, not a religious conservative; he's a populist protectionist who wants to "renegotiate" or get rid of NAFTA, not a proponent of free trade; he's... well his foreign policy is dangerously incoherent, but he's pro-Putin and anti-NATO, instead of someone who wants to stand with our democratic allies.
At any rate, Trump won without the support of Republican bigwigs. Former presidents couldn't bring themselves to vote for him - something you might want to pay better attention to next time, voters - and even House leader Ryan ended up cutting Trump lose and avoided even mentioning the candidate while campaigning for Congressional seats, because the man who is unfortunately our president-elect is absolutely toxic. After Trump bombed the final debate, the GOP was in "check Hillary" mode, not "we're gonna win in a landside."
So the Republican win was a byproduct of Trump's win, when enough voters jumped ship from the Democrats, or independent moderates, or sane individuals, to gamble on a gibbering idiot because they felt he best represented a chance for change. And to give that idiot the best chance of getting his policies through, they voted for the other people with little (R)s next to their name. Which means that after eight years of obstructing the president and crippling Congress' ability to function, the GOP was rewarded for its behavior by voters who were tired of Congressional deadlock. This country.
And let's not pretend this is the map flipping red, Fox News. Trump lost the popular vote. He only won the electoral vote thanks to razor-thin majorities in key states that are given artificial importance thanks to our stupid electoral system. If we say Michigan or Florida or the like is now a red state because the Republicans barely won them, we should say the USA as a whole is a blue country because more people in it voted for Hillary.
Second, let's not pretend Trump is, despite all appearances, some sort of political genius for tapping into something nobody else saw. Because while the pollsters may have made some extremely misleading assumptions about the loyalty of blue-collar workers in previously-Democratic states, and said workers were what gave Trump his win, they were not his target audience.
Yes, Trump made "you'll have so many jobs, you won't believe it" all part of his platform, but this was because he didn't have any other qualifications. This is a candidate with absolutely zero political experience, who only joined his party right before the election he participated in. The only argument Trump could make to show that he was even capable of running a country was claiming that his status as a yugely successful businessman - but no, you can't look at his tax returns - meant he had the organizational skills and savvy to be president. And only him, because all those other economic "experts" in Washington, they're all corrupt! They passed NAFTA even though they knew it would suck jobs out of the country! Only he has the patented negotiating skills to re-do NAFTA and take out the "export jobs" clause, or however it's supposed to work. And that's what won over enough people to elect him, because - after the defeat of Bernie in the Democratic primaries - he was the candidate most paying attention to the blue collar worker's woes.
But no, these desperate uneducated workers are not the core of Trump's campaign. Because he didn't get interested in politics after NAFTA was passed. He didn't run for president to fix the economy after the Great Recession. What started this sad tale is the election of President Obama, and Donald Trump simply could not believe or tolerate that.
So Trump started ranting about fake birth certificates and stolen elections, and other people who thought there was something wrong with the country if a black man could lead it took notice. And when Trump barged onto the stage at the GOP primaries, bullying his rivals and frothing about what a terrible president Obama was, he won over some equally vocal supporters who felt that the other candidates were just too moderate for their alt-right tastes. And these are the guys Trump spent his campaign pandering to, the people who feel threatened when their neighbors don't look like them, who feel like they've lost if minorities are making gains, who feel like the economic is rigged not to favor the rich but people of color, who will believe it when he talks about Mexican rapists infiltrating our country to steal our jobs or Muslim terrorists disguising themselves as refugees fleeing Syria, who are also nostalgic when Trump talks about police putting black protesters in the hospital.
A lot of the people who voted for Trump don't like him, and are in fact alarmed when he talks like that. But they voted for him anyway because they felt he had the best chance of changing the status quo and improving their condition, and were willing to gamble that our government's checks and balances could keep Trump from acting on all the hate and stupidity he was spewing on the campaign trail to placate his most fervent supporters.
For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're right.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
This Fucking Country
And so we can set aside the frightened speculation over whether Trump might have a chance, no matter how small, at winning the presidency, and now embrace the dawning horror that, barring some end-of-year surprise or act of God, Donald "Grab Them by the Pussy" Trump will be the next President of the United States of America.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Donald Trump is Killing Me
I haven't slept properly for over a week, not since an FBI director's decision to break protocol and possibly the Hatch Act unleashed a storm of speculation over what terrible discoveries may or may not be in a new batch of Clinton-related e-mails. He's since declared that it was a false alarm and there's nothing new to talk about, but the damage has been done - suddenly Clinton's victory has changed from a sure thing to a merely probable thing, which in turn meant that Trump's odds of victory shot up from "nil" to "unlikely."
And it's a strange thing to admit, that your favored candidate being just "unlikely" to lose is so terrifying. But, as we've heard repeatedly over the past year, this is not a normal election.
My political awakening was during the 2000 election, when I had my assumptions that the system worked and the electorate was rational torn to pieces. When 2004 rolled around I thought that surely, after Iraq, after the torture, people would wake up and make the right decision at the polls. I stayed up all night watching the election results come in and skipped class the next day partly from exhaustion, partly from depression.
The thing with George W. Bush, though - it was easy to hate what he was doing as president, but hard to hate the man himself. He was the doofus who couldn't pronounce "nuclear" and introduced us to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the "Axis of Evil," but for all the disasters he caused, he wasn't malicious. There was something oddly endearing about the way he'd carefully deliver a patriotic speech from a teleprompter, ease back once the applause started, and seem vaguely surprised in a "I did good?" sort of way. He was just someone who never should have gone into politics and got in way over his head, but never meant to cause any harm, and thought he was doing the right thing. A fool, but an honest fool, to quote Tolkien. Shame he spent his whole term listening to Wormtongue.
Dubya's successors were a lot better than him, and I never had any real problems with them. I liked John McCain a lot more when he was a sensible maverick instead of someone who had to toe the party line to win the primary and picked a terrible vice president, but he would have been an okay president. Romney was... forgettable, I suppose, but again, when I was watching the 2012 election, I wasn't losing sleep during the last week. Either Obama would win and do things I supported (and some things I didn't), or the other guy would take over and do things differently. I would prefer that my guy won, but there wasn't a sense of catastrophe if he didn't win.
Donald Trump, though...
It's not just that I disagree with his policies, though they are profoundly stupid. Bully our neighbor into building a wall across the southern border, through some terrain so inhospitable that illegal immigrants don't even try to cross it, at a time when Mexican immigration is going the other way. Ban any Muslims from entering the country, including refugees fleeing the disaster in Syria, to protect us from terrorism even though all the attacks on our soil have been committed by home-grown terrorists radicalized over the internet. Repeal Obamacare and replace it with... well, I'm sure he'll come up with something, hmm? And renegotiate all those terrible trade deals that sent US jobs overseas, like the section in NAFTA that... well, he must know what he's talking about, right?
In a worst-case scenario, in the event the electorate once again proves that democracy is only as good as the dumbest voters in it, none of that is going to be too crippling. Congress is a check on the President's ability to enact domestic policy, and between the Democrats and the Republicans who are either sane or vengeful following all that Trump's done to the party, I'm sure he'd have obstacles when he tried to ruin this country.
This isn't to say that he needs to get legislation passed to make things worse, Trump's already causing a stock market panic from the thought that he could actually win - stocks have been sliding ever since Clinton's poll numbers began their plunge, and I've heard economists talk about stocks being worth 10% less than they'd be under a President Hillary Clinton. I wonder if that makes a successful businessman like Trump start to wonder about his own campaign? But I digress.
What really worries me about a Trump presidency is what he'd do to our foreign policy. That's the prerogative of the president, something Congress has a much more limited ability to control, and Trump's proposals on that front are even worse than his domestic proposals. "Bomb the shit out of" ISIS when they're rounding up human shields by the truckload, work with Syria and Russia to fight terrorism at a time when they're busy killing anyone who dared to oppose the Assad regime. Reject NATO as a bunch of freeloaders at a time when Putin is doing everything short of open warfare to push against Russia's neighbors, then cozy up to the autocrat responsible for the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine and the slaughter of civilians in Syria. Consider giving Japan nukes to balance out North Korea. Make our allies wonder whether we're going to support them - this of course comes right after ripping Obama for abandoning Egypt's leader during the Arab Spring.
There's no guiding political theory there, no philosophy to back a coherent foreign policy. Clinton's a pretty clear liberal institutionalist who likes to use treaties, trade and governance to promote America's interests and keep the world stable, but Trump seems to be envisioning a world where no one can be sure what America is going to do next, where traditional alliances are abandoned and America's espoused values can be cast aside as it pursues its objectives. A world where America isn't leading, but leaving everyone in suspense over what it will do next - Trump likes that, he likes the attention and speculation he gets from stuff like refusing to say whether he'd accept the results of the election.
But that is dangerous on the world stage. The key to conflict is uncertainty - if I know that you're stronger than me, I'm not going to pick a fight. But if I'm not sure about your strength, or whether you're going to push back or retreat if I do something, or even what your interest in a given region is, that is where miscalculations happen that cost lives and destroy countries. This is why delusional autocrats like the rulers of North Korea - which Trump so worryingly resembles - are so dangerous, because they're unpredictable. And in a world with this many crisis zones, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, we don't need more unpredictability.
I suppose Pence could try to temper this somewhat, or maybe that Trump would listen to a band of expert foreign advisors more than he listened to anyone on the campaign trail. But I guess the fundamental problem I have with Trump is that when I imagine him in the Oval Office, my cheeks flush and acid rises in the back of my throat.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that the presidency is sacred and everyone who's occupied the office has been an exemplar of morality. We've had adulterers, racists, genocidal tyrants, murderers, the works. But when we have a candidate who has boasted about being able to sexually assault women, who cheers when black protestors are beaten at his rallies and reminisces about the good old days when the police would take such malcontents out in stretchers, who "jokes" about 2nd Amendment fanatics "doing something" to deal with the rival candidate, who threatened to jail his political opponent, who refused to say whether he'd accept the results of the election before deciding he would if he won it, who has constantly denounced the election as rigged ever since he started sliding in the polls and without a shred of evidence, someone who has urged his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling stations in minority neighborhoods...
Someone who feels entitled to good press because his interviews get such good ratings, someone who can't give a solid answer on his policy positions but can gush about how many attendance and fundraising records his rallies are breaking, someone who will lie repeatedly and blatantly about what he said even when there's recorded evidence of him contradicting himself, someone who will ignore any poll results or studies he dislikes and cite conspiracy theories or unscientific surveys to support his statements, someone who's earned the support of Neo-Nazis and the KKK and foreign hackers who have led a constant campaign to embarrass his opponent through leaked emails...
Someone who built his financial empire with other people's money and turned billion-dollar losses into personal tax write-offs, someone who'd rather take his workers to court over unpaid wages than give them what they've earned, someone whose response to any criticism is an insult or lawsuit, someone who will rant on Twitter at three in the morning, someone who still refuses to release his tax returns when every presidential candidate in recent history has been willing to make that effort at transparency, someone who loses his temper and acts erratically if you call him by his first name too much...
I'm not crazy, am I? I'm not the only one who's horrified at the thought of someone like that becoming president, right? I'm not the only one who can see the very scary places this story could go?
I guess we'll see in a few days. I can hope that sanity will prevail, that the system works, that this hysterical reaction to the mere potential of another Clinton email scandal will fade and her polls will bounce back at the very end of the election. I can certainly have more hope that she'll win now than I could this past week. And the odds are still in her favor, they have been this entire election.
But that does still mean that there is still a chance that Trump could win. And I have been sorely disappointed by the American electorate before. And after the last week or so, I'm so used to being afraid that it's hard to give up.
And it's a strange thing to admit, that your favored candidate being just "unlikely" to lose is so terrifying. But, as we've heard repeatedly over the past year, this is not a normal election.
My political awakening was during the 2000 election, when I had my assumptions that the system worked and the electorate was rational torn to pieces. When 2004 rolled around I thought that surely, after Iraq, after the torture, people would wake up and make the right decision at the polls. I stayed up all night watching the election results come in and skipped class the next day partly from exhaustion, partly from depression.
The thing with George W. Bush, though - it was easy to hate what he was doing as president, but hard to hate the man himself. He was the doofus who couldn't pronounce "nuclear" and introduced us to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the "Axis of Evil," but for all the disasters he caused, he wasn't malicious. There was something oddly endearing about the way he'd carefully deliver a patriotic speech from a teleprompter, ease back once the applause started, and seem vaguely surprised in a "I did good?" sort of way. He was just someone who never should have gone into politics and got in way over his head, but never meant to cause any harm, and thought he was doing the right thing. A fool, but an honest fool, to quote Tolkien. Shame he spent his whole term listening to Wormtongue.
Dubya's successors were a lot better than him, and I never had any real problems with them. I liked John McCain a lot more when he was a sensible maverick instead of someone who had to toe the party line to win the primary and picked a terrible vice president, but he would have been an okay president. Romney was... forgettable, I suppose, but again, when I was watching the 2012 election, I wasn't losing sleep during the last week. Either Obama would win and do things I supported (and some things I didn't), or the other guy would take over and do things differently. I would prefer that my guy won, but there wasn't a sense of catastrophe if he didn't win.
Donald Trump, though...
It's not just that I disagree with his policies, though they are profoundly stupid. Bully our neighbor into building a wall across the southern border, through some terrain so inhospitable that illegal immigrants don't even try to cross it, at a time when Mexican immigration is going the other way. Ban any Muslims from entering the country, including refugees fleeing the disaster in Syria, to protect us from terrorism even though all the attacks on our soil have been committed by home-grown terrorists radicalized over the internet. Repeal Obamacare and replace it with... well, I'm sure he'll come up with something, hmm? And renegotiate all those terrible trade deals that sent US jobs overseas, like the section in NAFTA that... well, he must know what he's talking about, right?
In a worst-case scenario, in the event the electorate once again proves that democracy is only as good as the dumbest voters in it, none of that is going to be too crippling. Congress is a check on the President's ability to enact domestic policy, and between the Democrats and the Republicans who are either sane or vengeful following all that Trump's done to the party, I'm sure he'd have obstacles when he tried to ruin this country.
This isn't to say that he needs to get legislation passed to make things worse, Trump's already causing a stock market panic from the thought that he could actually win - stocks have been sliding ever since Clinton's poll numbers began their plunge, and I've heard economists talk about stocks being worth 10% less than they'd be under a President Hillary Clinton. I wonder if that makes a successful businessman like Trump start to wonder about his own campaign? But I digress.
What really worries me about a Trump presidency is what he'd do to our foreign policy. That's the prerogative of the president, something Congress has a much more limited ability to control, and Trump's proposals on that front are even worse than his domestic proposals. "Bomb the shit out of" ISIS when they're rounding up human shields by the truckload, work with Syria and Russia to fight terrorism at a time when they're busy killing anyone who dared to oppose the Assad regime. Reject NATO as a bunch of freeloaders at a time when Putin is doing everything short of open warfare to push against Russia's neighbors, then cozy up to the autocrat responsible for the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine and the slaughter of civilians in Syria. Consider giving Japan nukes to balance out North Korea. Make our allies wonder whether we're going to support them - this of course comes right after ripping Obama for abandoning Egypt's leader during the Arab Spring.
There's no guiding political theory there, no philosophy to back a coherent foreign policy. Clinton's a pretty clear liberal institutionalist who likes to use treaties, trade and governance to promote America's interests and keep the world stable, but Trump seems to be envisioning a world where no one can be sure what America is going to do next, where traditional alliances are abandoned and America's espoused values can be cast aside as it pursues its objectives. A world where America isn't leading, but leaving everyone in suspense over what it will do next - Trump likes that, he likes the attention and speculation he gets from stuff like refusing to say whether he'd accept the results of the election.
But that is dangerous on the world stage. The key to conflict is uncertainty - if I know that you're stronger than me, I'm not going to pick a fight. But if I'm not sure about your strength, or whether you're going to push back or retreat if I do something, or even what your interest in a given region is, that is where miscalculations happen that cost lives and destroy countries. This is why delusional autocrats like the rulers of North Korea - which Trump so worryingly resembles - are so dangerous, because they're unpredictable. And in a world with this many crisis zones, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, we don't need more unpredictability.
I suppose Pence could try to temper this somewhat, or maybe that Trump would listen to a band of expert foreign advisors more than he listened to anyone on the campaign trail. But I guess the fundamental problem I have with Trump is that when I imagine him in the Oval Office, my cheeks flush and acid rises in the back of my throat.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that the presidency is sacred and everyone who's occupied the office has been an exemplar of morality. We've had adulterers, racists, genocidal tyrants, murderers, the works. But when we have a candidate who has boasted about being able to sexually assault women, who cheers when black protestors are beaten at his rallies and reminisces about the good old days when the police would take such malcontents out in stretchers, who "jokes" about 2nd Amendment fanatics "doing something" to deal with the rival candidate, who threatened to jail his political opponent, who refused to say whether he'd accept the results of the election before deciding he would if he won it, who has constantly denounced the election as rigged ever since he started sliding in the polls and without a shred of evidence, someone who has urged his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling stations in minority neighborhoods...
Someone who feels entitled to good press because his interviews get such good ratings, someone who can't give a solid answer on his policy positions but can gush about how many attendance and fundraising records his rallies are breaking, someone who will lie repeatedly and blatantly about what he said even when there's recorded evidence of him contradicting himself, someone who will ignore any poll results or studies he dislikes and cite conspiracy theories or unscientific surveys to support his statements, someone who's earned the support of Neo-Nazis and the KKK and foreign hackers who have led a constant campaign to embarrass his opponent through leaked emails...
Someone who built his financial empire with other people's money and turned billion-dollar losses into personal tax write-offs, someone who'd rather take his workers to court over unpaid wages than give them what they've earned, someone whose response to any criticism is an insult or lawsuit, someone who will rant on Twitter at three in the morning, someone who still refuses to release his tax returns when every presidential candidate in recent history has been willing to make that effort at transparency, someone who loses his temper and acts erratically if you call him by his first name too much...
I'm not crazy, am I? I'm not the only one who's horrified at the thought of someone like that becoming president, right? I'm not the only one who can see the very scary places this story could go?
I guess we'll see in a few days. I can hope that sanity will prevail, that the system works, that this hysterical reaction to the mere potential of another Clinton email scandal will fade and her polls will bounce back at the very end of the election. I can certainly have more hope that she'll win now than I could this past week. And the odds are still in her favor, they have been this entire election.
But that does still mean that there is still a chance that Trump could win. And I have been sorely disappointed by the American electorate before. And after the last week or so, I'm so used to being afraid that it's hard to give up.
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