And the winner, predictably, is Trump.
In 2015-16, I was a huge Hillary person and I even wore a Hillary badge the size of a large dinner plate. Long-time readers saw a picture of the badge and know it’s true.
When Trump won, I was very upset. I didn’t cry because I’m no longer capable of crying anywhere except the cemetery but it was as close as I get to it.
I was upset because everybody I knew and every news source I accessed told me he was going to betray Ukraine, give Putin everything he wants, crash the economy, start wars, and collapse the US dollar. I didn’t want any of this so I was upset.
I have this extremely unusual quality, though, which is that I am incapable of getting emotionally invested in a politician, whether positively or negatively. (Anybody who comes in with the Hitler fallacy at this point gets banned for being a total idiot).
To me, a politician is a function. I don’t relate to them as human beings because I don’t know them as human beings. I perceive people who read Michelle Obama’s biography (or one written by any relative of somebody important) as aliens. I understand reading Barack Obama’s books. By virtue of being a US president, he was a figure of enormous public importance. But how is his wife more interesting than, I don’t know, my husband’s wife or your nephew’s brother-in-law?
Very soon into Trump’s presidency, the US dollar left its 8-year-long stagnation (I’m very sensitive to currency fluctuations because I have family and pay for services in Canada). My students started refusing low-paid campus jobs because they already had better-paying ones. My financial situation improved. Ukraine got everything from Trump in 3 months that it couldn’t get from Obama in 2 years. Putin got punished like the little bastard he is. No wars were started. Unemployment plummeted.
With the extraordinary degree of animosity Trump provokes, I’m guessing if there was something against him, we’d hear it. But for 5 years, there’s been nothing but hoaxes and lies. The “grab ’em by the pussy” hoax with the part “and they let you” consistently edited out and the outlandish “he confessed to sexual assault on tape” repeated like a mantra. The “he mocked a disabled reporter” hoax, the Russia hoax, the Ukraine hoax, the fish tank cleaner hoax – there’s no end in sight.
So yeah, since I have a functioning brain AND absolutely no Daddy issues whatsoever (I’m a Mommy issues person), I changed my mind from “he’s a unique threat to democracy” to “his biggest observable problem is that he’s a people-pleaser.” He says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear, and it has zero connection to reality.
In reality – and not in rhetoric or “tweets,” God, I’ve so had it with the “ah, look what he tweeted, democracy is in peril” crowd – he’s a lot less of a nationalist than I’d like. He’s got a kick-ass economic team that is to Obama’s what your intellect is to a snail’s. (For the particularly gifted among us, I’m not comparing Obama’s intellect and Trump’s. I’m comparing their economic teams. In personal intellect and oratory Obama is light-years ahead. Which did nothing to stop him from bombing out a bunch of countries, mishandling the economy, or wasting every opportunity to do a criminal justice reform. Or to do anything, really).
I wish we had somebody better than Trump. It should be so easy, right? Somebody smarter, less self-involved, with a stronger personality and a coherent worldview, somebody more loyal, somebody who doesn’t tweet even. And, of course, the important stuff: no wars, withdrawing troops, fracking (the only thing that really hurts Putin), economic protectionism, not exploiting Central America for serf labor, everything DeVos is doing in education (she’s been amazing, and I say it as somebody who hated her with the power of an exploding sun), resistance to the PC culture, supporting Ukraine.
Show me somebody like this, and I’ll go vote.
P.S. I want to thank reader methylethyl for coming up with such a great blogging topic. These posts have been massively popular, giving rise to comments that are often better than the actual posts.