Midnight at Noon

Seeing Trump's face display on the Empire State Building is unreal.  Welcome to the future - an alternate dystopian future. There are too many scenes of the death of democracy (involving Natalie Portman) in my head. Never before has there been a President elected that hasn't served in government or the military.[1]  240 Years of American history thrown out, but like the Iraq invasion, the twenty-first century is an erasure of American ideals and tradition.  The country I come from is coming to an end, and something new will be beginning.  Anti-intellectualism has won.  Hopefully Mr Trump will not use the nuclear weapons he was so interested in, and hopefully he won't makes us a satellite of Russia, as they seem so happy about the occasion.  And, hopefully there won't be any racial prosecution or concentration camps, which would force me to choose between the clear morally correct humanitarian choice, and protecting my own self and family.  If we avoid those scenarios, we will survive, but in any case we will be different.

Election night 2008 provided an unknown feeling of hope, and now there is clearly a feeling of uncertainty, and in the context of ISIS, Russia, Brexit, there isn't much optimism.  As the world markets have already responded quite negatively, economic slide is already a concern.  The worst part of January 20th, 2017 will be seeing Mr Obama leave after doing such a graceful and respectable job.  Certainly Mrs Clinton was not a likable candidate and she didn't help herself or her reputation any.  But she was highly qualified, knowing how the executive branch works in the White House, how the legislative Senate works, and as Secretary of State was highly experienced in foreign relations.  Furthermore, she was probably the most vetted candidate in history, after seven congressional hearings on fabricated charges, and an FBI investigation which exonerated her.  The worst loss in diverging from that potential branch of history is the lack of another Clinton economic policy involving Bill Clinton, a second chance to bring back some of the success of the 90s.

Instead we get a President that has never answered to anyone and has no record to base expectation.  So far everything Trump has done has been to befit himself at the cost of others.  Unless he somehow identifies himself with the country, I imagine he will do the same to the country. Trump has no idea about working with people, and even with a fully Republican Congress he's not going to get everything he wants. He may not even get much of what he wants, as he learns that it takes compromise, discussion, and working out details, and there are limitations (e.g. finite financing). The "constitutional" candidate has run on a platform on completely  destroying the first amendment in multiple ways (freedom of religion and  freedom of speech and freedom of the press subject to prosecution) as well as the 4th and 8th, and I don't think his "stop and frisk" plan is a great embracement of the 2nd. But then, to the right, it's the truthiness that counts.

I think it's still possible that things won't work out like they seem.  Trump could resign, having won the game, leaving Pence as President.  That's not much better in my opinion, and I certainly don't want a President that got 0 votes in the primary.  He may be a Trojan Horse, playing his deplorable followers, and unveil a left-leaning agenda. Or, he may do something so stupid, so Trumpish that he gets impeached.  The problem isn't Mr Trump.  We have to give him the benefit of the doubt, it's possible he an actually get something productive done [2].  The problem is with the movement he has created (or at least led into emergence) and the people who follow this movement, who think they have license to harass and promote forms of racism and xenophobia (and perhaps ultimately worse, a defense of anti-intellectualism and ***** seizing) .  And, this is not isolated to the U.S. As we see in Europe, the rest of the world is following this model too, swinging to far right  stances that embrace nationalism and cultural and racial difference and hierarchy.  Just like pre-World War I & II,the world is positioning itself into confrontational positions. Now would be the time for a president that would de-escalate and avoid entering that destructive downward slide.

Trump was right.  Elections are rigged, and it would seem he succeeded in proving it. The "left wing" mainstream media really supported Trump by not fully calling out his absurdities and daily lies, and employed Trump paid staffers to spin his campaign.  Then there is the case of the FBI who interfered within 10 days on the election and with no substance caused a tremor in the polling.  Finally, we have Trump's Russian friends who have no doubt disrupted this election.

Now it's up to Trump to do what he said.  Good luck with that.  As things get worse over the next four years, as they undoubtedly will, the blame is on him and the delusion voters.  Be careful what you wish for.  It won't be long until those Russian friends turn on him and exploit Republican emails for their benefit.  They may well be smarter than a Trump administration. His presidency will not be the cakewalk he assumes.  After eight years of endless bitching by the right, it's time to shut up and do it if it's do easy.  Just don't fuck it up like the last Republican administration of  Mr Bush did.  We can't handle another Great Recession (or worse).

The question now becomes, if Trump is serious about acting through anti-establishment circumventions, how much substance does our governmental system have?  Is it a solid structure that operates within fixed and understood parameters?  OR does it just exist as all surface, just functioning through custom and convention -in which case exertion of power has break it, and unravel it to the point of dysfunction.  Let's hope we don't have to test it.


[1] Not only will we have a president with no past experience, but will an extremely unfavorable rating (60%), far higher than Clinton.

[2] The opposite side of this benefit, is that, most importantly, we must be highly vigilante of policies which destroy democracy and human rights, and intervene immediately before the wave of destruction occurs, as happened in the twentieth century Europe.