So there you have it. Donald wins. On a technicality, but he wins. The "rigged" election system that he consistently railed against or at least cast doubt on during his campaign is the very reason he's going to be our next president. Red America rejoices, blue America weeps. I shake my head one last time. In hindsight, this should not have been an upset. In our quaint little nation, the guy who yells the loudest tends to win the argument, be it in a bar or a town hall meeting or a presidential race. The goldfish-esque memory that America has exhibited has taken every history book ever printed and thrown it onto the funeral pyre of our international reputation and dignity. We've elected a fucking reality TV personality to be our leader. To call the shots on our laws. To direct the military during wartime. To appoint supreme court justices. As a future teacher, I'm done telling adults to read their history books. At least in this instance, it's too late. The deterioration of the American attention span is now exactly where it should be: front and center. But what can I say. I can't expect people to understand why events a hundred years ago are important today when we can't remember what we were outraged about three days ago.
Calling Mrs. Clinton a "flawed" candidate means nothing to me. Mother Theresa was flawed. And you can bet everything you own that everyone who has ever run for president is a very "flawed" person. But come on. The mere thought of someone using a private email server to communicate was enough to disqualify that person from being president? Bullshit. She's a less liberal version of Obama without the silver-tongued charisma. That's it. As we should have expected, the candidate with the most recent scandal lost, not the better one. Never mind that candidate's decades of experience in situations where actual shit was on the line, not just whether Omarosa was cool enough to stay on The Apprentice. Was it actually because that person is a she? Was it actually because she was endorsed by the most powerful black man in the history of the world? Yes, that played pretty significant part. Some will admit it, some won't. Some will scream it from the mountaintops. I don't give a shit how it sounds. You want it "like it is?" There you go. Donald was too much of a pussy to say it. If you react with incredulity and are ready to get in a fight with me over that, you have proven me right. And for their part, the Democratic party was completely tone-deaf for a year and a half and tried to play personality politics. That was incalculably stupid and played up the qualities that wound up winning Trump the election. It was childish and they have now payed the price. But now that Mrs. Clinton is out of the way, let's take a look at how we've made the worst of a bad situation.
Throughout this nonsense, Mr. Trump appeared to make some comments that I will politely call ill-conceived. We all know the sound bites. The gold star insults, the unflattering generalizations, the "grab them by the pussy." Crazy, crazy shit. The kind of shit that would make any other candidate for any other public office in any other place at any other time say "I fucked up" and then bow out. Mr. Trump, however, is very familiar with the aforementioned American attention span. His colleagues in the reality TV and real estate business are, too. Go ahead and tell me it's just Donald being Donald. Tell me it's locker room talk. If you're A. over 60 years old and B. have a wife who is expecting a child, it isn't locker room talk, it's disgusting and unacceptable.
On the whole, I would say we take politics about as seriously as Trump has. The Trump bros and broettes I meet at state-run universities in the red state of Pennsylvania seem unconcerned that Mr. Trump would privatize every college in the country if he could, and probably price many of them out of the education that they are receiving. He just speaks and acts like an angsty teenager who has a lot of pent-up emotion over having nothing significant to complain about, so they relate to him. On a larger scale, we've become a nation of people who will turn off the thoughtful, insightful debate and turn on the news about a shooting. We love drama. We are drawn to drama. We pay attention to drama. Plain and simple, want to be entertained more than we want to be educated. That is our sin. Period.
I suppose what has drawn many people to Trump has been his shoot-from-the-hip, wingin' it style. It sounds (and is) counter intuitive, but many people like the fact that he doesn't have legitimate plans. The plans that he has made have mostly been in the form of "first day" pledges. Stuff like starting to build the Mexican-funded wall, repealing the Affordable Care Act, rounding up illegal immigrants, prosecuting his campaign opponent, etc. Are these things actually going to get done? More importantly, was Trump serious when he proposed these things? Both are doubtful. At the very least, they won't get done as quickly as Mr. Trump wants them to. Although it may not seem that way (since they barely do anything anymore), congress sort of has the last say on a lot of these things. Will the republicans who gave up on Trump flock back to him and support him? Probably. I doubt we will ever see the limit to which those people will go in the name of political expediency.
Probably the biggest promise Trump has made is his pledge to "bring back the jobs" from overseas. How? Don't worry about the details, says Donald. I'm a very rich person. I'm a very smart person. Well I'm afraid that's not really how it works. I'm not an economic expert, so you can take this as seriously as you'd like: those precious jobs are probably not coming back, and definitely not without a fight. The shit that Mr. Trump's heartland supporters buy in Walmart is overwhelmingly made overseas. Donald says he wants Americans to make this stuff. Ok. Sure. Build a factory according to US standards and pay your employees what typical factory employees make. The factory has to lower its prices to compete with overseas manufacturers. It cuts wages. The people employed at the factory can't afford the very shit they're making. They get pissed. Maybe they go on strike. The factory (gasp) decides to move to Mexico or China in search of cheaper (and less fussy) labor. The way that things are set up now, that's exactly what's going to happen
Mr. Trump's solution? Maybe apply tariffs. Maybe cut regulations. You know, the ones that require paid maternity leave, keep hours reasonable, keep working conditions safe, etc. Sounds unattractive? Don't count on joining a union, which a Trump/Republican administration will fight tooth and nail. The thing Mr. Trump won't tell his devotees: if you want your jobs back, you're going to have to rethink what a "livable" wage is. Want to know what a Donald Trump economy looks like? Look up "New York Tenements 1890." You'll get the idea. Most serious economists with actual knowledge of how our economy works agree that the way to cut through the litigious bullshit that makes running a business in this country so difficult is to actually hold business owners accountable for their shittiness. The paralyzing fear of a lawsuit has turned our economy into a liability-limiting machine. But who actually suffers from those lawsuits? Not the CEOs. Not the bigwigs on Wall Street who actually call the shots. It's the mid-level managers who are just passing down orders. Case in point: Wells Fargo. Who got axed when the shit hit the fan? Mid and low level employees. It wasn't until Elizabeth Warren roasted the fuck our of the CEO that he stepped down. And guess what: he stepped down an extremely, extremely rich man. Just like Donald.
"The Wall" is the just the most publicized manifestation of the xenophobia and distrust of other races and nationalities that was a huge part of this election, whether we want to admit it or not. Go ahead Donald. Build your wall. Watch the bad guys laugh at you and find a way around it the day after it's done. Will Muslim communities really be subjected to steeply increased surveillance? Will they really be held accountable for violent radicals on the fringes of their faith? They better fucking not. There were no calls for greater surveillance of troubled Neo-Nazis when Scott M. Greene ambushed and killed two police officers in Urbandale, Iowa. Remember that? Probably not, it was in the headlines for all of two seconds. Talk about a crooked, biased media, right? But I digress.
Mr. Trump doesn't think we are at all responsible for providing refuge for some of the people displaced by the fighting in Syria. He also thinks that other countries in the area should foot the bill for our military presence. This is, of course, the man's complete and utter misunderstanding of the last 20 years on display. Donald. We. Created. The. Problem. We went into someone's house and set it on fire, and now we're mad at them for not wanting to put it out themselves? If you consider yourself an American, you need to be willing to accept the consequences of failed policies (the Iraq/Afghanistan Shitshow) even if you didn't agree with them (which he did). This shirking of the responsibility to answer for our asinine short-sightedness absolutely infuriates me, and it makes people in the Middle East hate us more, if that's possible. The more we turn our noses up at answering for bullshit wars we wage overseas, the more they will have those wars in our own back yards. If there is any symbolism in this election, it is the victory of violent extremists (Islamic or otherwise, it actually doesn't fucking matter) over the hearts and minds of the world's most powerful country. We are finally as afraid as they want us to be.
One of the more unsettling outcomes of this election is that the Republican party, the one that couldn't agree on a candidate, the one that shuddered and splintered and cowered at the first sign of trouble, is now in control of our government. The people that our new president refused to suck up to are now in charge. Republican leaders couldn't come up with a definitive answer to the question "what does your party stand for," and most of America said, "good enough for me." Horse. Shit. The Republican party is shit scared, paranoid to the point of paralysis, and completely without a serious plan for the future. The Democrats, for all of their stupidity, had a plan. I don't love it, but it's better than hot air. Limited government, you say? We've elected a group of people that are so scared of losing their power that they are willing to ride the coattails of a man who called the reliable part of their constituency "stupid." That's right. Trump called Republican voters stupid. So Republicans are faced with a dilemma: do we work with this guy who thinks we and those we represent are dumb? Do we give him what he wants? Votes are on the line, so yes, they probably will.
Even with all of this nonsense in mind, I would almost be willing to consider this man a serviceable president if he showed anything resembling level-headedness under pressure or a willingness to actually listen to his critics. Regardless of what we all want to hear, Hillary Clinton shredded Mr. Trump in the debates they participated in. I don't give a hot steaming shit if people thought the moderators were biased. They weren't. Donald just whined and bitched about them so much that people started to see something that wasn't there. Even if they were, how did he react? Embarrassingly childish. He has exhibited stress-management skills I would be concerned about in my seventh grade students. He gets defensive. He gets rude. He interrupts. He literally cannot control the things that come out of his mouth. In a nationally televised debate, that looks bad. In a crisis-level situation that Donald will almost certainly find himself in during his presidency, people will die. This affected fourth grade macho attitude that went over so well with the solid red voters of the American heartland is not going to go over well with foreign leaders. And no, having the biggest and baddest military in the world is not an excuse to say and do what you want in the Situation Room. Donald will be pushed and prodded and goaded into showing himself for the conflict lover that he is. I have said it before and I'll say it again: I will not fight in or support a war waged because an overgrown child couldn't keep his big fucking mouth shut.
So what now? What can we expect from President Trump? We don't really know. History is littered with underdogs who considered their popular support a mandate to seek revenge on those who doubted them. Does Mr. Trump want to make an example of liberals? Or of conservatives who jumped ship on him? I don't know. You don't know. Donald probably doesn't know. He's wingin' it all the way to the fuckin' White House. There is no indication that Donald's kumbaya moment of wanting to "unite the country" after a rough election is anything other than the post-win honeymoon champagne doing the talking. Trump ran a divisive campaign and he won. Why change now? He had every opportunity to push a unifying message and he didn't. Unfortunately for most of his die-hard supporters, they are probably in for a pretty nasty reality check. If the first few days of the Trump Era are any indication, President Trump will be spending a lot of time explaining why things that he said were going to happen aren't going to happen, and were actually never meant to happen.
The wall isn't going to be so great. ObamaCare is actually pretty good. Faced with the situation of actually speaking to Obama face-to-face, Donald now thinks he is a "very good man." Can you be any more of a two-faced coward? Maybe now he's finally realizing that for all the shit he talked about him, Obama didn't take anyone's guns, or incite any of any violence, or try to turn the country into a welfare state. He did what he was elected to do: be a slightly left of center establishment democrat, not satan. And all that talk about "draining the swamp" and getting rid of the crooked career politicians? Reince Priebus, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a slew of others: all establishment conservative republicans, all career politicians. And yes, I'll say that again for those who thought they misread: Sarah Palin, Ms. Desperately in Need of a Lesson in Basic World Geography herself (and also a climate change denier), is on the short list for Secretary of the Interior of the United States of America. Absolute. Shitshow.
But now the election is over. There are no more nonsense rallies to hold. There are no more ires to stoke. The utter stupidity of his campaign has begun to reveal itself like a festering wound half-assedly concealed by a band-aid. And for what it's worth, Mr. Trump has not looked very enthusiastic about this new life he has embarked on. In his first interview after the election, he seemed to find himself in a situation that he has never found himself before: at a loss for words. It is my honest to goodness contention that we have elected a man who does not want to be president at all. Why would he? He has never had interest in being a public servant and he doesn't now. I'm sure that for all of the "wonderful" friends he's made, he's starting to experience how incredibly lonely the presidency is, and I don't think he likes it at all.
So yeah, I am very disappointed right now. But I genuinely hope for the sake of everyone involved that he doesn't fuck up too badly. Politics are what they are, and politicians are who they are, but I have faith in the majority of Americans who, like me, shook their head at every single thing that happened in this election. Most of us voted, some didn't. But we got up the day after the election and got back to the work of keeping what this country has always been: great. And in spite of all of his efforts, I don't think the Donald is going to change that.
