How Trump Happened

We’ve heard the blame shifting.  We’ve seen the finger pointing.  By now, you’ve no doubt heard the theory from the Left:  Donald Trump won the election because of uneducated white males, which is liberal codespeak for racists.  Apparently, there are 60 million or so of them.

When the last shred of an argument one has is a shockingly and unfeasibly large allegation of racism, it’s time to reconsider strategy.  They were wrong, so wrong it cost the Democrats everything.  Hillary Clinton must be fuming that she not only lost–she lost to Donald Trump.

Just consider that.  He’s the most ridiculous and inept Presidential candidate we’ve ever had.  Any one of his stupendous blunders or unearthed scandals would have been enough to destroy any other campaign.  How did he get this far?

The answer is simple: anger.  Not just the kind that makes people throw a vase and feel better, but the kind that gets deferred.  The kind that festers.

The people the Democrats wrote off as trailer-park hicks are the majority of this country, not the liberals in affluent, coastal (and overwhelmingly white) intellectual towns.  And they’ve been ignored and let down for too long.  They’ve endured decades of a Democratic party that abandoned them in the sixties, paid them only cursory lip-service when it needed to pad margins with the “bubba” vote, then mocked them for being too bourgeoisie and unimportant.

That’s why Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania went to Trump.  I know. I’m in those places.  I talk to those people all the time.  They’re sick of watching pensions dissipate and jobs disappear while all they get from Washington are empty promises.  They’re so frustrated with the system they want someone, anyone, to come along and break it.

And they’re not just white males.  I suppose nobody wants to actually travel to Montgomery, Shreveport, or Gary to work the exit polls.  If they did, they’d find the Trump coalition to be much broader than they imagined.  I’ve talked to black and hispanic Trump supporters, male and female, in those states.  They know Trump has a blind spot for race, and that he’s got a reprehensible attitude towards the fairer sex.

The thing is this: they were willing to overlook that.  That’s the ultimate indictment of the system as they see it.  They didn’t elect Trump because they think he’s a racist or a misogynist–they voted for him in spite of those things.

That’s just how wretched of a candidate Clinton was.  That’s just how wretched the Democratic party is at this point.

And yet, they refuse to see it.  They blame the Klan, the Russians, James Comey…oh, come on.

2016 was the year their complacency, their smugness, their illusion of inevitability came back to bite them.  But they’re too arrogant, too assured of their own self-righteous correctness to admit it, much less accept it.  They ignored the people who actually work for a living, the people who have real struggles, in favor of spoiled brats who have to seek out conceptual struggles on Facebook and Tindr.  And now those people are rioting in the streets.  How charming.

They deserved to lose, and badly.  Still, I didn’t expect it to be this much of a bloodletting.  The Clinton dynasty is done, having effectively aged out with a feeble whimper.  Their candidate hadn’t even written her concession speech before all the sycophants, allies, and pundits turned on her and blamed her for the utter crash the party endured this week.

I almost pity her.  I almost pity the Democratic party.  But they created this situation.  Whether or not they’ll learn from it depends on whether they have a shred of humility left.

In the meantime, let’s hope President Trump doesn’t get too frisky with the nuclear codes.