The year
is almost half-over, and I haven’t written anything for my blog. What gives?
I can
explain in two words: Donald Trump.
Despite
my many reservations and its many flaws, I still thought of the
United States in my own mind as the greatest country on Earth. No more. The
greatest country on Earth does not make someone like Donald Trump its head of
state.
On
election night 2016, Trump’s achieving the presidency, in the words of a
friend, “felt like a death in the family.” It was the death of my confidence in the American people to
make reasonable choices.
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| In 2016, 62,984,828 voters looked at this boorish bully and thought, ‘Yeah, he’d make a good president.’ |
The fact
that so many voters — albeit not a majority — could
look at the 2016 campaign and see Trump as presidential material is
unfathomable to me. If anyone saw
this boorish bully on the campaign trail as someone who ought to be entrusted
with the nuclear launch codes, we have no common point of reference for any
kind of conversation. That’s one
reason why I haven’t been using my blog to articulate my opposition to Trump:
his unfitness for the office of president ought to have been self-evident. If you can’t see that, I have nothing
to say to you.
I’m
disappointed that the mainstream media nitpicked every tiny flaw in Hillary Clinton’s career — ultimately turning the insubstantial issue of her e-mails into a full-blown crisis that did much to cost her the election — while giving Trump free airtime and a free ride, largely laughing off his campaign until it gained too much momentum for them to seriously affect.
And I’m
especially disappointed in those ultra-liberals who could see “no difference”
between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and chose either to vote for a
third-party candidate or sit out the election altogether. If you could see no difference between
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 elections — if you believe
that a President Hillary Clinton’s administration would be under investigation
for collusion with Russia or something like it — I have nothing to say to
you. However, I’m sure that a
Republican-controlled Congress would have been perpetually investigating President
Hillary Clinton, whether circumstances warranted it or not, because Republicans
like to use investigations as a political weapon, to keep their opponents on an
unsure footing.
 |
| Given her constant criticisms of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, this is what I imagine ultra-liberal Susan Sarandon must be thinking. |
I thought
that the ultra-left had learned its lesson during the 2000 election, when they
regarded Al Gore as insufficiently progressive and split the vote enough for
the decidedly non-progressive George W. Bush to win. But it happened again. Because the Democratic presidential
nominee insufficiently championed the appropriate progressive causes, those on
the ultra-left enabled the election of a president determined to roll back
those causes. And it will probably
happen several times in the future.
If a progressive can’t see the absurdity and futility of that position,
I also have nothing to say to them.
And above
all, Trump’s election proves that eloquence and reason ultimately don’t carry
the day, so why bother engaging in them?
It will be interesting to see where the United States — and, indeed, the
planet — will be four years from now.
Maybe I’ll feel like breaking my silence before then, maybe not. Until then, I’ll have nothing to
say.
