Thanks 45! Really?
I believe America owes trump a big fat Thank You!
I read Heather Cox Richardson’s free, priceless, Letters daily. A brilliant historian and commentator, this is from her 6/25 piece referring to a story from CNBC about top tier business folks:
“With their switching loyalty — or at least their changing view of the likely outcome of the 2020 election — financiers are donating to Biden’s campaign, injecting cash where it will further hurt the Trump campaign.”
Influential Republicans are supporting Biden in increasing numbers. You know the Lincoln Project, led by KellyAnne Conway’s husband. There’s also a new Super PAC formed by Republican operatives, including the Mooch who are targeting battleground states. There’s a similar group, Republicans Against Trump. Then there are the McCain and Bush supporters who will work against trump.
This is unprecedented. It has never happened. The money and disgruntled Republicans are important signs but they’re not what influences me most strongly. They’ve come to join the ranks of true conservatives who believe the only way to salvage the GOP is to get trump out, even at the cost of a Democratic president, and then let time and the pendulum do their work. We are allied only in believing trump is an existential threat.
What’s got me rethinking are the Americans living in the ugly dump heap of an America from which trump benefited and which he brought to what may be its historical peak.
Why did the movement that began seven years ago suddenly gain unprecedented ground? I no longer believe it was videos from body cams, bystanders and victims. We have all seen videos of Black men shot in the back as they ran from police and murdered while complying with police orders. We know George Floyd’s murder was anything but an aberration. Was it just one too many? Or a combination of that and built-up frustration from Covid-19? Or those two plus a tanking economy? For a while, I thought that. I now believe this is a yes…and.
A wildfire swept every state in the nation after the murder of George Floyd. Yes, it’s about that. Yes it’s about the history of systemic racism and police enforcement of it. And it’s more. It’s bigger, deeper and broader in the white populations of America than if it were only about racism. Sad, but true.
I believe we are in a groundswell of opposition to the people we have become. And I mean specifically white people now. ’Cause it sure as hell wasn’t people of color that brought in this regime! It was years of built-up white shit supported through a 24/7 drip of hate spewed and normalized by right-wing outlets. It addled people’s perceptions and brought out their worst fears, anxieties and hate. Targets varied in different interest groups.
For some it was fear or hate of government, others of an elite they were told about but never met, of non-whites, immigrants, women. Of homosexuality. Of fluid gender identity. A deep state. Or just a vague fear and hate of times changing in too many ways and way too quickly. These were perceptions — a motley array of beliefs held by millions of white Americans who felt left out, left behind, and overlooked.
I’d add to that toxic stew a large number of whites who knew they were working more and getting less yet couldn’t put a finger on why life seemed to be leaving them behind. I suspect a lot of those were the folks who voted for Obama and then trump.
Now, after listening to hate and division for the better part of five years, white folks are waking up to what fear and hate have wrought. These people wanted change and they got trumpism.
They didn’t want to get sick with Covid-19 or lose their jobs or health care. They didn’t want to see hate and divisiveness every damn time they watched the news. They didn’t really want to see democratic norms trashed or anyone get killed for no reason in broad daylight. They didn’t want to see us pull out of the Paris agreements or the WHO or nuclear arms deals. They just wanted more of some unidentifiable ‘good life’ and they wanted peace. Instead it got bad and chaotic, and they wanted to turn away. Finally, or so I believe and hope, Americans have come to realize there is no away. It’s all of a piece. It’s all the America they helped create. It’s naked in its cruelty. It’s singed with hate. It’s trump’s ugly America and in what may become a sea change, white Americans are saying no, we can’t.
