Point-counterpoint

By: 
Robert Maharry

I’ve taken a fair amount of flak since the publishing of my last column (“Let’s Build a Shrine to Trump,” June 8), and a few misconceptions seem to have arisen: that 1) I dislike or have a problem with the Grundy County Board of Supervisors, and 2) I’m a mindless shill for the Democratic orthodoxy with a blind, irrational hatred for President Trump.
 
In response to the first point, I’ll simply present a quote that I got directly from Harlyn Riekena at the most recent meeting.
 
“I wasn’t offended by it at all,” he said of the piece, which was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.
 
Fair enough! Apparently the people white knighting on his behalf are a heck of a lot more bothered by it than he is.
 
In response to the second point and in the interest of full disclosure, here’s a sampling of some of the words I’ve written on this exact page about Hillary Clinton, Democrats and liberals since I joined The Grundy Register at the end of 2015.
From “Lesser Evils, Conventions, Etc.” (July 28, 2016):
The (possibly) Russian backed e-mail leak has revealed that pretty much everything Sanders supporters claimed about the national committee conspiring against the Senator’s presidential campaign was completely true and that money was being funneled into Clinton’s campaign coffers in, ahem, questionable ways. And despite her pyrrhic victory on her own e-mail scandal, the perception that HRC was careless at best and criminally negligent at worst won’t be going away anytime soon.
During a cycle in which voters have expressed more frustration than ever with “Washington elites,” “political correctness,” and “typical politicians,” the Democrats have managed to nominate someone who embodies all of these characteristics more than any other politician in the last 50 years. Most of Hillary’s supporters can’t really tell you why they’re voting for her other than “she’s not Trump.”
 
From “Freedom?*” (September 8, 2016):
Social justice warriors are free to defend the right to offensive speech now that it actually agrees with them for once (in reference to the Colin Kaepernick controversy).
 
From “They are who we thought they were” (September 29, 2016):
Trump is mad that we’re losing our jobs to other countries, and so is Hillary. His plan, like every other Republican candidate since Reagan, is to lower taxes in hopes that more companies will be attracted to stay in the U.S. and expand their operations. Hillary’s plan is to magically make them stay while simultaneously raising the minimum wage and achieving the mythical goal of “equal pay for equal work.” Advantage: Trump, I guess.
 
From “We’ll all float on anyway” (November 24, 2016)
In an election cycle characterized by disgust with the establishment, the Democrats ran the most uninspiring, technocratic, insider candidate of all time, and they paid a dear price for it. While the party loyalists now want to blame everyone but themselves for this crushing defeat, it’s quite evident that many of the voters they used to have in their back pockets have abandoned them and put faith in Trump to deliver on his promises, however misguided that faith may be.
 
One of the driving forces behind the rise of Trump was an anger at “political correctness,” a catch-all term that more or less became the idea that liberals are afraid to offend anyone, especially racial and religious minorities, as well as the notion that today’s youth are coddled babies who need “safe spaces” to protect them from ideas they may not agree with.
 
In the aftermath of the election, colleges across the country provided all the ammunition their conservative critics needed to be proven right: exams and classes were cancelled, therapy sessions complete with rigorous activities such as coloring and petting a dog were held for students, and protests that seemed to serve no real purpose sprung up everywhere. An Iowa legislator even got his 15 minutes of fame for his cheekily named “Suck It Up, Buttercup” bill, and it all drove home the point that Trump supporters had been making from the beginning: liberals are a bunch of entitled whiners who can’t handle losing.
 
Racism, sexism and xenophobia were the other reasons we’ve heard almost constantly from Hillary’s diehard supporters, and there’s absolutely no denying that there were elements of those attitudes in both Trump and some of the people who voted for him. After all, the KKK endorsed him, and the “alt-right” movement has become a cesspool of some of the most vile racists and anti-Semites on the Internet, though most of them are confined to social media and message boards. But as much as Democrats may refuse to hear this, I don’t believe that these factors can entirely explain why Trump won.
 
As much as it may pain the smug, arrogant left to face the facts, 35 to 40 percent of the people who vote are going to check the Republican on the ballot regardless of his or her name, and the same goes for Democrats. So in all reality, the two candidates were essentially competing for about 20 to 25 percent of voters, and many of the people who voted for Trump—including some that I’ve spoken to—did so reluctantly, much like the progressives who very much preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton.
 
They weren’t proud of his comments, and they weren’t proud of some of his behaviors. But they weren’t about to vote for another career politician offering no real change from the status quo who’s become a multi-millionaire almost solely through peddling influence without actually creating anything in the process. This election wasn’t about whom you liked more—it was about whom you hated less—and Hillary Clinton may go down as the most viscerally hated candidate in American history. As one reporter wrote on a dispatch from the campaign trail, he’s never heard more grown adults use unprintable words to describe someone than in listening to voters lob pejoratives at Clinton.
 
This election wasn’t simply a referendum on white identity: Trump actually won larger shares of almost every demographic, including black and Latino voters, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012. If you’re a grieving liberal, it’s easy to frame it that way, but this is the same country that elected Barack Obama twice by much larger margins.
 
The bigger fact is that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were all gifted campaigners who connected with people and gave them assurance that their concerns would not go unheard. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, failed to do so, and she never laid out an overarching plan for her presidency other than the fact that she wasn’t Donald Trump.
 
From “Ch-ch-ch-changes” (January 19, 2017):
Sure, the economy improved after the Great Recession of 2008, but only after the government artificially pumped almost a trillion dollars into it. While Obama will always be remembered favorably for his personality, his speaking abilities and his cool and calm demeanor, he’d be the first to tell you he didn’t achieve what he set out to when he took office eight years ago. And now he’s handing the baton off to a man who has promised to destroy his predecessor’s entire legacy.
           
What Trump will actually do in office is anyone’s guess. He’s been on every side of every issue and never seemed like he wanted to actually be president that badly in the first place, but the chorus of post-election sanctimony from Hollywood, media elites, and Democratic politicians only serves to further the narrative that Trump has thrived on from day one: that Hillary Clinton and her supporters are out of touch with the average American.
 
No scandal or gaffe can sink him at this point, and Buzzfeed and other left-leaning media outlets greatly compromised their ability to report on the new president in the future when they published a bogus dossier sourced to a British Hillary Clinton opposition researcher full of dubious claims that were quickly dismissed as “fake news.”
From “The Silence of the Brands” (February 2, 2017)
Like clockwork, now that Trump is the one issuing the (executive) orders, it’s liberals who are up in arms about constitutionality, wrapping themselves in American flags and staging the (unarmed, completely nonviolent and inclusive of all races, creeds and gender identities) #Resistance, and the conservatives who were so used to crying “executive overreach!” are just kind of shrugging their shoulders and looking the other way.
           
No one really cares much about the means as long as the ends are achieved, and nowhere is that concept more true than in modern American politics. To Trump’s credit, he never really expressed much reverence for the inner workings of governance: in fact, he was quite open about his disdain for the process and desire to achieve his goals regardless of the legal roadblocks that may arise. But the idea that a president can make major policy decisions unilaterally should scare all of us, regardless of which party he represents.
From “The Fake News Blues” (February 16, 2017)
But American journalists, especially in the age of Trump, can’t seem to get enough of talking about how hard they have it. This isn’t unique to one line of work: tell a teacher they’re lucky that they only have to work nine months a year and see what kind of response you get. Tell an actor or a musician that what they do is purely escapism and entertainment, and you’ll have to hear them rant about it for 20 minutes on the next award show (at this point, it just feels like there’s one every week)… liberals overused their leverage, as they’re known to do, in blaming their election loss on fake news and any culprit they could think of besides their own candidate.
 
Thank you for reading.

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