2016 Presidential Election Thread

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-donald-trump



News Desk
An American Tragedy
By David Remnick
, 02:40 A.M.

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world. ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his emotional support.

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

For eight years, the country has lived with Barack Obama as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional, fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial alt-right media. Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to demean and destroy Clinton. The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager.

It is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.

More on Donald Trump’s victory: Amy Davison on Trump’s stunning win, Evan Osnos on Trump’s supporters, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on who is to blame.

Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.

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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...inton-terrifying-moment-for-america?CMP=fb_gu


This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close

Steven W Thrasher
People of color, women, Muslims, queer people, the sick, immigrants: all are threatened by Donald Trump. They need your love, your warmth, your support

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‘This is the beginning of a sad chapter for our nation, and for the world.’ Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

@thrasherxy

Wednesday 9 November 2016 07.36 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 9 November 2016 07.39 GMT

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Hold tight to the ones you love, America.

Hold tight to the ones you love living in black and brown and yellow and native skin. Hold tight to us, because we will have to face white people who think we are rapists. We will have to face a nation that wants to stop-and-frisk us. Hold tight to us, because mass incarceration is actually going to get worse, and more of our brothers and sisters are going to be disappeared. We are going to be living as strangers in our land, among people who believe they have taken the country “back” from us. So hold tight to us, please, and to each other.

Women: hold tight to the ones you love who are also women. President-elect Trump – soon to be the chief law enforcement officer of the land - has bragged about his right to grab women “by the pussy” – and very likely, his subordinates will follow his example. The president-elect is against women having rights over their own bodies. He will probably get to appoint a judge to the supreme court to curtail them. So hold tight to the other women in your life, women - your friends and sisters and mothers and daughters – because we men are going to fail you. We have already failed you.

Hold tight to the ones you love who have come to live in this country from abroad. They are doing hard work in this nation, living lives of dignity – but they will be deemed suspect all the time by the likes of a Secretary of State Newt Gingrich, or a Department of Homeland Security run by Chris Christie. Immigrant communities, already knit with such love, will need to lean on its power more than ever.

Hold tight to the ones who are queer in your life – to the people living with HIV, who enjoy their sex lives being legal, who value the right to love or wed free from stigma and shame. We who are queer or LGBT are going to face a rolling back of our rights. We’re going to be stuck with abstinence-only education, which vice-president-elect Pence favors in Indiana. We are going to have no plan for HIV/Aids, and a complete governmental indifference to such matters as gender identity or LGBT teen homelessness. Hold tight to us, please, because our government is going to try to shove us back into a closet.



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Hillary Clinton supporters embrace as they watch results roll in on election night. Photograph: Gary He/EPA
Hold tight to the Muslim people in your life, for they have been marked for legal and extralegal vigilante vengeance. They and their loved ones could be banned from the nation. And they need love and protection from their co-workers, neighbors, teachers, and friends of all faiths and none at all – because the state is going to put them under constant surveillance. The American tradition of freedom of religious expression is going to fail them spectacularly, so hold them tight.

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Hold tight to the ones you love who are sick and differently abled. The President-elect and the next congress will end Obamacare, and leave them to suffer and die. So hold them tight even (or especially) when government medical care fails them.

Hold tight. This is the beginning of a sad chapter for our nation, and for the world. The system, and our government and parties, have failed. This will become a frightening, vengeful, unjust land. And an angry white electorate, now using the levers of government, is not going to be kind to any of us not deemed integral to making America “great” again.

So hold tight to the ones you love, please - because all we’ve got is each other.

Chuppie is on the verge of having a meltdown like Nova.

@Chup's

Yeah, let's see if the Trumpites are the ones still laughing in four years when their boy fails to deliver.

Yeah. El Chup is going past Nova to have a fake vagina episode of epic proportions.

But on the bright side, his panty bunch is amusing as hell.

Gee, I wonder if Obama supporters ever took a break at four years or eight years to reflect on his failure to deliver anything but hatred, division, poverty, and disaster?

So, Trump wins and now Shep thinks he's a Jew in Auschwitz?

Oh my!

To her credit, I'm sure Hillary would have legalized her throng of illegal voters in less than 4 years. So you do have us beat there.

What makes you think I am a Hillary supporter?

Who the fuck are you anyway?

I'm interested in seeing how the stock market reacts.

And lower unemployment, and lower gas prices, and a stock market that regained all the value it lost in the Bush crash and then some...

The FTSE tanked and is now on the rise again.

Nah, you were a Trumpista all on your own, bub.

Easy El Chup.

the sun still rose this morning.

I think this sums it up perfectly.

He was wrong though he put enough excuses in there to cover his ass in case Trump won. At least he actually shpwed the highest chance of Trump winning.

Going deeper into denial, I see. I voted Green, you fucktard.

I suspect that's out of a sense of denial, ironcally.

Then Hillary had best get a reality show.

They have been saying that since Reagan. Who was the ultimate empty suit who just repeated lines other people wrote for him.

Spoken exactly like someone who lacks the ability for self reflection. You are a fucking parody, dude, a parody dressed up as a female cartoon pony. You are so fucked in the head you don't even know it yet you keep casting stones from your glass house.

You are the cause of the dysfunction in your life, not everyone else. Grow up and start accepting that fact.

I never thought Trump would win Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. But maybe its true that saying about Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia on one end. Pittsburgh on the other end. Alabama in the middle.

I love how you assume I'm a Trump supporter. I'm just laughing at your meltdown and the meltdowns of all the people you're posting tweets of. Seeing all that salt is just glorious.