POTUS 45 is the “Chosen One” Because of, not Despite, his Incompetence
How the Moral Majority became (yet always was) the Immoral Minority
Charla McComic believes that her son’s health insurance premium decreased after he lost his job because of POTUS-45. As a result, she doesn’t believe she needs to worry about her granddaughter. She feels “safe” because of this president. She claims to be a Christian. The only other person for whom she would campaign as hard as she did was for “the Lord.” The Washington Post reported this from the campaign rally in Nashville, fifty miles from where I live, held two months after the 2016 campaign ended, before her candidate has passed anything at all.
I think I get it. Finally. I get it. I think I’ve figured out why we went from Obama Nation to abomination in the White House. I know why we have an (obviously) race-baiting, (admittedly) sexual assaulting, (apparently) woman-hating, (amazingly) Gold Star Family-bashing, (allegedly) billion-dollar losing, (outrageously) disabled-citizen mocking, (intransigently) violence suborning, and not terribly bright white male living (occasionally) in Washington D.C., who refuses to represent those in a clear majority because they did not vote for him.
When Jake Tapper told Bill Maher that many people voted for P-45 despite things like the Access Hollywood tape (start at 4:35), I wanted to agree, because I’m a Tapper fan. But I knew he was wrong (I’ve heard he prefers Sammy Hagar to David Lee Roth in Van Halen, so that should have been a clue of fault lines in his pedestal).
Reaching my conclusions took the kind of delving into reason and experience that I’d like to think Michel de Montaigne, originator of the essay, would have appreciated. Smashing myths and lies with the truth-seeking methods of M. de Montaigne, Miss Marple, and my guy Sherlock Holmes, I eliminated the impossible and what’s left, regardless of how improbable, must be the truth.
First, the impossible. I remember the days when the word “Conservative” could refer to decent people like Senator Howard Baker from my home state of Tennessee, people whose ethics did not limit themselves solely to self interest and harsh judgments of people on the opposing aisle of Congress, or William F. Buckley, whose ideas were wrong but rational (plus he wrote a nice little mystery). But fomented in the era of Newt Gingrich, “Conservative” became a respectable-sounding euphemism for radical authoritarians or white supremacists. Let’s look at their initial credo: Morality, Public Safety, National Security, Economy, and Immigration.
MORALITY
Remember that the infamous “moral majority” once claimed that “secular humanists” were fomenting the degeneracy of American society. Sexual modesty and biblical “literalness” became the order of the day, alongside faithfulness in marriage and protection of the family. Because of the hostility of their rhetoric, and the judging despite the biblical injunction to “judge not” (Matthew 7:1–3), it was clear to some of us living on Truth Continent that such claims were bogus. And when political leaders of Alabama start slandering Joseph and the Virgin Mary to protect Roy Moore who, according to credible reports, molested a fourteen-year-old child when he was a 32-year-old state prosecutor, well, we can completely dismiss any idea that they’re about morality and commitment to family.
The POTUS-45 they support brags about his multiple affairs, including grabbing women by their genitals, preferably (it seems) without their permission, and barging into dressing rooms filled half-dressed underaged beauty queen wannabes. He uses profanity and crude language as a matter of course. He has had three wives and has never, to my knowledge, lived with all of his children for any long-term span of years at any time in their lives. The first accused him of rape and then recanted; the second, his mistress while he was married, bore his child two months before he married her; the third posed nude in BDSM gear for a magazine.
And as for respect for women? “You have to treat ’em like shit,” he told New York magazine in 1992 when he was 46, which is old enough to know better. He later commented to Robin Leach on a 1994 episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that his infant daughter Tiffany had her mother Marla Maple’s legs but it was too early to tell about . . . and then he gestured at his chest. In joking (?) on The View in 2006 that his elder daughter Ivanka has “a very nice figure,” adding that if she weren’t his daughter, “perhaps, I would be dating her,” after having commenting to Howard Stern in 2003 in his typical overused hyperbole that “she’s got the best body.” One can’t help but notice the resemblance between his daughter and his third wife.
As his legion of supporters skulked toward the voting booths in suburbs around the country, these ostensible “focus on the family” folk were clearly aware that the white male whose name they chose after, I feel certain, misleading pollsters, had publicly allowed another white male to refer to his own daughter as a “piece of ass” (I feel like washing my computer’s mouth out with soap just for typing that). In a video of him in church, it’s clear he has no idea what to do with the bulletin or hymnal. And none of this was secret. He said and did all of this in widely disseminated public spaces: magazines, radio, television. So, voting for the Republican nominee could not have been based on issues of family or morality. Impossible.
PUBLIC SAFETY
Conservatives often rant about public safety, claiming that criminals are given too much slack and need to be sent away for decades for even the most minor of infractions. Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate, was excoriated for wanting to review each case separately at the human level rather than using mechanical mandatory sentencing, with no regard for circumstances. Of course, that was when minorities were thought to be committing every crime in the book: small, medium and the large economy size.
When black people become the victims, though, when public scrutiny begins to accompany reports and videos of the Castiles, Blands, Scotts, Floyds, Taylors, et al, arrested during everyday traffic stops, dying on the way to jail, shot in the back, suffocated, and literally killed in their beds by White police officers, or the Martins and Arberys hunted down and killed by White citizens, the Neo-Cons utter barely a peep about public safety.
If POTUS-45 is to be believed (normally a massive “IF” about the size of Jupiter and its moons combined, but this time his statements are supported by notable numbers of reputable female citizens), he has committed crimes against women and consistently supported Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, men paying millions to settle cases with their accusers.
His administration has also decided to take the most vicious and longstanding domestic terrorists off the list of concerns addressed by the Countering Violent Extremism program. These would be the KKK, Aryan Nation and other white supremacists. P-45, the media hog has maintained complete radio silence on the clear uptick reported by Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch on violence perpetuated by those who apparently share his worldview. This includes the shooting of two Indians on proper visas in Kansas, the shooting of a U.S. citizen belonging to the Sikh religion in Washington state, the mosque shooting in Quebec City, and the mosque torching in Victoria Texas. I have a connection to Victoria, so I wrote about this latter for the Salt Collective blog. His comments on a similar uptick in Anti-Semitic threats and cemetery desecrations were slow in coming and even then had some of his signature “blame the victim” moves.
And what about that ritornello lie that crime is higher than it has been in, what was it, 47 years? It’s not. In fact, just the opposite. They’d put the “lie” in leitmotiv if they could spell it. Instead his supporters have voted to put guns in the hands of those diagnosed as “severely mentally ill”! They’re also protesting Virginia laws that would keep guns out of the hands of those convicted of domestic violence. What could possibly go wrong?
And even now after a sparsely attended (thank the Lord) rally amid a Covid uptick in Tulsa, where his base of predominantly elderly, “Stroke Belt,” sedentary cultists were packed into an indoors space with masks optional, he has not lost his hardcore supporters, the very ones he’s putting at risk. He’s planned this despite severe warnings from both local and national public health experts. Next stop: Arizona, which is also suffering a spike. So choosing P-45 is not about public safety for all. Impossible.
NATIONAL SECURITY
And what about national security? Under the last Republican president we suffered 9/11, the worst attack by foreigners on our home soil since Pearl Harbor (and FDR, a Democrat, had not received the warnings as did the Bush administration). Under President Obama, far fewer Americans have been killed at home and abroad (including our military and non-Americans); Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind 9/11 has met his maker; and there has been no major attack by foreign nationals on American soil.
But nowadays, Russia, our most longstanding enemy, has been involved in our election and they’ve been communicating with Trump folks prior to the inauguration. The POTUS’s junior high bullying of Kim Jong-Un (whom he can’t seem to tell from his father Kim Jong-Il or his grandfather Kim Il-Sung) could still lead to the brink of nuclear war, despite the “beautiful letter” Jong-Un reportedly wrote. Oh, BTW, North Korea just blew up a building where joint work with South Korea had been occurring.
And this administration has let Saudi Arabia kill an American resident, dismembering him. Nary a peep from the base.
And we mustn’t overlooks reports about National Security Advisor John Bolton’s new book, reveal that P-45 was willing to do favors for China, our biggest rival since the Soviet Union, if they would help him get re-elected. That would put the US at risk when the bill came due. (We’ll leave to another day Bolton’s venal willingness to avoid Congressional testimony and let this menace stay in office so the bucks from his presumed bestseller can start rolling in. Who’s interested in National Security, anyway?) So, it can’t be about National Security. Impossible.
ECONOMY
Let’s talk greenbacks. Despite the fact that the deficit went up with unemployment when the several Republicans have previously been in office, and the economy came within an inch of crashing and burning under the last Republican president, whose incompetence contributed to innumerable families losing their jobs and homes despite the fact that the Democrat before had left us with a surplus (although it’s arguable that said Democrat started some of the financial collapse), you still hear that plaint about fiscal responsibility.
Of course, many of us knew that what “Tea Party” Conservatives meant by fiscal responsibility could often be translated as “give me tons of tax breaks, so I can buy a second Gulfstream, but don’t give anything to poor folks (especially the lazy dark ones, which are basically all of them).” The fact that the current inhabitant of the White House started his professional career as a toddler with a multimillion-dollar head start from daddy, had to be bailed out more than once by said daddy, sent jobs to China and elsewhere, refused to pay workers on more than one occasion, went through at least four Chapter 11 bankruptcies, and lost nearly a billion dollars, means that folks didn’t vote for him because he was good with money. And that was before he signed tax credits that ballooned the deficit, and mismanaged the Covid response so badly the economic futures of most of his followers has tanked. So it can’t be about the economy. Impossible.
IMMIGRATION
This is the easy one. This is a national security/immigration combo platter No citizens or immigrants from the past and present “Muslim ban” countries have attacked us, yet none of the countries who actually have attacked us are included in the ban. Not Saudi Arabia, 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden’s homeland; not Pakistan, the country that hid bin Laden; not United Arab Emirates, homeland of two 9/11 terrorists; not Egypt, homeland of one 9/11 terrorist. But in the initial ban, there was a “carve out” for Christians. And coincidentally, with exception of Pakistan, these most of these “not” countries are places where P-45 seems to have business ties.
But what about immigrants from South of the Border? Certainly it can’t be about about Mexican immigrant crime, since the highly respected Brookings Institution reports that first-generation immigrants have a lower crime rate than the general populace. And there is no apparent concern about immigration from Canada or Europe (although an Australian children’s author was briefly detained). So it can’t be about immigrants. Impossible.
Therefore, having eliminated the impossible, we must move to the improbable.
Frightened whites of all stripes consider minorities to be a threat. This is simply a fact. You can tell by all the gigantic myth pills they are willing to swallow without choking (like most people on welfare are black or Hispanic, blacks get more college scholarships than whites, the majority of whites are killed by blacks, Sikhs are just like Muslims, Muslims are all terrorists, etc.). A Boston University study showed that whites become much more “anti-minority” when they think about the possibility of becoming minorities themselves some day.
With the changing demographics, soon these nervous nellies will no longer be able to control every major office as they have for hundreds of years — sometimes based on merit, to be sure, but too often based on laws and practices that excluded any competition from women and minorities.
When Victoria Woodhull ran for President in 1870 with Frederick Douglass (may he rest in peace) as the VP candidate, women didn’t yet have the right to vote so she was arrested. Nearly 150 years later, voter suppression is alive and kicking (people out of the voting booth). Notice that nobody’s talking about illegal Canadian immigrants; nobody’s calling them raping criminals. POTUS-45 is even married to a woman who (allegedly) worked illegally in this country, but nobody’s talking about rescinding her citizenship.
The threat became more immediate when a black president was elected. Who did we think we were? We people of color had exhibited the ultimate in uppityness. We had to be taught a lesson. Don’t believe me? Well then, what about the 300+ hate incidents by white men against women and minorities reported in post-2016 election week? More personally, what about the swastika carved into a Methodist church where I play in Tennessee, birthplace of the Klan? The mosque burned down in a town I annually write concert program notes for in Texas, where the news of abolition was delayed? What about these:
To teach us this lesson, the frightened huddling masses yearning to choke off freedom chose the person most unprepared, least competent; most boorish, least charitable; most immoral, least fiscally responsible; most talkative, least honest; most verbally violent; least willing to serve his country either in the military, by keeping jobs here, or by getting swabs made to save our lives. They chose, in fact, what seems to be the worst of all possible White men to show us all that the only thing that really matters to these decently middle-class on the outside, radically fearful on the inside Whites is White maleness — that White male superiority is all they want, all they’ve ever wanted. (Is it a coincidence that I just saw “white Oreos” in the grocery store).
This is the drove of Americans who gave preferential treatment to white Nazi prisoners over black fellow soldiers. After all, according to New York Times reporting:
Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, the military governor of the American zone from 1945 to 1947, said that it would take 100 years before “the Negro will develop to the point where he will be on a parity with white Americans.”
This is the drove of Americans who drained a hotel swimming pool when the gorgeous Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toe in it. This election was the optimal expression of putting minorities (and women) in their places.
Consider this incident that happened a week after the *election* (sorry, I had to delete “debacle”): My sister, a corporate executive, was sitting in one of Nashville’s more exclusive restaurants with a group of female friends. The White male waiter comes to the table to take their order, but before doing so, he looks around at the table of stylishly dressed professional African American women whose accomplishments had clearly outpaced his own and, a propos of nothing, informs them that he had had to “hold his nose” to vote for the Republican nominee, in other words, the candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. In this way, he was establishing his superiority over minority women whose obvious success he, just as obviously, resented. Intimidation tactics. My normally über-corporate, hyper-realistic, un-stunnable sister was stunned.
The fact that a significant number of White women (and 10% of black and Hispanic men) conspired in these demeaning tactics was to be expected. But after all, women often stay with abusive men. Phyllis Schlafly flew all over the country telling women to stay at home and vote against their own equal rights. And some minority men have always been plus royaliste que le roi. Call it PTSD or Stockholm Syndrome. And think about Susan Smith who killed her own children to keep her white boyfriend.
Additionally, the working class white man is terrified of losing his race card, the only card in the deck he has left after having been consistently hoodwinked into voting for candidates who never protected him, never gave him jobs, never provided health insurance for these denizens of the Stroke Belt, Coronary Valley, etc. Republicans from Nixon on, have crafted their “Southern Strategy” just for these working class whites and middle class white women frightened of the mythical black bogeyman. (Bear in mind the “Southern Strategy” is not limited regionally.)
The fact that most women of any race are overwhelmingly more likely to be raped and killed by men of their own race is apparently immaterial. The fact that it’s big business, not racial minorities, that slides out of taxes, crashes the economy, closes down factories, and sends millions of jobs abroad, is apparently immaterial. Resistance is futile among the White Conservative Borg.
A few of my friends (a multiracial selection) don’t think race was an issue for all those who voted Republican this time. No offense, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. You can do racist things and act on racial fears without knowing you’re doing it. Quite frankly, you can’t really explain away a vote for a candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, now can you?
Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Wall Street Journal, doesn’t get it. He delivered an impressive speech at UCLA about the changes he sees in Conservative colleagues he thought were highly principled. He earnestly tries to understand how they could move from Free Marketeers to Protectionists, from patrons of the Moral Majority to denizens of girlie bar candidates. Stephens overlooks what he might see as improbable, but is nonetheless true. The common threads to what his Conservative friends used to say they believed and what they now say they believe begins to unravel from the word “say.”
A talented wordsmith like Stephens clearly values words and their meanings. He chooses the most effective, the most meaningful words to make his point, following Orwell’s prescient guidelines for composing clear honest English prose. It’s ironic that Stephens aptly quotes George Orwell’s novel 1984, but neglects an essay more clearly on point. In “Politics and the English Language” Orwell connects the decline of language directly to politicians who either didn’t have anything to say or used words to “defend the indefensible.” This means that what Stephens’ friends and colleagues used to “say” didn’t necessarily mean anything at all. Look instead at what they “do.”
That above-mentioned “Southern Strategy” is the one common campaign thread from Nixon to the current administration. Riling up poor working class whites to vote for their fears and against their self-interest has been the only consistent guarantee of a win as the GOP constricts to smaller and smaller numbers. (Believe me, I know that all Bill Clinton’s talk about crime served the same purpose, which is one reason why, rightly or wrongly, some black people just couldn’t get excited about Hillary). It may appear to have failed in the Obama successes, but in fact, those race-baited voters did come out, but demographic numbers are simply flowing the other way. Plus, some P-45 supporters fear Mormons, so Mitt was identified by some almost as negatively as the minority community. And did you happen to notice how many traditionally Republican Mormons rejected P-45 when the issue of religious suppression hit too close to home?
So let’s just call it what it is. Straight-up, B-flat, RACISM. Nixon and Reagan and GHW Bush and WJ Clinton and GW Bush all used it. The only difference now is that it’s front and center, its whitewash sheeting has dropped to the floor revealing the ugly undress of America’s open wound. Anti-Semitic Breitbart, Anti-Feminist InfoWars, White Nationalists Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and Racist KKK, plus various White Supremacists all have (or have had) positions of honor in the current administration. Of course, Bannon and P-45 and Labor nominee Puzder have all been accused of assaulting their wives, but that thread doesn’t hold because the rest of the cohort doesn’t seem to be tied to domestic abuse. Milo Yiannopoulos’ denigration of women and minorities was “free speech” but possibly abusing white children? Oh no, he’s got to go.
We’ve never put this issue to rest. After the Civil War, Andrew Jackson stood in the way of progress and Jim Crow became the formal and informal law of the land (P-45 saluted his grave, located not an hour from where I live, honoring a “heritage” of race hatred and genocide). It took nearly a century of hard interracial work and demonstrations, stymied by assassinations and legal blockades for our nation to begin to get on track. African-Americans, among other minorities, however, knew that the election of Barack Obama didn’t solve some fundamental problems, even when many self-identified liberal whites kept trying to force the idea of a post-racial (read: stop boring and guilt-tripping us with your race crap) world down our throats, displaying their own bigotry-lite by blithely dismissing our life experiences and valid concerns.
Look, for example, at Ezra Klein, a person I see as moving beyond mere liberalism to the blessed progressive zone. When interviewing President Obama, who was leaving office, Klein asked him how he felt about being one of the most polarizing presidents in history. I was appalled. Appalled. This was rape-culture style thinking. Blaming the victim. The irrational, completely unfounded fears of Whites were somehow the fault of the candidate and president who received more death threats than any other in modern history (probably “ever” but they weren’t always keeping records). Kenyan. Muslim. Death Panels. You remember.
But somehow irrational fear of Obama is seen on par with the candidate who has fomented actual violence, insulted minorities based on race and ethnicity, insulted women based on gender, threatened lawsuits, and lied incessantly about matters both trivial and important. SPLC did not record an uptick of violence committed by Obama supporters against others. The opposite was the case. It’s obvious that the same groups perpetuating violence now, perpetuated violence then. There was no doubt about Obama’s election. His popular vote margin was clear, as was his Electoral College win, not a whiff of Russian impropriety. Didn’t matter.
Inextricably tied to vicious gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, and false accusations of voter fraud that some so-called “Conservatives” even admit are intended to block the “urban” (read: Black and Hispanic) vote, the archaic “College” has twice denied our nation the principle of voting equality.
But despite all this bad news, there’s good news on the horizon. And that is bad news for the bad guys. IMHO, they know this is the last go-round for the ignorant, lazy, fearful, talent-free, corrupt white man — the Fox demographic incarnate. That’s why P-45 had to be incompetent. If he had any skills, any mitigating factors, they could be seen as reason for his “success.” They needed someone whose only qualifying characteristics would be race and gender. This would prove their overweening power.
Tacitus, the first-century Roman historian, had the 4-1-1 that describes our current situation: Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus [Once we suffered from our crimes, now we suffer from our laws]. The Obama elections plus the 2018 midterms, and even the current protests against police brutality (met, by the way, with more brutality), prove that we can break through these barriers of fear and White supremacy. We just need to annihilate those fears more thoroughly for the benefit of our nation and our freedom. “We don’t want no favors,” as Al Sharpton intoned at George Floyd’s service, “just get up off of us.”
Trae Crowder, a Tennessee-born comedian known as the “Liberal Redneck” with comedian pals Corey Ryan Forester and Drew Morgan, not to mention political commentator and former law-enforcement trainer, Beau of the Fifth Column, show that even some Southern white guys are breaking stereotypes and heading with us and our democracy in the right direction toward that which is not impossible, not even improbable. The truth.
