TERRY MOSHER
Results of the election were shocking to a lot of the country, but it shouldn’t be if you analyze our society as closely as I have over the years, much of which I have written about before.
I’ll let Richard Sherman, the Seahawks colorful cornerback, explain it without really saying it.
“I guess I expect it,’’ Sherman said in a Seattle Times story that ran today (Nov. 10). “It’s the time and age; people are showing their true colors so he (Trump) helped them show their true colors. So I guess this is the culmination of it.’’
You can guess as well as I can what he’s saying. Sherman, who supported the loser, Hillary Clinton, was talking about race. He’s African American and knows as much as anybody what that entails growing up in a white-dominated society where, as I have written, racism lies just beneath the surface and boils to the top every so often, usually in a white cop shooting an unarmed black man.
What Trump, the man I call Don the Con, did was tap into that racism along with other nuances to shock the nation with a triumph that will go down in history, if we survive his reign to have a future, a history.
Here’s the way I saw how he won. First of all, Don the Con did a brilliant job of marketing. He bluntly told his listeners exactly who he was and what he planned to do, most of it based on his morally bankrupt character, his racism, his bigotry, his nationalism, a trend that is sweeping through Europe as the alt-right there shows strong signs of taking control, as it did in England with Brexit.
The Democrats in his country traditionally are very strong in the metropolitan areas – New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, etc. – so Don the Con took his “Brand” and his silver-tongue propaganda (a mixture of lies and half-truths and horribly smearing of his opponent) into the rural areas of this country where most of the white class lives and tapped into the unrest, the anger and appealed to them to take back their country, even though their country never left them. That was the con. Convince people they needed him, and only him.
One of the strongest appeals Don the Con had was his pro-life stance (although he has switched to that from an earlier in his career pro-abortion stance) and he did a very intelligent thing by picking Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence is an ideological far right evangelical Christian whose whole career has been to limit the rights of women over control of their bodies.
As governor of Indiana, Pence has revealed his opposition to abortion in absolute terms. He also supported a religious-freedom restoration law that would allow businesses to turn away gay customers.
What Trump lacks in Christian values (and he has almost none), Pence gives their political ticket Christian values in spades, although it is a stringent Christianity that limits the power of women.
I believe now that by at least pretending to be pro-life, Don the Con hit the political jackpot. There are millions of our fellow citizens that support Trump mainly because of that.
This was stuck home to me by somebody who I have always considered my mentor, from childhood to adulthood. Months ago I was having a phone conversation with his person when the subject of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton came up in an innocent way. What happened next shocked me to my core and has led me to reconsider that mentorship.
“They are murders. They are murders,” this mentor yelled into the phone. That came out of nowhere and made me tremble it was so fierce and so intensely filled with hatred.
Wow!!!
So, let me retrace my steps here. Trump, Don the con, comes along like a bully on the beach and starts kicking up sand. Every small piece of sand that goes flying is coated with racism, hatred, bigotry and all the white supremacy notions that give pause to all non-white citizens in this country. He in effect, kicked up all the underlying evils that were mostly lying dormant and just under the surface and kicked them not just to the surface, but in the face of the scared white voters in rural America. The strongest of the strong, I’m convinced now, was that pro-life bit of sand that resonated with a large percentage of voters who hold true to the idea that life starts at the moment of conception.
The second most important facet of his campaign was to continue to paint, as the alt-right has been doing now for nearly two years, Clinton with an ugly brush. He smeared her at every opportunity across rural America and rural America by the end of the campaign was ready to at least lock her up and at the extreme assassinate her.
It was a brilliant strategy made all the easier by Clinton’s own serious flaws, the fact that she is a terrible campaigner, and by the piling on by the Russians that hacked into her emails and by the FBI that unbelievably jumped into the race by implying that there were more emails that could lead to an indictment, which as it turned out was a false attempt that should never had been released in public.
Reasonable people woke up after the polls had closed and said to themselves, “What have we done?” Thousands then took to the streets to protest Don the Con’s rise to the most powerful office in the world. That, to my equal amusement and dismay, was too late. Where were they when it came time to vote?
People who didn’t vote, or who voted for a third-party candidate in protest did their country wrong and now they have Don the Con as their boss.
Trump is 70 years old and as we all know that is too old to suddenly become somebody he is not. He is what he is: a rapist, a sexual predator, a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, a narcissist, a serial liar, a morally bankrupt individual that is psychologically damaged beyond repair, a hater, and now is our president.
If he does all he has said he will do and you couple that with all of the above, you have a blooming demagogue who likely will ruin this country. I wish it was a joke. I wish this was not true. There are at least half of this country’s voters (59 million; Clinton will apparently win the popular vote by a slim margin) that would like to have a mulligan.
Too late!!
With Don the Con in the White House and Congress controlled by Republicans who continue to move far right, this country’s progressives are in for a long nightmare that will see women’s rights restricted, conservative judges being appointed to courts, the lost of universal health coverage, Roe vs. Wade and Dodd-Frank being overturned, environment protection rules and regulations being scrapped, freedom of the press being limited, and that is just for starters.
If Don the Con follows his cheating career, he will do what he want when he wants and no law or Constitution is strong enough to stop him. We likely have our first dictator and the horror that follows that won’t be pretty.
The good part, at least for me, is that the people who voted for him will be in the same predicament as the rest of us. Some believe a civil war will erupt or he will be impeached before his four-year term is over. Either way, it is not a pretty picture I want to see.
But it is what it is. The other good part, at least for me, is that I’m closer to the end of life then I am to the start of life. So maybe I can take the coward’s way out and leave before it gets real dark. For now, all I can do is pray that God will help us.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.