For people who are surprised by Trump’s controversial first set of appointments to his cabinet, I’m not sure what they thought was going to happen. He signaled pretty clearly what he was planning to do. Loyalty would trump (pun intended) any other consideration.
From here on in, the mantra I’m going to repeat is: this is what America wanted. This is what America voted for.
It’s going to be four years of chaos, four years of driving a wedge between liberals/progressives and conservatives, four years of more Balkanization, four years of unapologetic provocation.
And about half of American voters wanted this.
I’ve read that Kamala and our side went too “dark” during the run-up to the election because we exposed his fascist tendencies, that he wanted to be a “dictator on day one” or that he was joking about a third term. In 2016 they said we took him too literally but not seriously enough, but should have taken him more seriously but not so literally. In the aftermath it was clear we should have done both.
Now we’re told that we should lighten up and not take him so seriously.
Yeah, okay.
Really, there are three possible outcomes now:
- Trump ruins the economy and our Western alliances
- Things go badly, but not quite as badly as we feared
- Things go surprisingly well, and we will have been proven wrong again (and not for the first time).
Regardless of which of these three alternatives actually materializes, the hardcore Trump supporters will blame anyone but Trump. The people in the middle — the ones who voted for both Obama and Trump — may swing left once again. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Let’s see how the people in the middle feel if the price of eggs hits double digits, and you can no longer buy a foreign car, and you can no longer get eldercare because of the deported Africans. But it would have to get pretty serious to grab the attention of black men and latino voters and some white suburban women to make them think that maybe this diaper-wearing “Alpha” male isn’t really the solution to their problems after all.
