The Washington establishment—Republicans, Democrats, the Beltway media—loath Donald Trump and are still “bitterly angry that their wisdom was spat upon by the voters,” writes John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. Yes, Trump has been caught in lies. Yes he is the twittering vulgar showman presiding in a White House surrounded by chaos. And yes, he perhaps is “the most (publicly) unsuitable personality to inhabit the White House in the modern era.”
Perhaps the only personality who would be even less suitable is Hillary Rodham Clinton and her basket of deplorables.
You might almost say we are two countries now joined only by loathing and mistrust, a nation of coastal media/political elites marked in blue, and a nation of red states in the middle.
True, Clinton received about 3 million more votes than Trump. But almost 63 million people voted for the president. And forcing them to their knees in capitulation is not a prescription for unification but a prospect for disaster.
Trump voters didn’t create the divided nation. The elites divided it over time, through economic dislocation and abandonment of the working class, and a mad push for endless wars in which soldiers returned to find no jobs or economic future.
Now America is reaping what the elites have sown.
In March 2016, Mr. Kass pointed out to readers that the American political system was breaking down—had been for some time. Establishment elites, he said, were properly frightened. “Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.”
The 63 million people who voted for Trump had been written off as stupid, unlettered, unsophisticated. The media described them as “pathologically angry” and mentally disturbed in their distrust in government.
They were betrayed. And all they want, really, is meaningful work and to not be told they’re idiotic or hateful simply because they dare support traditional values, and that a nation should shape its culture by controlling its own borders.
They knew Trump was loud, they knew he was vulgar, they knew he was trouble. And they voted for him because they wanted him to make trouble.
They wanted him to punch the Washington elites in the mouth, to kick them and stomp on them as they had been kicked and stomped on. They detest the ruling elites in the modern Versailles so much that they installed a character like Trump.
Fixating on Trump doesn’t really address this.
Trump-like candidates are not going away, warns Mr. Kass. Most likely, they are the new norm. What, he asks, will happen a decade from now when the next Trump, from the right or from the left, occupies the White House?
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