Bad Trump Rising

A rogue candidate defied the laws of political gravity, and floated out of our reach before we knew the extent of the vanity, greed, sloth, and cruelty driving him.

Just before 1 in the morning on November 9, 2016, I awoke with a start, and a sense of dread. I went to my laptop and tried to capture the nightmare before it dissipated like dreams usually do. This is what I wrote then. This is where we are now.

My worst fears are being realized.

I have argued for months that a powerful force was loose in the land and that Donald Trump could not be relegated to the fringe of Kluxxers, Wal-Mart shoppers, hicks and miscreants that the sophisticated, intelligent, educated and informed among us “deplore.”

Those arguments fell largely on deaf ears, even earned me some opprobrium for failing to get in line With Her and the history she was making.

I tried, mostly in vain, to suggest that Donald John Trump represented something unique in our history, something too primal and too elemental to conform to the standards and practices we historically have used to define our leaders. I argued for as long as it was practical that the only positive alternative capable of tapping this force was Bernie Sanders

.

HRC was, despite her advantages in organization, fund-raising, corporate and establishment support and — yes — gender, incapable of channeling this heretofore unseen power. I didn't say that because I "hated her," as some believed. I said it, as a political agnostic, because I trusted my own read of the political landscape. I was more confident in my ability to anticipate outcomes than in the bigshot pundits, the consultants and strategists, and the professional politicians arguing that surely the picture would come into focus according to their smug definition of reality.

Yes, there are "Hillary haters" whose disgust for her is without logic and impossible to understand. But there are also those who hold real and serious reservations about her, who find her political alliances troubling and who have an intrinsic distrust of anyone who argues, as she does, that humans will never become better by having their hearts changed, but only through laws that force them to.

That very notion is profoundly troubling to me, and I'm guessing to millions of others who might not be able to articulate their discomfort but whose "dislike" of her springs from an intuitive sense that she thinks she knows best, and will grab all the power she can to impose her vision on the rest of us.

Compare that to Sanders, whose appeal always was to our better instincts, to the notion that we each possessed the qualities of citizenship and compassion, and that we could unite to reform the nation in the spirit the Founders intended.

I watched helplessly as Sanders fell and those who supported him switched their allegiance to Clinton. They scolded those of us whose support of her was pragmatic at best, a practical matter in reaction to the vulgarity and incompetence of the Republican alternative.

In the euphoria of Her Turn, they ignored what we saw. Buoyed by every vulgar episode and sordid recollection, they dismissed Trump as a candidate and interpreted his clumsiness and lack of cough as a validation of theirs.

Worse, they refused to acknowledge the powerful, mysterious and novel engine driving him. He was like an action figure in a cheap thriller, muscling through hellfire and ignoring blows that would kill a mortal candidate. They maintained that it was just a movie, that the lights would go on and reason would be restored.

They could not, or would not, draw from their knowledge of our young nation’s history to recognize the power of populist passion. To the extent that they factored “populism” into their reckoning, they dismissed Sanders as a Pied Piper leading a drum circle of unsophisticated dreamers. They ignored the lessons Andrew Jackson, Victor Orban, and Adolph Hitler could provide.

They refused to accept that we were locked in this spaghetti Western and that it would take more than acting like practical grown-ups for gravity, the very laws of political physics, to reassert themselves. Surely, they argued, the orange monster would finally be slain. America the Exceptional would regain its balance and stride forward.

Maybe we will. Let us pray that we wake up from this horrible dream and find that it is so.

But if not, please have the grace to put the blame where it belongs.