I’ve been saying, for over a year, that Donald Trump is a dog who caught a car: he wanted to run for president, not be president.
Looks like my theory is confirmed.
“Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy,” writes Michael Wolff in an excerpt from his book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.”
Clearly, Trump has pivoted.
The celebrity real estate magnate has stopped worrying. Long forgotten are his reluctant move to D.C., his fantasies of governing from his brass-trimmed Manhattan aerie. He has learned to love love love the bully pulpit. The presidency even comes with the ultimate Christmas gift for the megalomaniacal narcissist in your life: the power of life and death over humans, animals and plants!
Wolff’s revelation by way of Steve Bannon is worth reflecting upon for two reasons.
First is another first.
Trump may be America’s first certifiably insane president. He is probably the most ignorant — and we’ve had some doozies. He is certainly the first without any political or high-level military experience whatsoever. What we now know is at least as remarkable as those bulletpoints: Trump is effectively the first president drafted into the position.
Vice presidents have been elevated to the Oval Office unexpectedly. But the possibility of winding up behind the big desk was always on their minds. They were political creatures.
If Wolff and Bannon are to be believed — and so far, there is no reason not to — Trump didn’t want the job. His team wanted him to lose. “Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary,” Wolff writes. “His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.”
Wanting to lose explains Trump’s refusal to contribute to his own run. It explains his barebones campaign, with its weird lack of field offices, his sleepy national HQ and his cheapskate approach to TV ads. The dude ran for president yet refused to spend the night in a hotel room.
As Hillary Clinton might ask: What happened?
The voters insisted upon Trump.
It’s difficult for Democrats to hear, but it’s true.
Republicans voted for Trump because Republican voters always vote Republican. But it was the swing voters who put him over the top. They voted for Trump despite his crazy rhetoric, his violent rallies and his incoherent promises. They were determined to howl their ballotbox cris de coeur. After decades of NAFTA and outsourcing and Rust Beltification and H1-B visas for foreigners while American tech workers can’t find work, they demanded to be heard. They did that by voting for Trump.
Trump isn’t merely devoted to his base. He is beholden to them. They put him in the White House even though he didn’t want to go.
The second takeaway here is that Hillary was an even worse candidate than her biggest detractors (cough cough) believed. Ruminate on this: she lost to a man who tried to lose.
A man with no experience.
With no campaign.
A nut.
You may be asking yourself here, why keep bashing Hillary? Why not leave her alone and move on?
Because Clinton won’t leave us alone. Because Clintonism, centrism, Third Wayism, DLCism are still running the Democratic Party. Because her corporate neoliberal BS was discredited at the polls yet the party bosses and Dem-aligned media outlets keep shoving it down voters’ throats. Because progressivism and socialism are more popular but can’t get any air until a big sharp stake is driven through the undead heart of soulless centrism once and for all (I’m looking at you, Tim Kaine and Kamala Harris.)
So think on that a while. Hillary Clinton was so sucky that she lost to the suckiest, stupidest, losingest candidate anyone ever dreamed of.
(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) brand-new book is “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” co-written with Harmon Leon. His next book will be “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
11 Comments.
To the benefit of Steve Bannon he is about to become darling of the Democratic Party by reason of his support given to the Russians-stole-the-election crowd, in the same way as did the FBI find its rehabilitation with them.
Ted hit one nail on the head: conservatives are even more likely to vote for who they’re told to vote for than lefties. Conformity makes them feel secure, and hating on nonconformists just comes along naturally. Their handlers have been exploiting it for decades. But much like mad scientists in B grade horror movies: their experiments got out of control and created Trumpenstein.
You just gotta wonder what the sequel will be like.
Cue Whimsical…
Agreed on all counts, Ted. But I think another glaringly obvious reason that Her Clintonness lost has to do with her lack of a penis (at least, I’m assuming….). Although I’m not suggesting that’s the whole reason, of course, nor even the main one, I cannot but believe that it’s still a significant factor. Whether or not HRC was a good or bad, fit or unfit, or popular or unpopular candidate, had she been in possession of that particular tool, I suspect the outcome might have been quite different. A (male) friend of mine disagrees, pointing to the evidence of female heads of state in other countries, but I think all that demonstrates is that the the US is still a major producer of sexism. Despite little (no?) indication that this country is more progressive than most of the rest of the world, I think many people still want to believe it is — old habits die hard — but one needn’t look too far to see that we’re still near the head of the pack in keeping racism, sexism, classism, and such like alive and well.
> (at least, I’m assuming….)
Heh. Don’t look at me, I’m certainly not going to perform the examination. 😉
Anyhoo, I you’re right that it’s part of the problem; but I do take hope in the fact that she got as far as she did. She got more votes than the candidate who did have a penis (at least, I’m assuming….)
Maybe, just maybe, if she had the *other* necessary qualifications we’d be saying Madam President today.
I was happily surprised Obama got the nod given his glaring lack of white skin. I was even further surprised when he got a second term.
Neither candidate would have been conceivable even fifty years ago. So, we are still making progress – even though we’ve still got a ways to go.
As always, the Millennials give me hope. They get it.
If you read Intercept, you’ll read that Obama was, in many ways, worse than Bush, jr in his actions (of course, Obama gave great speeches, I couldn’t find a word to object to in any of his speeches, only in his actions).
Oh, heck yeah – I voted for The Big O on his first term, ‘cuz hopey-changey stuff. I did *not* vote for him on his second term ‘cuz war criminal.
Still, credit where credit is due: He did break that particular glass ceiling. Very few men could have; neither Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes is ever gonna be prez.
Craze: “Maybe, just maybe, if she had the *other* necessary qualifications we’d be saying Madam President today.”
To be sure — a shame it was not the case.
As for pinning our hopes on the Millennials, I’m inclined to agree, but with caution, only because we’re doing such a good job of destroying higher education. (And lower, too, come to that.) After all, the Millennials are not genetically endowed with special world-saving powers. Drat.
My former UC Berkeley roommate(back in 1989-90) who returned to the industrial wasteland of upstate New York(i.e. Rochester) has seen Trump 2020 stickers already. She has a BS from a leading university, yet she was only able to get a job at Walmart(she was penalized for not working for one employer for years, their attitude toward employment history in Rochester is very retrograde). She did not vote for the Orange Menace, but she is enjoying his tweets and his upending of the political establishment. I can see why, but she doesn’t understand those of us who are really afraid. She thinks we are overreacting. I am very worried that he does not listen to anyone, he has no attention span, the caffeine in those Diet Cokes is disrupting his sleep and is likely sleep-deprived in a dangerous way, he reacts to things he sees on Fox and of course he is unfit for office. But if people did read what David Cay Johnston wrote about DJT, and several other authors, they would not have voted for him? Or is our culture in terminal decline and there is so much desperation out there? For years I was wondering why my former roommate did not have enough grit to get a decent job in Rochester, now I know it’s a systemic problem and it’s beyond what she could do.
Oh, and I forwarded this column to her. Her reaction was “there is too much whining. get over it.”
She has a BS from a leading university, yet she was only able to get a job at Walmart
You probably meant to write BSc (Bachelor of Science) but judging from the context BS is probably as descriptive 😉
«They voted for Trump despite his crazy rhetoric, his violent rallies and his incoherent promises.» May I suggest a slight emendation here, Ted ; viz , «They voted for Trump because of his crazy rhetoric, his violent rallies and his incoherent promises»….
Agree with you about Ms Clinton….
Henri