Yes, I know: I keep waking up in TrumpWorld, too. The thought clicks into place about two seconds after my eyes open and consciousness dawns. Dazed and confused. Then, the cringing and wincing begins all over again...
My blood pressure goes up 40 points envisioning his clan in the national living room, rummaging around in the country's secrets and cupboards and treasure chests, looking for self-fulfillment, self-aggrandizement, and various wealth-building angles to play. We have 243 million adults living in this country, give or take. THIS is the best we can do? REALLY?!
How on earth did we elect a person who speaks and acts as this man has done all throughout a campaign -- and all through his life? While in the public eye, in the spotlight -- not in some dank back room, where he was an unknown? How can we respect someone who has spent a lifetime showing disrespect to everyone around him? How can we trust a man who has spent his life cheating and conning others? How can anyone -- let alone half the country -- have been taken in by a man who always acted only for his own benefit, recognition, and gain... especially on the basis that this greedy elitist would do all he could to improve the poor lives of the regular, everyday people?
It's alarming. It's another world. It's some new rip or rift in the fabric of reality which has occurred, and there's no way of telling what will happen next, no way to know or understand what we should expect -- no way to see what the New Normal might be in this New World Order, this neo-democracy.
Yes, well: Grab a Danish and some coffee, take a seat. Welcome back to Group.
* * *
I'm sure you've already heard a Trump protester was shot at a demonstration. Scary stuff.
Most protests have been peaceful. One or two events got a little heated, I hear, with some proof of anarchist-agitators getting involved with peaceful protesters, trying to urge them on and make things ugly. A clear majority of the events have been peaceful, respectful, legal, and spontaneous outpourings of real and valid concern.
We all expected Trumpsters would be riled up and rioting after Hillary's projected win. We didn't expect to be marching and protesting a Trump takeover. And we surely didn't expect them to start picking us off when we expressed our surprise and dismay at the qualities -- and lack of them -- in the totally inexperienced and woefully unqualified man-child who won the Electoral College, but not the popular vote.
I mean: Let's get real. No one from the left started picking-off protesters when Obama won office, nor when rightwing marchers hoisted their Obama effigies high, or when they torched flags, figures, and photos of the man.
No one took potshots at the Supreme Court or its members when, it could be said, they ended -- at the very least interrupted -- the reign of representative democracy in this country on December 12, 2000, when a legitimate vote recount was underway, but was terminated by them, with the court deciding to hand over the presidency to their choice, and not the People's?
In fact, I'm trying to remember the last right-winger who was gunned down by someone from the left, or by an independent or other-party member -- when anyone pulled the trigger on any Republican, any time in the life of you, your parents, your grandparents... All I remember, personally, is the assassination of JFK, RFK, and MLK, Jr., and that it all happened within my very own lifetime.
The Secret Service has sure had their hands full with the unprecedented number of death threats for Obama, gawd knows -- a sure sign that this country is not settling down and not getting any wiser.
Sure: There were plenty of rightwingnuts around, and still are. Always have been. None of them have been "taken out," as so many swaggering rightwing tough guys like to say. And why is it that people with the gun collections and the camo gear and the chips on their shoulders for anyone not exactly like them are always lunatic, white-guy Republicans?
I tell you: I'm waiting for the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! banner to come out of mothballs and be unfurled again. It'll look just great to the world, hanging alongside a new, big sign I saw today celbrating Trump's win, reading: THANK YOU DEPLORABLES!
* * *
You've probably already heard about that petition which was filed in Oregon, requesting that state be allowed to begin secession from the rest of the country. California's talking about starting one, too.
Thing is, the one already filed in Oregon has been withdrawn. Why? Because of all the death threats, and threats of assorted mayhem and violence against the people involved, and their property.
- Funny -- I don't remember anyone on the left boiling over and threatening people during the on-again, off-again squirreliness from southern states who periodically ramp up seccession papers every third or 13th weekend, for any light-on-logic cause or another...
- Wonder why it is that it's always been the rightwingers who get twitchy, and who get trigger-finger itchy, who want to kill or bail?
This violence is happening -- and happening already, a whopping THREE DAYS after the election -- one person shot and many people threatened, OVER THOUGHTS THEY HAVE EXPRESSED.
What can we expect -- what in hell should we expect -- in the coming weeks, months, and years? What should we expect when someone does more than express a contrary thought, and actually ACTS against the way rightwingers want things to go, against TrumpThink?
Will we start shooting members of councils and legislative bodies? Kill any lawmaker daring to present a bill with another point of view? Threaten their families? Curse and spit at them, tell them we are burning down their homes? String them up, out in front of their burning houses? Warn them that we know their children's names, tell them we know where their kids go to school?
Yes, waking up in TrumpWorld gets more real -- every... single... day.
* * *
Ask me, Trump should stop tweeting about how "VERY UNFAIR" it is, having people peacefully expressing their First Amendment rights.
His complaints are hollow, vaporous, and are further insult, coming from a man who made suggestions about a Second Amendment solution for his opponent in this last tortured, and torturous, presidential race. It is also doubly insulting, considering Trump had previously tweeted that people should march on Washington and stop "this travesty" of Obama's re-election in 2012.
Maybe a cooler head prevailed in the TrumpBubble, or, more likely than not, Trump was jumped and hogtied by his staff, and his Twitter account was once again wrestled away from him. Later, a new message appeared, contradicting his first message, pouring love all over those passionate protesters.
You can't have it all ways, simultaneously, all at once, and from all directions and points of view. We've had -- and still have -- plenty of rightwing hypocrites in office and on the political scene. However, I think this is our first experience with a hypocrite able to display facets of hypocrisy from a multiverse of parallel multiverses and alternative dimensions, all at once.
* * *
Yeah, I'd agree: If you can't trust Trump with a Twitter account, what makes you think you can trust him with the nuclear codes?
Then, there's everything else below that, underneath the Numero Uno concern of nuclear armageddon. How about regular wars? You want this guy at the head of the strike force, making life and death decisions for your country, for your sons and daughters?
How about meeting foreign leaders? Helping to decide if corporations should be allowed to ruin, gouge, cheat, and steal even more from regular people? How about disbanding the EPA? How about ditching all protective rules? Deciding we no longer need social safety nets? Appointing dunces and dolts to key positions in government, to roll back any and every act trying to move us from the Dark Ages and into the Light? Wouldn't putting Torture firmly back on the menu be great?
Question: Would you trust this man as far as you could personally lift him up and throw him?
Me? I've been trying to think where my comfort zone is with Trump. Honestly, now -- I think I'd be OK with Trump as carnival barker or Tilt-a-Whirl operator in a run-down, local-county-fair-circuit, travelling amusement show -- or maybe as an alternate assistant manager at a Dollar Store, or else in a retread tires shop in a strip mall, out by the town's biggest junkyard.
I don't see him selling me clothing. Nothing involving food or drink, either -- not on your life.
* * *
Actually, I think he might be worse than we think when it comes to meeting leaders from other countries. Instead of being a bully, have you noticed how nervous and small and stoop-shouldered and how weirdly quiet he gets when with experienced leaders, with people who really and truly know what they're doing?
You saw it with Obama when they met. You saw it with the Mexican president. I think this guy's a hollow vessel, an empty suit, and an empty shell, who will cave in to anyone with experience and power. Instead of him running roughshod over world leaders, I think he'll cut a number of deals giving away the store, just because he's still just a petulant little boy in men's clothing.
* * *
Of course, there's always the possibility of basic confusion in communication here -- that people on the left, being steeped in logic and fact, are more likely to take Trump at his word, and for the actual words he uses. Those on the right, though, being more wired for feelings and fears, may have just been hearing his pomp and bluster about change, and completely ignored his actual words and meanings of those things that he said.It doesn't seem likely, I know -- I mean, come on, given the foul and abhorent things this clown has repeatedly said -- but it's possible, is all I am saying. Everyone's not wired the same. Still, I don't know how anyone could have ignored or overlooked all that he has said and done, and all of ir so terrible, so foul.
In the end, I wish I could give him some benefit of the doubt. I mean, he's a canny opportunist, rather than being someone who is intelligent or smart. But all I think and feel about him is revulsion and fear -- it's like... what? Asking someone to entertain the thought of giving a baby a running chainsaw to play with!
* * *
Everything's up for grabs, feels like. Everything's about grabbing -- and grab all you can, fast as you can, before you are caught, before anyone notices, before anyone can change the rules.
Not only that, but, by all means, feel free to say and do anything -- promise anything, be as hatefully offensive as possible, and ignore any sense of decency, propriety, and civilized discourse! Dump empty and meaningless half-phrases onto frenzied crowds!
Tweet slashing insults and half-baked judgments in all directions! Complain about your opponent's lack of presidential temperment and appearance while demonstrating absolutely none of your own! Avoid speaking about plans and policies! Push away the terrible burdens of thought!
After all, says Trump, only MY words and ideas and beliefs can be anything I want them to be, and I can change anything at will, with a wink, a sneer, and a leer! Ten plus four is 200 million! Lock her up! Prosecute her and jail her! Impeach her, faster the better, even before she's elected!
This kind of existential free-fall is the price of uncertainty and the cost of unpredictability, but it's also the fee extracted from us when candidates and voters stop thinking All Words Matter. This will be a very difficult lesson for anyone associated on the side of the PussyGrabber-in-Chief-Elect, where words have been flung around in a melee of psychotic abandon, with harsh and wounding insult and scorn aplenty.
Trump, and his team members and supporters, have been endlessly guilty of saying nothing of substance, and saying it in a blustering, populist, TV-friendly Tony Soprano affectation which has motivated his completely bluffed-and-stumped supporters: the desperate, the forgotten, the reactionaries, the Islamophobes, the racists, the misogynists, the homophobes, and the intolerant and unthinking reflexives of every type, manner, and stripe.
When your words don't matter -- how can anyone believe what you say? Shall we simply go by the manner in which you don't say them? The style and strength in the way you toss around random words and phrases?
If you can't tell what a a candidate will do -- either by avoiding discussions on the point, or evading questions by returning inquiries with volleys of un-answers -- we are forced to look at what it is that candidates do, and, at what they have already done.
My God -- the things this walking tragedy of a man has already done! And, you know what -- he has no sense of shame, no restraint, no idea of what is appropriate or not, no idea at all how to act. He's seven years old, his parents are rich, and it's his damn birthday party, every single day.
We thought Ronnie Reagan was The Teflon King, but there's a new waffle-maker in town, and it's this guy. He says and does anything he wants, no matter how stupid and foul, and people love him! They want to be just like him! They think he cares about them, off an away in his penthouse and jets he's scammed from other people...
It's like we elected some kind of Catskills circuit comedian who's filling in for someone out sick.
How sick is that? How sick does that make us -- make our country?!
* * *
Grieving is a long process, I guess -- especially when so much chance for doing good in the future is now lost. And when so much good already done is about to be undone. Especially when so much that is so disagreeable is about to loosed upon us and is about to be unleashed into the world...
I think the first people to be blind-sided by Trump will be the very same people who supported him the loudest, the strongest, and the most. These will be the first supporters he will himself throw under the campaign bus.
When Trump's supporters find out how he's cheated and tricked them, it's going to be even worse for them, and everyone else in this country -- even worse than the way Clinton supporters and Independents feel now, believe it or not.
By then, we'll finally have something in common, which will be that we were are all fooled and cheated by a con man, by a trickster, by a conniving charlatan and thief. Until then -- well, he'll be our President, angling and dangling himself in and out, being an unchecked, free-wheeling dictator, no doubt. Who could keep him in his place -- you know anyone who has ever told this guy NO and told the story later? Do you think Trump has ever even heard the word "no"?
For a while, anyway, thief or no thief -- Trump will be our Commander-in-Chief.
* * *
How long will he last, is my question. He could go off on one of his shady moneymaking jaunts and gets himself impeached, or be forced to resign, or maybe he'll just plain quit, once he gets a taste of all the work he'll be asked to do -- and at what a sorrowfully low wage.
Then again, he could just go back to his penthouse, give Pence the whole job, and tell us all to get lost and get bent -- that he's making some more of his own traditions now, and he'll run things how he sees fit.
Then we can all tweet back and forth: SAD. VERY UNFAIR. PUPPET, NO PUPPET. WRONG. And we can pretend that reality TV shows and celebrity are still really meaningful, good for us, and good, clean fun.
* * *
Soon, over all of these channels and stations and websites, it's The World According to Trump, followed by Trump Acres, Make Room for Trump, Trump's Heroes, and The Trumpsters! By law, now, there's no looking away!
EPILOGUE
Of course, we could always very politely ask those who cast Electoral College ballots to go against the grain of historical precedent and cast ballots for Clinton instead.
After all, as Trump would say, That's just a tradition -- and no, you still can't see my tax returns, no matter how many times you ask me. They want to give theirs away for free, up to them.
How about that -- we may have finally found one thing in common with Trump, everyone: There's no reason to automatically stay with mere tradition. It's not like we're breaking any laws, or rigging the system, or failing to pay our taxes, or play fair with our contractors, or not go bankrupt three or four times, or....
How Very Unfair.
Today's Semi-Random Links:
The view from Brooks & Shields:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GXAVp6_KBQ&t=627s
Keith Olbermann's take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYHEmzIJwo
Safety:
... and a not-so-safe-for-work, much-needed, humor-relief video from a self-described crappy-robot-maker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAznN8ehzjQ
BONUS, BREAK-GLASS-TO-PULL-DOWN LEVER, EMERGENCY-USE-ONLY LINK:
Petition to those casting Electoral College votes for them to choose Clinton instead: