Mr. Write's Page

I decided to go ahead and write this post now, instead of giving my brain more time to process the outcome of the election, because I feel the need to vent. The reality that we elected a man like Donald Trump as President is making my stomach hurt.

Honestly, I thought his chances of winning were laughable. But it happened.

You can’t sugarcoat this. America has really stepped in it this time. This will not end well.

We all knew Trump had the vote of the conservative herd from the beginning. That was obvious. Those people were voting Republican no matter the candidate. And of the huge field of GOP hopefuls, Trump was such a charmer, SO entertaining and brash. He captured their hearts and minds easily.

I can hear them now, watching his daily outrageousness on the evening news. “Ha! Ol’ Donald! He really makes ’em squirm!”

A generation ago, their parents reacted the same way when one of the Three Stooges planted a pie in the face of a haughty banker or politician. Who doesn’t love it when The Man gets his comeuppance?

So, yes, Trump wowed the crowd and got the nomination. But that was just the voters in conservative La-La Land. In my heart, I believed that most Americans were sensible enough to reject him in November.

Surely — surely — people would see that Trump is, to choose an ironic term, deplorable as a candidate and a human being.

But I was wrong. I overestimated the citizenry. I gave them too much credit. They are much more gullible than I imagined.

In the last few days, I’ve listened to all the analysis, and I’ve read the opinion columns, and I’ve weighed the theories of how Trump and another wave of hidebound, Neanderthal Republican politicians were victorious.

Most of it is some variation of the same theme: the elites who run things are prospering, at the expense of working-class white people. Those disaffected people have been left twisting in the wind, and they resent it.

In their minds, they don’t have decent jobs or prospects for the future because the elites who run the country have sold them out and abandoned them.

The disaffected whites despise the wealthy for screwing them, despise the immigrants they believe are taking away their jobs, and despise people who get government help because they consider such people lazy.

Furthermore, thanks to 20 years of Fox News propaganda, they also despise government, as well as anyone who doesn’t swallow the Republican orthodoxy. The hated lib-tards.

That explanation of why disaffected white voters turned to Trump is probably accurate. Plenty of people have been shafted and left behind because of politics and economics.

In some respects, the complaints of the disaffected voters are genuine and their motivations sincere. But, really, their motivations don’t matter. What matters is their actions.

Not only did they elect a singularly unsuited and appallingly awful person to be President, but they got hustled in the process.

They think Trump is on their side. He isn’t.

They think Trump will bring back their jobs and dispatch all the boogeymen in their lives. He can’t.

They think Trump will make everything right, make American great again. He won’t.

If you think Trump is a champion of the common man, you are mentally ill.

Trump is, and always was, one of the hated elites who run the country. Now that the need for rallies is over, so is the need to associate with all those chanting, sign-waving disaffected voters. Trump has returned to Trump Tower and the warm embrace of his rich, privileged, and powerful friends.

Trump will not use the power of the office of President to help the poor saps who erected Trump signs in their yards. He will use it to help himself, his family, his businesses, and his fellow Robber Barons.

Meanwhile, as the disaffected types are getting stiffed even further, we are left with a President who is an arrogant, erratic, petty, petulant, self-centered, self-serving jerk and a genuine danger to the country.

Once in office, Trump isn’t going to change his stripes. He has been the same noxious person all his adult life, on public display. He isn’t going to get religion, see the light, and lead the nation to the promised land.

No, it’s inevitable that Trump will spend his time as President feeding at the public trough, using inside information and the power of the office to enrich himself further. Don’t doubt that for a second.

Beyond that, he might follow his authoritarian tendencies, clamping down on dissenters and stifling the news media, à la Vladimir Putin. That’s the most familiar route of would-be autocrats.

Or he might get bored with the job, go back to his gilded life, and leave the details of governance to his kindly, generous, civic-minded Republican friends.

Either way, the Supreme Court will belong to the hateful side for a generation or more.

Roe v. Wade is in peril. The modest progress we made under Obamacare is probably doomed. Power is now in the hands of people who don’t believe in science — or use that excuse because they are corporate pawns.

And then there is the matter of Trump in control of the armed forces, including the nuclear arsenal. I don’t want to contemplate that subject right now.

The bottom line: you can’t sugarcoat this. America has really stepped in it this time. This will not end well.