How he won on fear and bile
Garrison Keillor says Trump voters aren’t going to like what Trump does.
Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.
The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers, people who make their own pasta, opera-goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.
Or like Twitter trolls, 4chan, Reddit, Breitbart.
But the mayhem Trump will cause is going to hit the Trumpers harder than anyone else, he says. He also points out that cruelty is bad.
We all experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us, to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Herbert Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin.
I hope that’s true, but I doubt it.
I suppose if I were a nice person, I’d feel sorry for them…no, I can’t. They inflicted too much on everyone else.
No, I very much doubt Trump’s mayhem is going to hit his supporters harder than, say, LGB people, or Muslims, or undocumented immigrants, or Syrian refuges. There’ll be pain all around, sure, but rural white males are probably not seeing the brunt of it.
Actually, StlSin, I fear rural white males are going to be inflicting a lot of it. And to make it worse, rural white male is the description of half the people in my vicinity (the other half are rural white females, and a lot of them carry guns, too)
They’re not gonna like it when they lose their welfare. You thought the coal mines getting displaced by fracking was bad now watch your worthless little hamlets disintegrate.
On Bill Moyer’s page, an essay reminded the reader of Bush’s re-election. Trump represents such an assault on realism, on any respect for cause and effect, that he may well be a two term president.
Already, he is never held to account for his pronouncements and actions. No matter how catastrophic his regime might be…it will always be someone else’s fault.