Posted on Facebook, 19 March 2017.
Up to now I haven’t said much publicly about Donald Trump. Frankly, during his campaign I thought he was a sideshow and couldn’t possibly be elected, and thus not worth my time. (In retrospect, his election shouldn’t have been surprising, precisely because he WAS a sideshow. The media elected Donald Trump. He’s a clickbait peddler’s wet dream. If they had ignored him from the beginning, as he deserves, his campaign would have quietly fizzled before it ever got off the ground…just one of the many ways in which the outdated and criminally inefficient advertisement-based revenue model is ruining everything on a global scale.) But now that he’s in the White House, there are a few things I need to get off my chest. Time to piss some people off!
As I mentioned, Trump himself would not be worth giving any thought to if he hadn’t managed to rise to the presidency of the United States in spite of himself. What really bothers me about this situation is what it says about the people who put him into power, and those who still support and apologize for him no matter what he does. I keep hearing people who I know to be very smart and who I otherwise respect actually say things like, “Trump isn’t racist, his immigration ban isn’t banning Muslims because there are non-Muslims in the countries on the list and majority Muslim countries that aren’t on the list,” and “Trump can’t be sexist, he has women in high-level positions on his staff, and he’s married to a woman and supports his daughter!” These are such frankly idiotic arguments that it’s difficult to believe any intelligent person could put them forward honestly.
Even leaving aside the blatant non sequiturs and other logical fallacies, Trump has made his intentions and character so clear by now that no one could possibly mistake them (even if you somehow managed to miss them before he ran for president)—believe me, try as I might during the election, even I couldn’t remain blissfully unaware of the disgusting things he said on a regular basis. He explicitly and repeatedly declared his intention to enforce a Muslim ban as one of his first acts as president, and he is following through precisely with what he told us he was going to do. And he repeatedly said derogatory things about Muslims, about Mexicans, about immigrants in general, and about women. He repeatedly talked about physically assaulting his political opponents (obviously including women) and even imprisoning them. Do you think he wouldn’t try to follow through on those statements as well if he thinks he can get away with it?
And people who try to write this off as some anti-political correctness joking are full of it…he wasn’t joking, and you know it. (And incidentally, I don’t give a shit about political correctness, but Trump’s statements weren’t just un-PC, but simply evil.) In fact, such people really support Trump because they take him seriously, even if they won’t admit it when you call them out on it. But push them a little and their hostility to Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, women, or any other group that they perceive as a potential threat to their privileged position (which they vehemently, and absurdly, deny) nearly always comes out. Recently I’ve gone back and listened to actual recordings from Trump’s campaign, and what shocked me wasn’t so much what Trump said (which I couldn’t avoid hearing all about at the time), but his audiences’ responses to it. They cheered enthusiastically at his most despicable racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise vile remarks. Sadly, it appears that many conservatives are even more motivated primarily by feelings of fear and hatred than I had previously thought—fear of change, and hatred of anything different, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable. (Of course, progressives have their own version of this, but what they mostly fear and hate is intolerance for unchosen or superficial differences…apparently with some justification.)
Donald Trump is possibly the worst thing that could have happened for the causes of freedom and prosperity (or any other basic component of human well-being). He’s like a bad Hollywood caricature of the evil, greedy businessman. There will be a reaction against him, but it won’t be the right reaction. Rather than rejecting him as representing bigotry, short-sightedness, cronyism, fascism, etc., he’ll be misassociated with capitalism—i.e., economic freedom—which will have its long-standing misassociations with all of those genuinely bad things (thanks to other unfortunate conservative icons who falsely flew the banner of free markets) further reinforced for decades to come. Clinton should have been elected on principle. Even if all of her policies would have been uniformly terrible, and all of Trump’s uniformly great (neither of which are remotely true)—even if she were an actual criminal—her election would have been less bad for the country, and the world.
I don’t think my more liberal friends who have been kind of freaking out over how racist, sexist, fascist, and generally awful Trump is are overreacting…though I wouldn’t call Trump a real, ideological fascist—I don’t think he even rises to the level of a nationalist. In a way I think it’s even worse than that. Trump obviously doesn’t really give a shit about America. Trump is in it for Trump. I think of him as the Crony in Chief. My prediction would be that he’ll milk the country for everything he can from his position of power, then retire to Russia with his oligarch buddies in four years, much richer than when he took office—but I don’t think he’s actually smart enough to pull it off, and the Russians will certainly drop him as soon as he’s no longer of any use to them. So in the end, he’ll probably get what he deserves. Unfortunately, in the meantime the rest of us are getting it, too.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’re a supporter of or apologist for the sorry excuse for a president that is Donald Trump, you should be ashamed of yourself, and no decent person should want anything to do with you. I certainly don’t. So if you’re reading this and we’re somehow “friends” here on facebook, please do me a favor and unfriend me now. Thank you.
[/rant] We now return you to our regularly scheduled posting of cute cat videos.
