Let’s not mince words. I regret that Hillary Clinton has walked back her statement that half of Trump supporters are deplorable. Because, while I don’t know if it is in fact literally half, or more, or less, there is no mistaking the crux of her argument: Donald Trump is deplorable. His views are deplorable. His lack of policy knowledge is deplorable. His bilking of contractors and “students” and workers is deplorable.
It is deplorable to suggest the deportation of 11 million people is justice, breaking up families, sending people back to neighborhoods and regions with such appalling conditions that they were willing to risk absolutely everything to try to escape. It is deplorable to refer to these same people, flippantly, as rapists and criminals.
It is deplorable to suggest banning refugees solely on religion while their homeland burns around them and their children die of starvation. It is deplorable to suggest a database of people of the Muslim religion. It is deplorable to support torture, which has been scientifically disproven as effective, to say nothing of inhumane and dangerous for our own troops.
It is deplorable to disrespect POWs and Gold Star families, to call women pigs and dogs and reference their hormonal cycles as proof of instability. It is deplorable to start unsubstantiated and roundly debunked rumors about your opponent’s health, and to use 9/11 to apply for small business loans you don’t deserve or need.
The list goes on and on. There has never been a campaign like this. The press doesn’t know what to do with it. The public doesn’t know what to do with it. We were scandalized and incredulous. And then we were puzzled. Now we’ve been numbed and this behavior has been normalized.
When Hillary Clinton calls it deplorable, she’s exactly right.
When a couple of guys beat up and then urinated on a homeless Latino man in Boston, saying that “Trump is right!,” Trump tepidly denounced the action, and then followed up with, “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”
If that doesn’t immediately turn your stomach, if that doesn’t make you question the very fabric of this country, then yes, you are deplorable. And if you can read through the list above and find no issue with it, then that, too, is deplorable.
Trump has now tried to leverage this completely legitimate criticism as an insult to his supporters. The real insult is that his supporters are so caught up in Trumpism that they can’t even recognize the stench that emanates from this man and from this campaign. Or perhaps it’s just that he has so normalized bad behavior, intolerance and the bellowing louder technique that this is actually what our country has become. In a long-ago blog, back on Super Tuesday, in March, I said that Trump had invited the Orcs out to play, and they had come in droves. I stand by that characterization.
Trump is a child caught red-handed stealing someone else’s bicycle from the playground, and then howling with such ferocity that he didn’t do it – probably the Mexican or the Muslim did – that the facts become a buried lead, halfway down a news article that no one read past the headline of his manufactured outrage.
The defense will be that not all Trump supporters are racists. Not all Trump supporters are xenophobic. Not all Trump supporters believe that encouraging one of the world’s thug autocrats (whose opponents end up dead) to meddle in the US election is a good idea. Fair enough. I’d like to believe that.
As Hillary Clinton said in the same section of her remarks, there is a sizable faction of Trump supporters who are simply looking for change. Who “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”
Not everyone who will vote for him is formed in Trump’s image. They will vote for a myriad of reasons I won’t understand, but that I can’t discredit. But enough people who call themselves Trump supporters have lapped up his – yes, deplorable – racist, xenophobic fear-mongering as to give the United States a black eye on the world stage, and a case of full traction at home. It will take years for the nation to overcome his hateful campaign rhetoric and that is another tragedy of this campaign.
Vote for Hillary, or don’t. There are other choices. Vote for Gary Johnson who is a two-term governor and businessman who wants to, in his words, “Make America sane again,” or don’t. Vote for state and local government who you believe in to make communities strong again and skip the top of the ticket.
But before voting for Donald Trump, ask yourself if you’d be okay with our nation’s children growing up listening to his greatest hits. If that is what you want their backbone to be. If that is how you want them to treat their siblings, their classmates, and eventually their own children.
“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me… I would bomb the sh**t out of them.”
“I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them. No, no. I was going to hit them, I was all set and then I got a call from a highly respected governor… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard his head would spin and he wouldn’t know what the hell happened…”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems…they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
“If she gets to pick her judges – nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people. Maybe there is. I don’t know.”
“Women: You have to treat them like s–t.”
If the answer is yes, yes this rhetoric is okay, yes this is how we would raise our children… then Hillary Clinton is talking to you. I hope she keeps talking. And I’d think of all people, Donald J. Trump would appreciate her telling it like it is.
Wonderful commentary, Rebecca. I wish I shared the optimism in your statement that “It will take years for the nation to overcome…” In my opinion we will never fully recover from any of this. Not the hateful campaign rhetoric, not the lying, not the fear-mongering, and certainly not the black eye we’ve garnered. The second law of thermodynamics infers that systems move from stability to chaos without an external force to maintain the stability. I don’t think any part of our federal government, (or our society as a whole), thinks rationally enough anymore to maintain us as a stable presence on the world stage. We shall see.
I forget who said, “In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve,” but it feels depressingly true right now.