|
|
(Dobbs) “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are"
They
wanted Trump. They saw themselves in Trump.
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
Every day since the election, people have forwarded
links to me with commentaries that they told me, in so many words, “You’ve just
gotta read this.” The day before yesterday, and I’m not making this up, I got
sixteen pieces I “just gotta read.”
And I do. I read every one of them. The people who go
to the trouble of sending them, and who flatter me with the notion that it
matters that I see them, deserve that much.
That’s why I’ve taken three days off. I have been reading, and reflecting. Was everything I’d written about Donald Trump— not just this year but since 2015 when he first rode fear and anger all the way to the White House— just wrong? I’d argue, no.
|
|
Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He is all the detestable and dangerous
things so many former White House officials and military advisers, the ones who worked with him, say he is. From what some of his most adoring political allies have
said about him in the past, deep down even they know it. The problem for
pundits on the left wasn’t misunderstanding Trump. It was misunderstanding the
electorate. It was misunderstanding what the electorate wanted and what it
didn’t.
The electorate didn’t want what the Democrats were
selling. They wanted Trump. They saw themselves in Trump.
The title of a column by Carlos Lozada in the New York
Times told the story: “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.” He wrote,
“There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s
politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and
temporary. We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who
we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million
did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast
their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and
Trumpism is no fad.”
|
|
One piece a friend sent me wasn’t published beyond a
small circulation on the internet, but written by a man named Keith Lovin, it
captured what has changed. “This election is not about Trump. Everybody, and I
mean, literally everybody, knows who Trump is and what Trump is. So it is about
us, the electorate. Character and decency no longer matter. Truth no longer
matters. Respect for people no longer matters, especially if they are Latino or
Black or gay or lesbian, or ESPECIALLY, if they are transgender. Trump and his
lieutenants want to return us to the 1950s where white men are in control,
women are in the kitchen and having babies, Christian Nationalism is in the
ascendency, multiculturalism is rejected, hatred and vitriol and resentment and
xenophobia are the menu du jour.”
The microcosm that proves him right was a post on X the
night of the election when the writing was on the wall, by white nationalist
and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” He’s no
nobody. Just two years ago Donald Trump had him over for dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
|
|
On the issues, what we misunderstood was the electorate’s
anxieties about the economy, which the plurality of voters told pollsters gave
them the most angst. Not the availability of abortion, not the stability of
democracy, but the economy. CNN commentator S.E. Cupp might have hit the nail
on the head when she wrote, “Maybe telling voters the economy is ‘strong as
hell’ when they tell you in every swing state that they couldn’t afford
groceries and gas was a fatal strategy.” My friend who sent it added this about
how Democrats pointed to strong numbers on the economy: “That doesn't play to
the family of 4+ across the country whose grocery bills have skyrocketed the
last 3 years.”
President Clinton’s labor secretary Robert Reich broke
that down: “Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top. This has caused
many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger.
Harris did not.”
Centrist columnist David Brooks went deeper. “Nine days
before the elections, I visited a Christian nationalist church in Tennessee.
The service was illuminated by genuine faith, it is true, but also a corrosive
atmosphere of bitterness, aggression, betrayal. As the pastor went on about the
Judases who seek to destroy us, the phrase ‘dark world’ popped into my head —
an image of a people who perceive themselves to be living under constant threat
and in a culture of extreme distrust. These people, and many other Americans,
weren’t interested in the politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law
school grads were offering.”
|
|
From the right-leaning Brownstone Institute, Josh
Stylman saw the same thing: “When Donald Trump gained unexpected support, the
expert class dismissed both movements as mere ‘populism.’ They missed the key
insight: working people across the political spectrum recognized how the system
was rigged against them. These weren’t merely partisan divisions but fault
lines between those who benefit from our institutional structures and those who
see through their fundamental corruption.”
Or, if you want a wholly different take on it— a
different take on what cost the Democrats the election— go to a column in the
supreme spirit of satire by the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri: “I know what
went wrong… not enough texts and emails from the candidate…. so why were we
only receiving (and this is a rough estimate; I think I am lowballing it) 346
of them per hour? That wasn’t enough. We needed more.”
|
|
Oh no we didn’t!!!
But whether it was misunderstanding the electorate or
miscalculating the mountain of emails and texts that went out, as of now it’s
all moot. Donald Trump will take the oath of office on January 20th. And he
will do what he has said he will do: the mass firings, the mass deportations,
and the retribution. The most chilling proof of that came in a post yesterday
morning from the Trump camp with the vow, “Jack Smith’s abuse of the justice
system cannot go unpunished.”
If you read words like those from leaders in Moscow, or
Beijing, or Pyongyang, you wouldn’t be surprised. It is the boilerplate
language of authoritarian dictators. But that’s not where it came from. It came
from Florida. It came from Trump’s new BFF, Elon Musk.
And we’ve only just begun.
