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Mourning for America's Lost Soul

While the election results are not final, it is looking as if Donald Trump, a man who in my view is a cruel and dangerous sociopath will be returned to the White House.  Many in America  - the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly - and the world at large with suffer this disastrous decision by American voters.  I take pride that my home state of Virginia rejected Trump, but I shake my head at the millions who voted for this horrible man.  I had perhaps deluded myself into believing that America was better than this, that deep down the vast majority of Americans are good people.   The vote tally so far tells me that the truth is something very different from what I wanted to believe. Clearly, America continues to cling to its racist and misogynistic past and maintaining perceived white privilege outweighs everything else for a majority of Americans. The irony is that if rump does what he has and Project 2025 promise, many Trump voters will suffer greatly financially and many elderly will never be able to retire as Social Security and Medicare face the chopping block so that billionaires can have more tax cuts.  America is now the Germany of 1933.  A post by John Pavlovitz sums up my sadness:

Kamala Harris didn't lose, America did.

As a nation, we collectively failed her—and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.

It's unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a beautiful, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures—we will instead be holding a postmortem for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.

 I truly thought we were better than this, that our shared humanity would show up. I thought we would reject this hatred and ugliness once and for all. I hate being wrong about the majority of the people of this nation.

I don't know what's ahead. All I know is that good-hearted human beings are more necessary now than ever. We did all that we could to avoid this moment, but now that it's here we'll just have to decide who we will be.

There is no way to comprehend or measure how grievous an error this is, but the only thing the decent people of this nation can do is wake up tomorrow and fight like hell for what we still believe is worth the fight, and we will.

I'll be doing that with whoever has the strength to join me. I'm mourning the country we could have been and the one we apparently are—but I refuse to give up believing that compassion is the right path, that diversity makes us better, and that love is greater than fear.

Trump's likely reelection reveals that love is not greater than fear and hatred.  Pavlovitz had two other post that sums up my sentiments:

I will never forgive my family members and former friends for voting for him.

We now know that 2016 wasn't a fluke or an aberration, that this is what the majority wants: whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism, hatred, nihilism. . . . I just know that I'm seeing the nation with my eyes fully open and there is no mistaking what so many people I Ioved and once respected, actually value. 

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Will Women Be Trump's Undoing?

Unless one has had a lobotomy or chugged gallons of MAGA Kool-Aid while tuned in to Fox News, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump holds women in low regard.  He sees women as a male property to be used - and abused and assaulted - at will.  The famous Access Hollywood tape revealed Trump's true view of women.  Much of the male membership of the MAGA base seems to embrace this anti-woman mindset that wants women to be subordinate and controlled by men.  This is certainly true among evangelical and Christian nationalist males who want to reinforce the patriarchy and put women back to a pre-1960 status.   The U.S. Supreme Court's tortured ruling overturning Roe v. Wade had a huge dose of this mindset and viewed it as fine to strip women of control over their own bodies. With election day 2024 now here, a looming question among those of us who see a reelection of Trump with dread and as a nightmare worthy of sleepless nights and distracted days is whether or not women voters will extract their revenge both on Trump and, with luck, the wider field of Republican candidates.  A column in the New York Times looks at this question:

On Saturday evening I was watching a movie with my family when a text message made me gasp so hard that it scared them. “What happened?” my husband asked, worried. “Nothing bad,” I said, slightly overcome. “It’s just … Ann Selzer has Harris up three in Iowa!”

All day, political nerds had been waiting for the results of J. Ann Selzer’s famously accurate poll of Iowa. The state hasn’t been swingy in a long time, but the Selzer poll, conducted for The Des Moines Register, can offer clues about broader trends in the electorate. In 2016, when many Democrats were feeling complacent about a Hillary Clinton victory, her survey showing Donald Trump leading by seven points in Iowa was an early indication of his underestimated strength in the Midwest. . . . . In 2020, her poll again showed Trump ahead by seven points, which was both close to the final tally and, in retrospect, a sign that Joe Biden’s margins in neighboring states like Wisconsin would be much thinner than other polls were indicating.

So many of us were anxious to see how big Trump’s lead would be this time, and the fact that Selzer instead found him losing came as a shock. The poll may easily turn out to be wrong; Selzer’s record is as good as anyone’s in the business, but it’s not perfect. Should Kamala Harris win this election, though, the poll will be part of the story of her victory.

The reason for Selzer’s anomalous finding is simple: women. If it’s anywhere near accurate, it suggests that conventional political wisdom has been seriously underrating the scale of women’s fury over abortion bans and their revulsion at Trump’s cartoonishly macho campaign.

Selzer’s poll shows independent women backing Harris by 28 points, and women 65 and older backing her by 2-1. Speaking to Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Selzer speculated about what might have driven these numbers. “It was over the summer that Iowa’s six-week ban on abortion went into effect after all the court challenges were taken care of,” she said. Now, she said, people have been “living with it for a while.”

Women’s anger has, of course, been a catalytic force in American politics since the insult of Trump’s election in 2016. It drove the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, and persuaded record numbers of Democratic women to run for office in recent cycles. Female rage was rekindled when, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court picks, we lost Roe v. Wade and women in many conservative states were stripped of control over their reproductive lives. The backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended Roe, is probably why the red wave that Republicans were expecting in 2022 never materialized.

Some conservative men have assumed that women’s outrage would fade. “As we settle back into what feels like a status quo,” the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini told NPR last year, it will be “tougher to move people and to message on” abortion. Others on the right decided to lean into the gender gap, hoping to galvanize disaffected young men, including men of color, to make up for their erosion among women.

This appears to be the strategy of the Trump campaign. In 2016, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, were around to help soften his image with at least some female voters. This year, by contrast, Trump’s most influential relative seems to be his aggro oldest son, Don Jr., who reportedly urged Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate, thus giving us a season’s worth of memes about childless cat ladies.

Trump and his aides made the final night of the Republican National Convention seem like a pro wrestling spectacular. The ex-president has spent lots of time courting young men on podcasts.

Forgoing any significant outreach to women, the campaign has created a permission structure for a carnival of trollish misogyny. In a recent video, John McEntee, a former Trump aide likely to be key to any future Trump administration, said, “When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male: M A L E.” At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, a speaker referred to Harris’s “pimp handlers,” all but calling her a prostitute. . . . . The ex-president himself, in one of his latest demonstrations of contempt for women, last week said that if he’s elected, he’d give the anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. responsibility for “women’s health.”

Maybe Trump’s hyper-patriarchal approach will work. A majority of women will almost certainly vote for Harris, but Trump could win even larger margins with men. With most polls showing a dead heat, the green shoots of Democratic hope could be mowed down tomorrow. Among Republicans, however, you can already see a dawning suspicion that the male voters they’re counting on to replace conscientious suburban women may not be wholly reliable. “The core plot of the Barbie movie was distracting men so they wouldn’t vote,” Gaetz wrote on X on Monday. “Don’t make the Barbie movie come true.”

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Trump's Mental Impairment Becomes Ever More Visible

Donald Trump's behavior has never been that of a normal political candidate - despite much of the mainstream media's efforts at false equivalency and pretense that Trump is remotely normal - but over the last weeks and days Trump's behavior and statements have become ever more unhinged, ranging from wanting Liz Cheney to face a firing squad, threatening to use the military against citizens,  to miming giving fellatio to a microphone in Milwaukee.  None of this craziness bothers Trump's MAGA base as long as Trump continues to greenlight that base's racism and hatred towards other American citizens and other non-white, non-heterosexual, non-Christian nationalist individuals and groups.  For sane and truly patriotic Americans, however, Trump's behavior and unhinged statements should be terrifying.  Should Trump regain the White House, a madman will not only wield frightening power - including assess to the nuclear codes - but a veritable campaign against elements of the media, political opponents and other critics could be unleashed.  A column in The Atlantic looks at the terrifying threat facing Americans.  Here are excerpts:

I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.

I could have put it differently. I might have said that “a cognitively impaired man, who has long been showing signs of serious emotional instability and has a history of sexism and racism, engaged in crude behavior in front of a large audience.” But that wouldn’t capture an important reality: This deeply impaired man is tied in the race to become the next president and could be holding the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal in less than three months.

I don’t know if this bizarre display will move votes away from Donald Trump. Nothing seems to dent the loyalty of his base. Trump voters are resolute in their determination to minimize his ghastly antics, or even to scrub them from their minds.

[I]t’s always difficult to single out one terrible moment at a Trump rally when there are so many from which to choose. Last night, for example, he insisted that he won Wisconsin twice. (He didn’t.) He also took a veiled racist shot at the Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Black. . . . Antetokounmpo is a Greek citizen born in Athens of Nigerian immigrant parents.

Trump is white, and we know this, by the way, because he told us so. During a stop in Michigan before he got to Wisconsin, Trump explained that he could have been living an easier life on the golf course had he chosen not to run for president: That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.

[M]y Greek father lived to be 94 years old. He might have found the idea of a Black Greek basketball player kind of amusing, and he might have laughed about it among his poker buddies. My dad was a working-class, shot-and-beer guy who told more than his share of sexist and racist jokes.

But if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d have brought him in for a complete neurological workup.

Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important, manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.

I do not know if Trump’s erratic behavior, his apparent physical decline, his bizarre rambles and their mental cul-de-sacs are part of a larger illness. Trump’s critics claim that he has dementia and other afflictions.

I know this much: If Donald Trump were your father, your husband, your brother, your uncle, or merely your friend, you would insist that he see a doctor, and you would likely shield him from large gatherings where he could become an object of ridicule. You might even suggest that family or friends look in on him more often.

Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.

The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part, laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few days must take its place.

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