Chump Trump Change
I’m sickened and aghast that Trump won† .
I won’t claim that the election was rigged. Trump is the president elect. (Not that he’d have said the same if he’d lost.)
But that doesn’t mean that I have to support him.
I appreciate and advocate that Obama is continuing the legacy of a peaceful transfer of power, but I can”t get behind his statements that, ‘we are all rooting for his (Trump’s) success in uniting and leading the country.’
No, President Obama. No, I’m not rooting for him. I do not want his ideas, his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, credulous, isolationist, criminal, warmongering, fascist, mendacious ideas to be remotely successful or that he should unite us, as a country, in the pursuit of the worst of human nature.
I’d thought that Trump was going to lose. I’d thought that the neo-cons / alt-right misinformation campaigns through mass market, corporate controlled media was a snake that was about to eat its own tail. But I underestimated the effects of a generational long intellectual poisoning.
And indeed, it is this generational effect that has me feeling grave beyond the damage that Trump and Pence will do in four years. With the Republican senate instituting a constitutional crisis by failing to even hold hearings on Obama’s respected, centrist nominee to the Supreme Court, we’re now in line for one and likely more Trump / Pence ultra-conservative judges. These judges will almost certainly be in place well after Trump’s other cronies are swept into the dustbin of infamy.
There isn’t much hope for the foreseeable future. Even if Trump dies or scandalously crashes and burns (and that is doubtful since he seems to be made of poisonous asbestos), we’ll still be stuck with far right wacko Mike Pence.
Deplorable
Hillary Clinton famously said that, ‘you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.‘ (A phrase that she later recanted.)
What is far less reported is that she want on to say:
‘But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.’
For my part, I think that broadly calling a group of people by a label is errant. But Ideas, and individuals, and philosophies, they can be deplorable. Discrimination, racism and those who willfully hold to these concepts are worthy of reproach. But beyond that, who would argue that the KKK or ISIS aren’t deplorable as a group who hold a shared philosophy? And they are a ‘group’ because they share an ideology – a hateful ideology that civilization must rebuke. But to be clear: I think that the vast majority of Trump’s followers do not hold to these ideas.
But Trump himself? He is a promoter of dark, malignant lies and fear mongering hatred and is to be berated every time he pukes out his venom.
Some Animals
And I hold little hope that he’s capable of meaningful, positive change. I won’t be fooled by his attempts to whitewash and comb-over his false statements.
Ever read George Orwell’s Animal Farm? Recall how at night, when the other animals weren’t looking, that the pigs repainted the seven commandments of Animalism? “All animals are equal” became, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
Well, the attempt to white wash Trump’s history is well underway:
Muslim ban statement ‘removed’ from Donald Trump’s website.
The Trump team appears to have removed the statement, in which Mr Trump said on December 7, 2015:
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.
According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine,” the statement continued.
Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”
The only thing wrong with this cartoon is: Trump doesn’t actually say he’s sorry. He just changes the subject to his next obscenity.
My memory isn’t so short. I won’t soon forget what Trump has said and done and I’ll resist his, and his advocates’ efforts to further poison the country: to make America Hate Again.
† (Footnote: And lest we forget, for the record: Trump won the electoral college but like G.W. Bush’s first election, Trump lost the popular vote.)
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