image   CHAPTER TWELVE   image

Why You Got Trump

The Normals chose Trump. And it was not okay with the Smart Set.

He was no expert, at least not at governing. Now Hillary Clinton—there was an expert! Trained at the finest schools, studying at the side of a master politician, versed in the crafts of domestic governance and foreign policy, she was the Smartest Woman in the World. Plus, it was her turn, damn it!

Her turn!

And then those rednecks chose Trump.

What the folks snickering at that New Yorker cartoon about that troublesome, presumptuous, uppity passenger who dared want a say in where he was being taken forgot is that those people who voted against her saw that while she had the credentials that so impressed the Smart Set, Hillary Clinton was terrible at everything she did.

Just terrible.

Her domestic policy legacy was the Clinton health care plan that blew up like the Hindenburg without the humanity. In foreign policy, when she wasn’t making an idiot of herself by handing reset buttons to baffled Russkies, she was sparking bloodbaths in Libya—and letting our folks get butchered in Benghazi. The Elite hated and resented accountability, and it never saw Their Girl’s accountability coming until Michigan flipped into the red column on November 8, 2016.

And there was another thing—Hillary did not know her place, and the Normals knew it. Not her place as a woman—the Elite did what they always did when a liberal woman failed and blamed her rejection on sexism. It was her place as the future president. She did not go into the job search with a sense of humility. She mouthed the right words about working for the People, but no one believed it, not her opponents who distrusted her and not her supporters who never wanted her to work for the People.

She was in it for herself and for her Elite cronies, and everyone could see it. And the Normals were tired of it.

That New Yorker cartoon dissing the upstart passenger demanding some input in his ultimate destination—or, more specifically, the attitude behind it—is Why You Got Trump.

Every high school dropout with a zillion-dollar contract and a desire to appear to be more than a goofy clown on a late-night comedy show using his monologue to lecture Normals on why they ought to be thrilled about Obamacare is Why You Got Trump.

Hillary Clinton skipping out on the pokey for her classified materials antics when any Normal who did the same thing in uniform would still be at Fort Leavenworth converting boulders to pebbles is Why You Got Trump.

A silver-spoon doofus tries to exorcise his guilt by shoving illegal aliens down Normals’ throats and christening it an act of love—one Ned Beatty would appreciate—is Why You Got Trump.

There are a thousand reasons Why You Got Trump.

The insults.

The attitude.

The nearly unbroken track record of incompetence from the people who presume to be our betters but refuse to be held accountable when they prove again and again and again that they aren’t.

The double dealing, double standards, and double crosses. They are all Why You Got Trump.

And what’s stunning, and hilarious, is that the Elite did not see it coming.

But why would they? They never cared to look. They were like the courtiers of Louis XVI who had zero idea of what was coming until François looked over the Seine and said, “Sacre bleu, Pierre, it looks like the Bastille’s on fire! Wonder how that happened? Oh well, back to our cake and Champagne!”

And they still don’t get it. Hillary stumbled her way through India in early 2018, and then decided it would be great optics to explain to her foreign hosts that the reason she lost is that half of America is terrible. Her saying out loud what the Elite thinks even shocked the Washington Post, which headlined its report on that latest fiasco “Hillary Clinton Takes Her ‘Deplorables’ Argument for Another Spin.”1

Clinton offered some rather unvarnished remarks that weekend in India that sound a lot like her “deplorables” commentary from September 2016. She played up the states that supported her as more economically advanced than the states that voted for Trump, calling them “dynamic” and “moving forward.” Then she again suggested Trump supporters were motivated by animosity toward women and people of color.

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” Clinton said. “I win the coast. I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota—places like that.”

She went on: “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Then she turned to Trump’s voters: “And his whole campaign—‘Make America Great Again’—was looking backward. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights; you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs; you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are—you know, whatever your problem is, I’m gonna solve it.”

Wow.

The alienation of the Elite from the nation they are supposed to serve is immense, and this kind of thinking should not be a surprise. It has been in effect for a while. Back in the sixties, the young Elite went to cultural war with their Elite parents and differentiated themselves by casting off the older generation’s attachment to America’s common morals and mores. No, the Elite did not always honor the kind of Main Street values the Normals embraced, but they generally did, and they certainly did not attack those values and seek to overthrow the cultural regime that had made the United States the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

The young Elite of the sixties? Burn, baby, burn.

The young Elite had inherited a utopia—all they had to do was keep on doing what their parents were doing and slip into vacant positions when the older generation got put out to pasture. But they wanted the power right then, and the way to do it was to change the game. It was to play on their own terms—and their own terms did not involve actually tipping their hat to the values the Normals embraced.

They differentiated themselves from the older generation of the Elite by rejecting the values the older generation venerated—values of faith and patriotism, of sexual modesty and self-sacrifice. In fact, they wanted to do more than just differentiate themselves. Barack Obama’s pal Bill Ayers advocated a slightly harder line that was repeated in a loving New York Times tribute that ran, ironically, on September 11, 2001: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”2

So, in the least shocking development ever, the young left alienated themselves from the Normals.

As the older generation of the Elite retired and faded away, the Me Generation slowly slipped into the institutions and began their own long march to conquer the heights of culture and government. They brought with them that profound alienation from those on whose behalf they presumed to rule that they got from listening to Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the poisonous Frankfurt School disciples who spread out through academia. Expressly anti-capitalist, but more than that, anti-bourgeois, the critical theory nonsense these charlatans pushed was irresistible to a generation of young Elitists whose parents’ achievements—lifting the world from poverty and ignorance, defeating Nazism—set a standard they could never hope to match. So they embraced a doctrine that excused their meritlessness by providing a plausible-enough moral framework to allow them to justify their own essential worthlessness.

As a practical matter, the psychodrama of an Elite generation that deep down understood it was not actually elite in any meaningful sense led to our present predicament, a situation where our Elite has nothing but contempt for those they presume to rule.

Of course, the Elite never saw Trump coming. By the time he rode down that escalator with his Slovenian supermodel wife and started his campaign off by saying exactly what most Americans outside the big, blue cities were thinking about illegal immigrants, the Elite had grown distant from Normals not merely in terms of geography but culturally.

When the Elite traveled, it was to the opposite coast or to Western Europe, where they found people much like themselves, people not limited by some primitive attachment to the idea of nationalism. Instead, they felt more akin to the transnational Elite. They would be citizens of the world, not just their own parochial country. Traditional citizenship? That didn’t matter anymore—in fact, it was an obstacle to progress. It complicated the migration that would allow the Elite to import a much more complacent and obedient electorate from the Third World, which was wonderful and beautiful and not at all a bunch of shitholes. Yet it would be a moral outrage to send any aliens back to them.

The Elite was loyal only to itself.

Still, some Normals welcomed their new hipster overlords. The Normals are a diverse lot. But most Normals just got royally pissed off.

The unspoken bargain between the Normals and the Elite was always that if the Elite kept things running smoothly they could have their power and prestige. No Normal ever expected the Elite not to take a little off the top for itself, to do some skimming like a mob boss running a Vegas casino.

But it was a deal the Elite seemed to forget it had made, maybe because it was their dads who made it over previous generations. By 2016, the Elite stopped bothering to even pretend to perform its part of the bargain. It did not even recognize that there was a deal anymore.

Hillary was to be crowned not because of what she could do for the people, but because the people owed it to her.

The Elite became convinced that it ruled not at the sufferance of the Normals and for the masses’ benefit, but because of its own righteousness and merit. It ruled by divine right, though of course all that stuff about God was hick bait for the Jesus freaks in Deliveranceland.

And the Elite convinced itself that its own merit derived not from actually doing anything meritorious, but from simply being who they were. They had merit because they were the Elite, not vice versa, and the Elite was open to anyone who chose to harken to its dogma.

So, basically, anyone could be Elite by calling himself, or herself, or xirself, “Elite” and believing in the things the Elite believed in—which mostly boiled down to believing that the Elite was elite and entitled to rule without accountability.

The Normals never signed on to that.

Normals were faced with a bunch of insufferable snobs who thought the rules did not apply to them—though the rules sure as hell applied to the Normals—and who were not constrained by any limitations other than their own desires. And the Normals? When they were a consideration at all, the fact that something made life harder for Normals was a selling point.

Let’s take away a lane Normals commute on to work and make it a bike lane that one guy an hour will use while the suckers sit idling on gridlocked streets.

Wait, the Elite did that in Los Angeles recently, without bothering to ask the Normal victims of its altruism. “‘Change is hard, and people’s first reaction to change is the most negative,’ said Seleta Reynolds, the Transportation Department’s general manager. It helps, she says, if the public is involved in the process.… That was not the case for Vista del Mar, one of the few major streets that bypasses Los Angeles International Airport and connects the South Bay and the Westside. Last month, with little warning, the city narrowed the beachfront street to one lane in each direction in an effort to reduce liability for fatal traffic collisions.”3 Los Angeles backtracked hard when the Normals got up and drew the line.

Let’s import a bunch of foreigners to work under the table for half pay.

Who needs Americans? “If we lose the workers who are here illegally, it’s hard to see how they’ll be replaced, because Americans are reluctant to take these jobs, particularly the ones harvesting crops.” So observed a Washington Post columnist on March 17, 2017, in an article that does not explore the option of paying Normal Americans a decent wage to do this work.4 It does, however, recommend paying foreigners more, presumably to obtain the worst of both worlds by creating a more expensive labor force to replace Americans.

Let’s make a bunch of movies about how America’s soldiers are either psycho killers or guilt-ridden basket cases, and then cry like preteen girls when a rare movie depicts American warriors—Normals, of course—as the badass killers they typically are.

In a Scientific American (!) article from February 2, 2015, titled “What War Propaganda Like ‘American Sniper’ Reveals about Us,”5 one John Horgan speaks for much of the Elite when he announced that a “real-life ‘hero,’ Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, was a child killer.” It’s always good to obtain clarity, and Horgan’s disgusting slander of a man whose combat boots he is unfit to lick offers a crystal-clear insight into what a big chunk of the Elite really thinks.

Now, let’s shove all of this garbage in the Normals’ faces and laugh at how they have to just sit there and take it.

Except the Elite didn’t really know Americans very well.

Americans are not a “sit there and take it” kind of people. Hell, even the French eventually stood up for themselves. It should have been no surprise that the American Normals would, and did.

The Elite took Trump as a calculated insult by the people they thought they ruled, and it was hard to imagine any other reasonable conclusion. Trump was a giant walking, talking middle finger to the Elite. And the Elite did everything it could to ensure that the Normals understood that voting for him would create great disappointment among the ruling class. They were a face, aching for a pie.

But why Trump?

He certainly did not embody the values of the Normals, at least on the surface. He was thrice married, with multiple dalliances in between and during them. He lived in a gold-trimmed palace and flew around in his own jet and stuck his name on everything he built.

Maybe that was it—he built. He did something, something you could see and touch. He built. The Normals built, too, maybe not skyscrapers and casinos, but they sometimes built buildings and sometimes built cars and sometimes they built businesses. Trump, like them, was about the real world even if his personal life seemed more like a fantasy.

In Trump’s world, like in the world of the Normals, what you did mattered. He was a bottom-line guy for bottom-line people. His talk of winning resonated—you either won, or you lost, and there was no room for participation trophies in the cutthroat real estate jungle of New York just like there were no participation trophies in the real world the Normals called home.

What did you build if you were a journalist? A reputation? What, among other Elites? What did journalists risk? Sure, Dan Rather had some hard times back in 2004 when he decided to run with that manifestly bogus National Guard letter about George W. Bush. He lost his job at CBS—you could almost see them grimace as they cut him loose—but he should not have worried. The Elite came back with a plan to resurrect him. It started with a terrible movie about his unstoppable quest for truth—called Truth (2015), of course—that painted him as the victim of a terrifying conspiracy determined to cruelly hold him accountable for taking a giant dump on what was left of the concept of journalistic ethics. And recently, Rather has been running around networks like MSNBC as some sort of journalist emeritus.

Pathetic.

But did Dan Rather ever actually do anything? No, he functioned in an environment of theory and shadows, striking the right poses, mouthing the right clichés, and trying to crucify the right enemy. He endured and prospered until he got caught.

And then he endured afterward. Stephanie Ruhle even dragged his wizened countenance on to her MSNBC show to—seriously—opine on journalistic standards with a focus on Fox News.6 Perhaps for her next guest, she could get some insights into fighting sexism from Clinton friend and noted Democrat donor Harvey Weinstein.

But what happens to Normals who screw up? They face real consequences long before they experience a Rather-level foul-up. And they don’t get the entire ruling class to tacitly agree never to bring it up again.

How about an assistant adjunct professor at some law school who pens a tome titled something like Transgender Issues in Uniform Commercial Code Article 9 Jurisprudence? Is there any chance, even the slightest possibility, that someone is going to come to him and say, “You know, you contribute nothing to what we are doing here, and you need to go away.”

There’s no chance. It will never happen. Instead he, or she, or whatever pronoun it chooses will have a soft, comfy gig forever.

Trump was about achievement. That’s where the whole “winning” meme came from. He did not just fight—and it was great to see him fight—but he competed. He got in the arena and battled and came out on top with an Eastern European hottie and a ton of dough. Even his alleged pre-presidential dalliances demonstrated dominance. How many men were really surprised—or all that concerned—that Trump used to score with Playboy Playmates?

Normals competed, too. They fought hard for what they had. Sure, so did some of the Elite, but decades of watching half-steppers who never did a damn thing presume to pronounce their judgments upon the lesser mortals out in Normalland left the Normals receptive to a guy who loved to compete and loved to win.

Americans love a winner, General George Patton told his men in his famous speech to the Third Army that George C. Scott recreated for the 1970 film Patton.7

Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best, and it removes all that is base.

No, Normal Americans will not tolerate a loser. Truer words were never spoken.

And Trump was a winner going in. And he kept winning even as he refused to compromise. The Elite swarmed like wasps, but they could barely lay a stinger on him. He just kept going, saying things millions of Americans thought but had been taught they were not allowed to say.

He called illegal aliens “illegal aliens” and pointed out that some of them were dirtbags.

You can’t say that!

He said guns were cool and that the reason the Constitution talked about them was so that the citizens could resist tyranny.

You can’t say that!

He called Hillary corrupt and incompetent, and the whole Elite swamp, too.

You sure as hell can’t say that!

But Trump did. And people responded to the one guy who would say what they thought.

They called it the Trump Train, and it’s a solid analogy. It just kept chugging along down the track toward its destination. The whole time, the entire Elite sought to derail it. But at every stop, more and more folks hopped aboard.

Especially men. It didn’t help that Hillary gave off the vibe that she had a beef with manhood. Her cold, remote father probably started it, and it’s reasonable to expect that Bill’s shenanigans took a toll on her patience for the unfair sex. But now she was wearing the pantsuit in the Clinton family. Poor Bill had been shuttled off to the gimp box to wait out the election and her inevitable victory.

She was womyn, hear her bore.

It must grate on her to know that if she had actually listened to Bill, who knew Normals and at least was able to fake an affinity for them, she might not be stumbling through the woods of Chappaqua today half-hammered on seven-dollar Trader Joe’s Chardonnay.

Men were Trump’s secret. He was manly in a way few men in the public eye had been in a long time. If you looked at him on the stage with the 378 other Republicans, he was the only one who really looked like he would get in your face. Well, Chris Christie might, particularly if you had doughnuts.

Who else up there was going to fight? Ted Cruz would, but like a gentleman, with arguments and reason, and of course neither of those applied against the Elite. It’s hard to leverage arguments and reason against people who accept an unshakeable liberal dogma on faith.

Trump was alpha, and he did not apologize for it. He embraced it, reveled in it, and promised men that with him in the White House, America was going to be alpha again, too.

The thing is, Normals identify with America. It is part of their identity in a way it can’t be to some Davos-loving Elitist goof who considers himself a “citizen of the world.” So when he promised to Make America Great Again, what he was promising the Normals was to make them great again.

Hillary was promising four to eight years of nagging and hectoring, culminating with her confiscating their guns and their testicles.

Trump promised strength and prosperity. Hillary promised more weakness and more decline.

Not a super-tough choice.

It would be silly to say that every Normal loved Trump, that they all sat in awe of him, that he completed them like some sort of orangey Jerry Maguire.

They didn’t.

Many of them actively disliked him. After all, superficially much of what he did and said clashed with the values the Normals celebrated. Faith? He talked about it more and more as the race continued, but he was no born-again holy roller. In some ways, he was closer to an unholy roller. Yet many evangelicals harkened to his call. Why?

Simple. Trump didn’t hate them.

The Democrats would sober up Hillary long enough to trot her out in front of some black church congregation and, in her best What I Imagine Deeply Religious Black Churchwomen Talk Like voice, she would announce, “I don’t feel no ways tired.”

But you always knew that, once she was done, she would be riding off in the back of her limo on the way to the airport, nursing a Smirnoff and laughing at the marks she had just left cheering in her wake.

Evangelicals knew what she thought of them, even if she would prattle on about her Methodist upbringing. Of course, like most mainline denominations, by 2016 the Methodists had turned so liberal it was doubtful they even had Jesus anymore.

And the working class? Trump at least seemed to know they existed. Who else went out to factories, to farms, to the third- and fourth-tier towns and packed arenas full of people who the Elite would prefer not to know existed—at least until their co-op ran out of arugula and cilantro and they wondered why the bins had not been magically refilled.

The Democrats, the party of the Elite, its vehicle, had abandoned them, and it had done it consciously. The old Democrats were the Party of the Working Man. The new Democrats were the Party of the Soft Hands and the Unworking. White collar? Welcome to the Dems. Lazy? Hey, vote Dem and you’ll get your scraps. Outraged that people in Kansas are living the way they see fit? Join the Donkeys.

A guy who turned wrenches had no place in the modern Democrat Party. The wrench part made the Elites uncomfortable, and the turning it made the shiftless welfare cheats uncomfortable.

Another piece of the puzzle were the working minorities. These were Normals, people who loved their families and worked hard and for some insane reason kept buying the bottled bullshit the Elite was selling. There was a huge pull of tradition and habit toward the Democrats, but also a rising sense that those snobs always talked a good game when they needed votes, but little ever changed. According to NBC News, reporting on November 9, 2016, in 2012, Mitt Romney, a guy so white rice once sued him for copyright infringement, got 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Trump got 29 percent. Trump also received 33.3 percent more of the black vote than Mitt did, but that meant he got 8 percent to Romney’s 6 percent.8

With the media going 24/7 about how Trump was going to deport everyone who ever met a Latino and how he was going to restart the Klan, too, because of course he was, it was no shock. Still, Trump improved on the numbers. At least there the Democrats could breathe a sigh of relief. They had to go all in on minorities—if the non-Anglo population ever went for any Republican in any significant numbers, it was curtains for the Democrats. There just were not enough Elites out there to win the Electoral College—which suddenly became retroactively racist in 2016—and they needed their minority allies to be competitive since they had driven off the working whites. The Elite felt good and woke doing so, but their wokeness meant they woke up to President Trump on November 9, 2016.

Why Trump?

Why not?

What choice was there?

That shrill harridan who hated everything the Normals stood for, who trashed them as “deplorable” when she wasn’t falling over?

Trump made it possible for the Normals to vote for him, but it was Hillary Clinton who made it necessary for them to vote for him.

They say luck is opportunity meeting preparation. Hillary and the decades of misbehavior of her Elite pals provided him the opportunity, and after decades in the public eye he was prepared.

Sure, Trump got lucky. But Hillary Clinton did not get unlucky.

She just sucked, and everyone knew it.

But Trump? He would fight for them. And they knew it.

So they elected him.

So what next?