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Our America: What The Orange Man Showed Us


“Relax,” I told my friends, one evening after Donald Trump emerged as the Republican nominee for the presidency. “Make popcorn, then sit back and enjoy the collapse of the Republican party.”

“How could we have been so wrong?” many of us have been asking ever since.

The simplest answer is that we thought Americans were better than all the vile, poisonous shallows embodied in Trump’s ludicrous figure. And that was true for even those of us who don’t regard the United States as particularly good—at home or abroad.

So what does that Tuesday’s result reveal about us Americans? If the election of President Obama stood for how far we’ve come, the election of Trump has demonstrated how very far we’ve yet to go:

Maybe the American people aren’t overwhelmingly racist. But we are, at the very least, capable of shrugging off numerous bigoted acts in order to elect a racist to the highest office in the land. Maybe we aren’t misogynists, but nearly half of the country preferred one, when faced with the alternative of electing a far more qualified, if flawed, female candidate.

Maybe Americans aren’t a hateful people. But we are perfectly comfortable with empowering a man who has insulted and threatened our Muslim, Latino, and black communities, along with seemingly every other minority. How are our fellow citizens to feel, knowing that the electorate has voted for Trump despite—or even because of—his direct assaults on them? I suppose it’s easier to not take things quite so literally, or to lob a symbolic grenade at elite consensus, when it’s not your family’s skin that will catch the shrapnel. Thank God that my mother, who is Muslim, doesn’t wear a hijab.

Maybe it isn’t fair to call the American voter stupid. But as humanity hurtles toward extinction, we have been sufficiently ignorant to elect a climate change denier for president. He has already appointed an “oil industry mouthpiece” to head his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

Of course, our politics don’t define us entirely, and many otherwise good people voted for Trump. Some are teachers, factory workers, helpful neighbors, good mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, all of that. They have legitimate grievances that rarely get a hearing in the neoliberal order.

The vast majority of these otherwise good people will be hurt by Trump’s presidency. I suspect it won’t be long before the disappointment sets in. Already, there are stories of a transition team filled with lobbyists. American manufacturing jobs are not coming back, but taxes for the rich will certainly be cut. Trump’s tax plan would give 47% of these cuts to the richest 1%; Paul Ryan’s would grant 76% of benefits to the same select crowd. (I’m sure Trump will be able to meet Ryan somewhere in the middle—a killer deal!) As a first act, Obamacare is sure to be repealed, potentially taking away health insurance from tens of millions. What will replace it? “Something terrific,” of course.

Even if Republicans are punished at the voting booth in 2018 and 2020, these regressive policies will cause great harm to America’s most vulnerable populations. And this is the best-case scenario. It may well turn out that this presidential election is a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, the last gasp of ideas that have no natural constituency left. Trump—having few substantive thoughts himself—will be the portly vessel used to pour Paul Ryan’s policies down on a reluctant public. Republicans will have to own responsibility for the outcomes, and Democrats may learn their lesson and become the working man and woman’s party again. This is wishful thinking, of course, but it is not an entirely fanciful portrait of the future. It’s one thing for Republicans to coalesce around the strawmen of un-American leaders who are trying to ruin our country. It’s another to govern. The cracks in the Breitbart coalition will show quickly, and the tide of demographic change will continue to widen them with every voting cycle.

Of course, something similar was supposed to happen this time. And if this is our best-case scenario, what are the other possibilities before us?

Already there are reports of emboldened racism in schools, university campuses, and other public areas. How does President Trump plan to confront such expressions of hate, given that he brought them out from the shadows?

What else might we witness in these next four to eight years? Will there be mass deportations of Latino families? Internment camps for Muslims? Maybe President Trump tires of persistent protests or an adversarial press—and decides to put them to a stop. Maybe an external event puts him under pressure to prove his toughness. Maybe someone insults his highness on Twitter, or his poll numbers drop and the need for a public scapegoat arises. Feeling his fragile masculinity threatened for any reason at all, and with the full heft of the United States’ security apparatus and military might behind him, Trump may one day feel the need to demonstrate the size of his presidential penis to the world—just because no one trumps the Donald.

And no one, finally, will be laughing at him then.

 

Pedja Jurišić lives in Copenhagen. His critique of Téa Obreht's award-winning novel The Tiger's Wife can also be found on the MR blog.

Read more voices on #OurAmerica here.
 


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