Columnist Thomas Friedman says Democrats should quit labelling Trump and company “weird.” Recalling Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” making Trumpers feel disrespected. Dems should instead aim to convince those voters they’re really on their side. Yada yada yada.
While Trump loudly panders to middle Americans, his policies in fact screw them. It’s Democrats whose actual policies have helped them.
Don’t like the word “weird? Okay — how about vile. How about sick.
Trump recently told Christians they won’t have to vote after 2024, because everything will be fixed. Implying that we vote only to get something; otherwise, why bother. This (supposed) author of The Art of the Deal is said to have a “transactional” mindset, seeing everything in such terms. Any concept of higher values is alien to him.
For me, voting is a sacrament. Mindful how throughout history, and elsewhere in the world, government hasn’t been accountable to citizens. Societies that vote are very different from ones that don’t. It’s a powerful force shaping our collective character and destiny. Look at Venezuela today, whose “government” is simply a criminal gang refusing to accept being voted out. And remember how Trump himself tried that here! A fact making his remark about no future voting not only asinine but also downright creepy.
Then he queried when Vice President Harris “turned Black.”
Such juvenile nastiness, so much his shtick, is getting really really old. Polluting our civic culture. Enough!
That Trump remark was not just factually absurd. (Harris has always been half Black and half Indian, but 100% American.) It recalls Trump’s despicable “birther” accusation that President Obama was Kenyan-born. (Nothing suggested his mother ever set foot there; and anyway foreign-born children of U.S. citizens are automatically citizens.)
But why, really, did Trump say that thing about Harris? Obviously to stoke racial divisiveness, to make her ethnicity somehow an issue. While trying to impugn her character by implying that “identifying” as Black is self-serving, supposedly advantageous in today’s America — the whole “reverse discrimination” trope, that whites are getting shafted in favor of non-whites. Which is indeed part of Trump’s appeal to lower class whites fearing loss of caste.
(An extensive data analysis by Bloomberg’s Sarah Green Carmichael recently found white males still have an advantage over women and non-whites in hiring.)
But these are details. The real point is — how can anyone imagine that electing this disgusting chaos machine would somehow make America better? It’s not merely weird. It’s vile and sick.