Saturday, November 12, 2016

My Take on America Circa Trump

Well, hasn't this week just been interesting as hell?

Interesting being a relative term, of course.
You may have heard that Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America. That happened.

Some people are a little upset about it. Some people believed it could never happen. Me. I believed it could never happen.

To be fair, "The Simpsons" believed it could never happen.
So I feel I'm in pretty good company among the dead wrong.

I'm going to spare you a post-mortem on the election, on how badly the Clinton campaign overestimated its popularity, on how deeply a majority of Americans wanted a regime change, on how misguided were the polls and pundits that wanted/needed a Clinton win. You can get that stuff literally anywhere else online.

As regular readers know, I let go of my anger and disbelief for a Trump win when I realized it was affecting my relationships with people I love. I love so many people whose politics differ from mine. I refuse to allow an election to come between me and good people who don't happen to agree with me.

This is true and has nothing to do with the
play on words with the President-elect's name.

But I do have opinions on how things will play out over the next few weeks/months/whatever. I may be totally wrong (cf, the election), or I may be totally right, or I may be (likely scenario) some combination of the two. 

So, with Donald J. "Bigly" Trump having won the election, here is what I think is likely to happen.

1. It will turn out that Donald ruthlessly played both ends against the middle, and he will end up being a model moderate Republican, to the dismay of both his fans and his foes.

2. He will subtly but definitively walk back his most controversial campaign promises (the wall, deporting Mexicans, banning Muslims, repealing the entirety of Obamacare), leaving it to Congress to make itself look bad by continuing to champion them.

3. He will appoint an entire administration of traditional conservatives and let them operate autonomously, taking neither credit nor blame for their policy positions.

4. He will let Vice President Mike Pence take ownership of the most batshit right-wing initiatives Congress might promote.

5. Melania will turn out to be a charming and gracious First Lady whose personal causes will be neither laughable nor shallow.

6. Barron Trump will unfortunately be subject to the same over-magnified, under-filtered scrutiny that has befallen all Presidential children. (It will be interesting to see who propagates the hate and who defends him.)

7. A subset of Americans will continue to be anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-liberal, anti-Muslim, anti-redneck.

8. America will not perish.

Just my thoughts, you guys. I may be completely wrong. But if I'm even a little right, my hope for America's future survives. And that's what I'm going for.

Are you hopeful or hopeless?

That's the only issue really dividing us right now.

3 comments:

  1. I think he'll be gone soon. The GOP hates him, he's too unpredictable and uncontrollable. I just can't tell yet whether they are going to impeach him, or convince him to resign and have Pence pardon him. Either way, we're going to end up with Pence. So I am feeling pretty hopeless. Because I don't think Trump really believed half of what he said -- but the people who voted for him do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Trump by conviction is a New York liberal from all I have read of him and his whole campaign has been a marketing gimmick. I don't know who Barron Trump is, but apart from that I'm pretty sure there won't be much difference between Trump and the second term of George W Bush. Which, from us in the Rest Of The World, is good enough.

    ReplyDelete
  3. From what I am heading so far, his transition committee includes ultra right wingers like Jeff Sessions, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich. If Herr Trump has said anything against the racist, jingoistic violence perpetuated in the name of "Trump's America," I am not aware of it. His VP supposedly will really be running things, but this is someone who thinks that gays should be electroshocked into conformity. So... not too hopeful.

    ReplyDelete

You're thinking it, you may as well type it. The only comments you'll regret are the ones you don't leave. Also, replies to threads make puppies grow big and strong.