Make America Mad Again: Trump wins by sending everyone into a frenzy

Not even the Russian electorate, which has expressed rhetorical support for Trump since the start of his political career, has demonstrated itself to be as easily manipulable as America’s. The Kremlin, in its own elections, makes its predetermined winner appear more palatable by deciding who is and who isn’t permitted to run against him. In 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2018, one of those acceptably unattractive challengers was the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of the comically misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In both style and substance, Trump and Zhirinovsky were remarkably similar. And yet, the Russian clown candidate’s best ever showing in a presidential election was 9.48%, attained when running against Dmitri Medvedev in 2008. When juxtaposed against Russia’s Trump-like figure, Putin came off looking sane.

America’s real-life Trump, on the other hand, continues to drive just about everyone in the country crazy. One minute, he can be heard recounting the graphic details of heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and the next, he begins making calls for national unity, claiming that his opponents’ rhetoric has been unjustly demonizing. One minute, he can characterize Joe Biden as being too old and out of it to string sentences together, and the next, he can blame Biden’s incendiary rhetoric for inspiring would-be assassins to take shots at Trump. One minute, he can hint that he will not accept the result of any election that does not declare him the winner, and the next, he can complain that his opponents call him a threat to democracy. Somehow, right around half the electorate looks at the former reality TV star and sees a serial liar whose chief political aim is to avoid being sent to prison, while the other half looks at the same thing and sees a genuine patriot who sacrificed his life of luxury to fix up the land he loves.

There is no reliable formula for figuring out who will see what. College-educated women of color appear to be least susceptible to Trump’s charms, while blue collar white men tend to be the most enthusiastic suckers — but exceptions abound among all demographic categories. Democratic competition is, almost by definition, a divisive process, but the rifts Trump causes are of a different nature than those that arose between, say, supporters of Barack Obama and those of John McCain. In 2008 there were certainly Americans who entertained the idea that one or the other presidential contender might turn out to be the Antichrist, but those Americans were mainly fringe weirdos.

With Trump, things really are different. It isn’t normal for a presidential candidate to make up stories about immigrants in Ohio eating domesticated animals. Saying such things does not mean he is the embodiment of evil, but to tens of millions of Americans, the invented absurdities disqualify him as a potential steward of the country’s nuclear codes, and it comes as a shock to us that so many perfectly capable dentists and accountants disagree. The resulting divide is almost religious in nature. Unbelievers cannot fathom how their neighbors could possibly fall for such obvious mythmaking, and the devoted cannot comprehend how those outside the flock fail to see the divine truth.

The political divide in America is almost religious in nature: nbelievers cannot fathom how their neighbors could possibly fall for Trump’s obvious mythmaking, and the devoted cannot comprehend how those outside the flock fail to see the divine truth.

Most phenomenally of all, Trump’s cult is actually getting bigger. On Nov. 5, for the first time, he won the national popular vote. Commentators will point to his challenger’s gender, her ethnicity, and her laugh as potential explanations. They will cite exit polls showing that Trump voters by and large named “the economy” as their top priority when making a choice for commander-in-chief. They will speculate on what might have been if Joe Biden had withdrawn from the race in time for the Democratic party to hold an actual primary process. But the most pressing problem of all is not that Trump won 50% of the vote instead of the expected 47% — the real issue is the fact that he could make it into the double digits in the first place.

America gets what it deserves, no matter how self-destructive those just deserts might be. Donald Trump will be America’s next president — again — and at this moment, it is difficult to imagine that J.D. Vance will not succeed him.

theins.ru