The Bright Side of President Trump

Okay, enough sulking already.  Get up out of bed.
We now have President Trump. King Joffrey.
President of the disrespected.
What is done is done.
Democracy, well not really democracy, but the electoral college system, has spoken.
It's a done deal.
There is a bright side, however.
This man can be entertaining.
As George Carlin once noted, class clown was fun to be around.
The class clown is President now, nothing we can do about it.
When he gets out of hand we can try a dope slap.
The snarling dogs around him may be a problem, but we can learn to laugh at them, too.
What I want to know is, where are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert when you need them?
If they had been around, this may never have happened.
John Oliver cannot carry the load all by himself.

The Irony: Trump Wins Rigged Election

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; she had more votes than Donald Trump.
But, of course, she lost the electoral college vote, and she agreed to play by the rules. The electoral college, of course is the ultimate in election rigging: legal but rigged.
Those rules were established in the 18th century to avoid exactly the kind of President Donald Trump is: a rabble rouser to appeals to the unwashed, ignorant and passionate rather than the cooler heads of the ruling class. The people could vote, but  the electors could over rule that vote if the rabble voted into someone the electors considered simply too reckless.
It's never worked that way.


So, after screaming for months about how the election would be rigged, Donald loses the vote but wins based on the established structure of rigging.


It should be noted the presence of the electoral college may well suppress votes in "safe states," and many voters in Alabama, Mississippi who would have made the effort to vote for Trump may have stayed home, knowing their state would go for Trump. The same is true for Maryland, California and New York, where voters bet Clinton would win.


And the bigger picture is that Trump's election would not mean as much if the House and Senate were in Democratic hands. The popular vote for Republican Congressmen is the real problem for Democrats, and that is not rigged--except by Gerrymander.


Who knows if you can trust any of the polling data, but exit polls suggest Latinos voted 30% for Trump and Blacks did not turn out in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they had for Obama, and that gave the Election to Trump.


So, you reap what you sow.
I'd like to check the lead levels in a lot of communities. Might explain some brain damage voting behavior.

Joy in Mudville

One of the aggravating things about Trump's victory is having to put up with the joy expressed by his supporters.
This morning, at my wife's exercise class in Exeter, NH, the instructor, observing how depressed her participants looked, concluded the class by saying, "Well, good work out. Go out and have a better rest of your day."
And one man shouted out, "It already is the best day of my life!"
The rest of the group stared balefully at him.
But really, let the man gloat.
The people who voted for Trump are, in large part, losers in our society, people who sense they have not succeeded and they want to find the government as the culprit in their underclass status.
Not everyone fits this description--some winners voted for Trump--but mostly his crowd was losers who he convinced he would make into winners.
But, of course, he will not get them winning again.
They are destined for disappointment.
Right now, they are enjoying "their" win, much as fans of any professional sports team does, telling themselves and each other, "Oh, WE won." But of course, they have not won anything.

As my son observed last night, "Well, this is the best day Mr. Trump will have for the next 4 years and it's the best day his fans will have."

President Trump: The Son Also Rises

The sun rose this morning. I took my dog out for his walk. The streets were unusually quiet, less traffic, but otherwise, a normal day.


"Processing" is what we are all doing now.


Thoughts bubbled up:


1. Conspiracy:  All those votes collected locally have to be entered into computers at some point, collected centrally and sent on. Despite the cute little cartoons about how this happens they were playing on NBC, fact is, like so much else in modern American life, it's so high tech, we really don't know how this happens and where a hacker could change the results. The Russians have hackers...

2. Realizing all the pundits, political scientists, TV experts, Nate Silver, Politico, pollsters were wrong. "The math is very difficult for Donald Trump."  But I was never polled, and I live in New Hampshire. I don't answer my land line or my cell phone if I don't know the number. Most people don't answer their phones when the "ground game" people call. So, if people are unwilling to be polled, how can the polls be reliable? Another article of faith: The ground game. The ground game is so 20th century. Donald Trump didn't need no freakin' ground game. We were wasting our time. Well, we were learning about voters, but it didn't help win.

3. The elephant in the tent: That old story--there's an elephant in the tent and outside the tent are people who have never seen an elephant, have no idea what it is and each reaches through a crack in the tent. One feels the trunk, one the tail, one the ears, one the feet and each one describes what is under the tent differently, depending on the small part they can feel or see. Nobody can see the whole, because it is too big and hidden from them.  That's the way I felt canvassing in New Hampshire. I could not see what was happening in the rest of the country, or even the rest of the state. All I knew is what I could see in my small space, and around here, it looked like there were a lot of angry, aroused people who wanted to throw a brick through the glass window of Washington, wanted to vent their rage and to shake things up, just as Michael Moore described. 

4. Bernie and the DNC: Bernie tapped into that urge for change, for revolution. My friends and family said, "Hey, we're doing okay. We're getting taken up into the ruling hierarchies. We don't want revolution." Could Bernie have beaten Trump? I thought so at the time. Thought he would have been a better bet than Hillary. But I thought Hillary would be a better President, so I worked hard for her once she won the nomination. But it bothered me she beat Bernie by beating him in states she didn't have chance of winning in November: the entire South and Southwest. Didn't anybody else notice this? We chose our Democratic nominee on the basis of her performance in the South?  Bernie, meanwhile was doing great in the rust belt. Didn't that mean anything to these power brokers?

5. Trump, bad as he is, is still better than Ted Cruz.  Trump at least has no actual real deep seated beliefs.  Problem is, he is surrounded by the most unappetizing scoundrels, that guy from Breitbart or whatever that reactionary website is, Rudy Guliani, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, the demented Ben Carson. The President appoints thousands of officials and his will be really virulent. And his Supreme Court nominees will insure the Supreme Court goes Scalia for a generation.  Kiss Roe v Wade good-bye. Abortions will become illegal again.  I'm not all that unhappy about abortions after 21 weeks or even after 18 weeks being illegal, but going back to the coat hanger in the back alley days will be nasty.

It's a new world today. An earthquake happened. The humbled have risen up and turned the world upside down.

In some times and places that change spelled doom for some people: Jews, who were living at the top of society were stripped of their homes, their clothes and sent off to concentration camps. Is that likely in the USA?  In the Jew-SA?  Hopefully won't happen to Jews. But what about Muslims? Are those Muslims Donald Trump saw celebrating on the New Jersey roof tops after 9/11 in danger?  And what about Mexican Americans, Central Americans living illegally in the USA? Will the goon squads come around to round them up?

Andrew Jackson brought a populist revolution to the White House. Like Trump, he was a wealthy man who appealed to the hoi polloi. They trashed the White House. We may have to read more about President Jackson for clues about what to expect.

It will be fun watching them build the wall, though. All those Kentucky coal miners down there building the wall.  West Virginians, too. I'm looking forward to seeing all that. 

Oh, and did I mention, Sarah Palin for Secretary of State. She can see Russia from her porch. And Vladimir thinks she's pretty hot.

Unkindest Cuts

Pennsylvania goes for Trump.
Yikes.
Who saw that coming?
Michigan, Wisconsin. 
Who saw that coming?
Florida, North Carolina, Ohio: okay, knew those would be close. 

Make America White Again.
Make America Hate Again.

Fact is, this is still the country we have.  This is who we are. Whites are still the majority and they are here to tell you, they are still in charge, not some coalition of Hispanics, Blacks and hippy Whites.

One third of Hispanic males voted for Trump.
"Hispanics love me," he said. Guess he was right.

What will this Brave New World be like?
Actually, one might expect it to be like the sad old world, when Whites ruled, the America of the 1950's. Except those factory workers going off to work in the morning, to their union jobs, while their wives stayed home to raise the kids--not gonna bring that back. Ozzie and Harriet are both working now. The factory jobs belong to robots, not White men with high school educations.

The Cleavers lived in a world of segregated schools and bathrooms, of considerably less wealth than people have come to expect. 

I can think of every face I have seen, screwed up in rage, ignorant, angry faces belonging to people determined to vote for Trump. 

Close those borders to Muslims and refugees. Build the wall. 
Are we great again yet?
Remember that Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. 

Case Studies: Election Day

Talking to people on Election Day is fraught with concern about starting an unpleasant conversation, so we are careful not to ask how others voted, but that doesn't mean we're not interested to know.


Of course, we all are looking for an indication of how the election will turn out from sampling the few people we can sample, as if one or even 10 people can tell you how millions are voting.
On the other hand, as they say in medicine, sometimes a single careful case study can tell you more than a study of a thousand patients who you do not know much about.
Just now I spoke with a man who is very rich, well educated, lives in North Hampton, flies his own airplane and he said, "Well, some people you just have to keep down." Of course, I immediately assumed he was talking about the raucous crowds we see frothing at Trump rallies. But then he said, "I worked at a construction site once. Those union guys tried to run me out of town because I wouldn't join the union."
So, I assume, he's voting for Trump because Trump will know how to keep those union guys down.
Of course, the union guys will vote for Trump because he's convinced them he'll bring back those great factory jobs once he's renegotiated all those terrible, horrible, no good trade deals.
So Hillary loses from both ends. The union guys hate her because she is single handedly responsible for all the bad trade deals going back to NAFTA. And the rich guys hate her because she supports the working man and his unions.

Children Listening to Trump

A little late, but finally and good.
This ad should have been running daily for weeks.
But it is finally out there, if anyone is watching at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrX3Ql31URA