Trump Wins

Scott Hardie | November 9, 2016
I don't want to talk about the outcome of yesterday's election, but I feel some kind of need to document my feelings on the morning of November 9, 2016.

Trump is an awful human being and was an awful candidate. He's a con artist and snake-oil salesman, a tabloid reality-TV celebrity, a grandstanding bully, a near-constant liar, and now with this election, a white supremacist. He shouldn't have been elected to run the PTA at Barron's school, but here we are electing him, with zero experience in the government or in the military, to the presidency of the United States. It boggles the mind that we would so gullibly fall for his act and do something so stupid.

But we've done embarrassing and ill-considered things before, and we can live with that shame. That's nothing. What really worries me are the consequences of this election, in which the Republican party of this decade, which demonstrates no interest in responsible governance, now controls two branches of government and will next year control the third.

I very much fear a recession. The collapse of international trade deals, the slashing of programs to help the poor, and incompetence of Trump to resist a number of economic threats do not bode well for us. Kelly and I are preparing to close on a house; we do not want to find ourselves unemployed next year because of massive layoffs. My mother depends on her pensions and investments to survive in her retirement; she cannot get by if they disappear.

Long term, I worry about climate change. Obama's effort to combat it was pitiable compared to the scale of the threat that it poses, but even that meager effort will be undone by Republicans, who will block any efforts to combat the growing crisis. Here in Florida, Rick Scott even forbids state employees from using the term "climate change" in their work, literally pretending that the problem does not exist; I expect the same policy to extend to the rest of the country. Our grandchildren and their grandchildren will excoriate us for this failure to address this very serious problem despite all alarm bells ringing, and we will deserve it.

I worry about my friends and acquaintances. I know people who will struggle to stay in this country, and who have nowhere else to go, who will be separated from the only network of people they have. I know people who will lose medical coverage, who will have to choose between medicine that prolongs their life or keeping their house. I know people who have suffered discrimination as a result of their race or sexual preference or sexual identity, whose tormentors will gain legal protection and popular support. For Trump's supporters, life will scarcely get better; the jobs that he promises are impossible to restore. For many other people, life is soon to get demonstrably worse.

Some of this will pass; damaged economies recover and societies inevitably get more progressive. Some of this will not pass, like the environmental damage wrought by climate change. (Will the house that we're buying this month be worthless in 15 years because the Florida housing market has collapsed as a result of the effects of climate change becoming unignorable?)

I hope that I am proven wrong. I certainly wish President-Elect Trump and his congress success in keeping this country and the world in good shape. If he won this election against all odds, maybe he can pull it off. But for now, I have very little hope and much reason to worry.

What are your thoughts today?

Erik Bates | November 9, 2016
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Chris Lemler | November 9, 2016
To me i'm sorry but I didn't like either candidate. Now we have a stupid idiot as a president that don't know what the hell he is doing. Just cause he is a business man that don't make him a good president. I have a feeling that he will sink this country right into the ground faster than the titanic sunk. I rather of had Ken Bone as the president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has a bad attitude towards everyone. Now that he won he speaks highly of Hilary which is a big joke. I rather see the third party win this. I think as soon as a country pisses him off he will retaliate cause he is the president and he can do what he wants. To me we would be better off to put someone in office that will try to make the country better not drive it completely in the ground.

Scott Hardie | November 9, 2016
I didn't mention it above because it won't affect me personally, but to be honest, I also fear war. China and Russia welcome a Trump presidency because they know he won't intervene when they expand their territory. I fear Putin annexing a lot more land in Eastern Europe, a post-EU Britain joining Trump on the sidelines, mainland Europe trying to mount a resistance, and a large war breaking out, this time with nuclear weapons The death toll could be catastrophic. I certainly hope that this scenario never comes to pass. If it does, may history judge us as harshly as we deserve.

Scott Hardie | November 10, 2016
Good points, guys. Erik, I feel you about Bush. I could have said the same about Romney. How much I wish now that Romney had won in 2012, sparing us the possibility of a Trump presidency, especially if Democrats would (presumably) have taken the Senate in 2014 and prevented him from going too conservative on Scalia's successor.

Do you ever feel a tiny bit relieved when some horrible murderer like Casey Anthony or O.J. Simpson is tried with insufficient evidence and found not guilty, because even though the right and desirable outcome didn't occur, at least the system worked the way that it was supposed to, and that's a good thing in and of itself? That's how I feel about Trump winning.

I'm nearly done watching the full run of Parks and Recreation over the last few months. I'm glad that it's almost finished because I don't think I could sit through scenes of Pawneeans acting like morons now that that's how I actually feel about my country. :-(

Samir Mehta | November 10, 2016
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Lori Lancaster | November 10, 2016
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Lori Lancaster | November 10, 2016
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Scott Hardie | November 11, 2016
On Wednesday morning, one of Kelly's friends went to a convenience store. On the sidewalk outside, a man asked her if she was glad that Trump won. When she said no, he spit in her face and laughed.

On Wednesday night, a friend of a friend was taunted by several men for seeming gay. When he objected, they shoved him to the ground and kicked him and stomped on him. Later that night, he took his own life.

This is the America of November 9, 2016. If a couple of states had swung Clinton's way and she had won, all of this same hate would still have been there, but it wouldn't have the means to shape American governmental policy for years to come. Things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

Lori, I've been in some of those same conversations, and it's despairing, but at least when we're talking, we're learning to see each other's perspectives and we're sharing experiences; it's painful but I have to hope that it's a good thing in the long run. Good for you for helping those people.

Samir Mehta | November 11, 2016
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Lori Lancaster | November 11, 2016
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Scott Hardie | November 14, 2016
I take "get behind him" to mean "accept that he will be president and hope for him to do the job well," at least when said by decent and well-meaning people. That's reasonable. There are obviously plenty of trolls out there, liberated by their candidate to say horrible things, who mean it as "shut up," but then again, many of them simply say "shut up."

Obama has had all kinds of mean, untruthful things said about him by conservatives for eight years. But Bush suffered the same treatment by liberals for his eight years, and Clinton suffered it by conservatives before that, on and on to varying degrees backwards throughout the country's history. It's nothing new at all. It's not like it started with conservatives bashing Obama.

This year offered us two intensely hated candidates, easily the least popular in memory, so it was inevitable that half of the country would feel especially ill upon seeing one of them win the election. We knew turmoil and protests and widespread misery were imminent in November; we just didn't know who would be suffering them.

Samir Mehta | November 14, 2016
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Samir Mehta | November 14, 2016
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Lori Lancaster | November 14, 2016
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Samir Mehta | November 14, 2016
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Scott Hardie | December 29, 2016
Sorry for being so busy that I wasn't able to respond to this sooner...

By "hope for [Trump] to do the job well," I mean hope for him not to plunge the country into a recession or war or other calamity, and even in fact to improve the economy and bolster our security and work well with Congress and represent us well internationally and do other presidential things successfully. I don't expect him to accomplish any of these things except maybe get along with Congress (at least until the Democrats regain the Senate in the midterms), but I think his success by that definition is a reasonable thing to hope for.

There were a lot of people terrified of a Clinton presidency. I think their fears were unfounded and based on a conspiracy-theory view of America, covering everything from Clinton ordering assassinations of her enemies and being involved in child sex trafficking in a pizza shop, to her plotting to take away Americans' guns and free speech and blah blah blah. None of these threats were real, but the fear of them was real.

Agreed about Trump's own rhetoric being the problem. I remember thinking late in the election season that if I was an undecided voter who could truly swing either way, and if I weighed the negatives about Clinton (mainly her email scandal and Benghazi scandal), I'd have to consider that it was only Republican politicians and conservative media outlets making the case for them, which would require me to trust two untrustworthy groups of people. However, if I weighed the many, many negatives about Trump (the vagueness and self-contradiction of his stated policies, his awful rhetoric and disregard for rules and norms, his bottomless vanity and self-interest, etc etc etc), I would need to trust only the man himself, because the many things that disqualified him came out of his own mouth. Everything that he has done since November 9 has only convinced me further that he was a fraudulent candidate and will be a terrible president.

Samir Mehta | December 29, 2016
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Samir Mehta | January 13, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 13, 2017
Samir, I missed your 12/29 comment, sorry. You truly want Trump to fail as president, resulting in a recession and possibly other calamities (war, mass deportation, mass civil rights violations, etc), so that he gets rejected by the country? It's so important to you that a president behave respectfully and decently that you'd wish for a recession, in which millions of people may find themselves out of work? That's your price for Trump being taken down a notch? I hate Trump, especially how obviously phony he is and how readily people believe him anyway and how smugly self-satisfied he is about it, and I desperately want to see him taken down a notch. But I love my fellow Americans more, and I cannot wish for their suffering just to see Trump fail. I'd tolerate Trump's success if it truly and tangibly made the country better off.

As I was saying to friends last night, even more than I am disgusted with Trump, I am disgusted with the failures of our institutions that are supposed to keep an authoritarian monster like him in check. First is our own collective common sense as a republic not to elect power-mongers like him, which clearly failed badly. Second is Congress, which went way overboard restraining Obama's excesses and now is bending over backwards to accommodate Trump's wishes as long as he signs off on their own aspirations. Most of all, there's journalism, which is so badly broken in this day and age that I cannot imagine it recovering within a generation at least. This is an industry that sells information about what's going on in the world, one of the most basic things that people want to have, and it cannot even figure out how to stay in business! Trump keeps making an complete mockery of the industry (Slate has a good breakdown of how he most recently did it), and media outlets are like ants compared to him. They should be in a position to rein him in, but they're deeply and thoroughly incompetent. We're all screwed.

I am trying my best not to let anger or bitterness get to me. I hate Trump, but I don't want to carry around those feelings all day or nurse them to feel them more intensely. Unless he introduces one of the aforementioned calamities, he will have little bearing on my day-to-day life beyond the minutes (fewer lately) that I spend each day taking in the news. Actively hating Trump in the abstract, because of what he represents, strikes me as just as dangerous to one's own quality of life, and ultimately to the republic, as it was for so many people to actively hate Obama for what they perceived as his failures for the last eight years. It's just not worth it.

As for feeling hate for my fellow citizens, I am deeply disappointed in them for gullibly buying Trump's snake-oil pitch -- "this man can not be bought!" one of my conservative friends once beamed, but duh, Trump didn't get rich being principled -- but I am working on forgiving them too, because I feel like I have to. I'm stuck with Trump for 4-8 years; I'll be stuck with my countrymen for a lot longer. Not only do I have to accept that they meant well and were doing what they thought were best, but also, as difficult as this is, I have to accept the possibility that they were right and I was wrong, that Trump will in fact make the country better. I cannot suspect them of being misinformed by fake news without allowing for the possibility that my news is wrong, and I cannot accuse them of being gullible without allowing for the possibility that I'm the real sucker, and so on, for if there exist fake news and gullibility in the world, and they depend on their victims not recognizing them, then logically it must be possible that I'm the victim. The same goes for doubting Trump: It is possible, however unlikely it feels, that I am wrong about him and that he will be a good president. Not a good president in the sense of being respectable and decent, for he has proven himself countless times over (this week included) to be a corrupt lying slimeball, but a good president in the sense that the country will do better because of his leadership. I don't consider that to be defending him; I consider it to be wishing my fellow people well. You keep wishing Trump failure if you'd like; I'm going to hope for the good of the republic in spite of him.

Samir Mehta | January 13, 2017
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Samir Mehta | January 15, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 15, 2017
All well considered and well said. I have no quarrel, except that I think we're going to get more Trumps whether there's a recession or not. :-(

Samir Mehta | January 17, 2017
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Lori Lancaster | January 19, 2017
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Samir Mehta | January 19, 2017
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Lori Lancaster | January 20, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 21, 2017
Trump's cabinet picks are terrible. These people are as dangerously unqualified as he is, and the potential for harm to the country cannot be underestimated. He's also acting fast to repeal Obamacare, which twenty million people depend upon for medical coverage, including several friends of mine who face destitution.

And yet, I don't think it's going to make a lick of difference. Those of us on the left are predisposed to revile him, and we're going to see and hear news indicating that his presidency is a failure. Those of us on the right are predisposed to respect him, and they're going to see and hear news that his presidency is a success. We're likely to be just as divided in two years, four years, and eight years as we are now, unable even to agree on basic fact. I don't know what to do to fix this, and it depresses me to no end.

For example, a friend of mine shares bullshit "facts" at a steady clip, that are clearly not true. He shared a chart of numbers showing how bad things have gotten under Obama, with the caption "facts don't lie, liberals do." Some of the numbers require research to invalidate (the unemployment rate is not 8.5% right now), but some are just so obviously phony (the current gas price is nowhere near $3.86 a gallon right now). And I have to be intellectually honest and wonder, well, couldn't some of my "facts" be wrong? If he's wrong about some things, I could be too, and I don't know how to get right with real certainty.

More importantly, our inability to agree on objective reality strikes me as terribly dangerous. Bad people will always spread misinformation and propaganda, but our collective willingness to accept those lies is growing and becoming scary. Simple logic should rule the day: What's more likely, nearly all of the world's scientists conspiring to say that humans cause climate change so that they can get research grants, or the energy industry lobbying politicians and conservative media outlets to drum up opposition to clean energy? Perhaps a clearer question is: If climate change is a hoax and we fund some research, then we've wasted some tax dollars, but if climage change is real and we ignore it, then we cause catastrophic loss of life/species and risk making Earth uninhabitable, so regardless of what's "real," which side should we choose?

The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness today is frustrating. I have friends who are angry at the protestors for being un-American and unpatriotic, insisting that Trump was fairly elected and that's that and we should all support him. If Clinton had won, these same friends would be the angry protestors. How they cannot see what seems incredibly obvious to me, I cannot fathom.

The experts predicted a stock market crash upon Trump being elected, and when that failed to materialize, a stock market crash by the time Trump took office. In fact, the stock market performed quite well on both occasions. Whether you attribute that to cause or correlation, it still makes Paul Krugman look like a fool. If the experts can be wrong about that, I hope they can be wrong about other doomsday predictions too.

Agreed completely on the Christian values point, Lori. I am astonished at a Republican friend of mine who does Bible study at the office, met his wife while doing mission work overseas, and talks openly about his relationship with Jesus, who also frequently disparages the poor people he meets as lazy grifters who he shouldn't have to pay a single cent to support. He harrasses panhandlers, and laid into an unemployed woman he met while doing local charity work for her preferring to sit around watching daytime talk shows rather than work. I get it, there are shitty lazy people in society that coast by on our IRS-enforced "generosity," and I don't like those freeloaders either. But I'd rather support ten freeloaders than cut them off and let a genuinely hardworking, decent family starve and suffer with them. We can easily afford welfare programs; foodstamps cost ten cents per taxpayer per day. Moreover, poor people are the hardest-working people I know. I have poor friends who work multiple jobs, begging relatives for a few hours of childcare so they can cover another shift, just to barely scrape by between paltry paychecks. They work a hell of a lot harder than my rich friends do.

Samir Mehta | January 22, 2017
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Lori Lancaster | January 23, 2017
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Samir Mehta | January 25, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 27, 2017
Count me in the "want Trump to fail" camp now too. The stuff that's typical Republican policy, like cutting funds to abortion providers and the arts, and pressing forward on the oil pipeline, I disagree with but I accept; that's a normal part of living in a democracy. What worries me is the dictatorial undercurrent to the administration (following the same in Trump's campaign), like they're testing us to see what ideas they can get away with: Threatening to cut off access to journalists who report on the administration lying, suggesting that federal troops should be sent into Chicago to maintain law and order, proposing a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, et cetera. I have friends who moved here from totalitarian countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Ghana) and they say this is how it starts. I'm wary of crying "dictator" when Obama's detractors said the same thing baselessly for eight years, and right now it's all just talk. But if Trump's critics find themselves suddenly arrested, or if media outlets find themselves suddenly closed, we'll know that we have crossed a real line, and it's very difficult to go back.

Scott Hardie | January 27, 2017
Another small but foreboding sign: Ordering departments not to communicate with the public. That is, as long as they're off-message about how great and awesome the Trump administration is; I doubt that they'd be silenced if they produced proof of Trump's awesomeness.

Lori Lancaster | January 28, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 28, 2017
Given the Trump administration's propensity for discrediting and silencing the news media as well as their own staff's communication with the public, I wouldn't be surprised if many of those small steps happen quietly, without public knowledge.

Whatever doubt I had in the early days of the campaign season about Trump being able to build a border wall or do other radical things, I no longer have. Other than simply ordering Mexico to hand over the funds, he can do pretty much whatever he wants, as the normal checks and balances that we have in place to restrain a radical leader like him all seem to have failed, at least for now in the early days of his administration. Hopefully time will weaken him, especially the midterm elections, but I fear how much damage will be done in the meantime.

The only reservation that I have about using the Holocaust analogy as a warning about future treatment of Latinos is that it was much easier to persecute Jews based on their size: They made up less than one percent of the German population, but Latinos are nearly one-fifth of the American population today. That's an awful lot of people to deprive of their livelihood and to remove from the population without massive damage to the economy and social fabric. Germans went along with it; we'd have a much harder time. But like I said, nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility any more. The fact that we're even discussing the actual possibility is unspeakably depressing. I want to scream from the rooftops, "Don't you people know history?!" And the scary thing is, some who do, don't care.

Scott Hardie | January 28, 2017
One thing I don't understand about Trump so far: Why the reliance on so many executive orders? I understand that some of them are about showing swift action after the inauguration, normal political theater. But he seems to be using them to do things that will be undone by the next Democratic president. Unlike Obama, he has both houses of Congress on his side; he could craft laws to accomplish what he wants in ways that will be much more permanent. Perhaps I'm just uninformed, and the orders to date are minor procedural things and the real changes will come later.

Lori Lancaster | January 28, 2017
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Scott Hardie | January 19, 2021
I told myself that I'd revisit two things on the last day of Trump's presidency.

First up is the above discussion from just after Trump's election win in 2016. It's hard to read today, knowing that time has vindicated many of our fears. A few things stand out to me:

- For the past day, I've heard MANY white men tell me and my friends that "it's not a big deal." Yeah, I remember hearing a lot of that back then. A memorable tweet that I saw two weeks ago after the January 6 insurrection attempt at the Capitol said, "Here's a big Fuck You to everybody who told me I was overreacting in 2016."

- "He's our President and we all have to get behind him." Oh how I would love to see Trump supporters have to walk around wearing a sandwich board with this sentence and a Biden campaign logo. And if they object that they don't like it, they get a Trump "fuck your feelings" sticker.

- Some of the same people that state we should all just rally around and accept Trump as our President are the same folks who have been saying horrible things about President Obama for 8+ years. Ding ding ding, right on the money, as much now as it was then. They'll go right on blasting Biden for the next four years, too.

- "this man can not be bought!" Hahahahaha.

The other thing that I saved for four years to discuss today is this checklist of things that Slate authors feared President Trump would do, published on his inauguration day. Some of them are just outlandish (sexually assault a foreign head of state in the White House? seriously?), but many turned out to be correct or at least partially correct. I'm not going to count; you can see the list for yourself. I wish we could go back in time to 2016 and tell ourselves the specific ways in which things would go wrong, but I'd say that for those of us on the left, our sense of doom in general was well-justified and well-calibrated.