Nominally, I suppose, the good guys eked out a small win. After all, the House of Representatives flipped to the Democrats, and seven statehouses changed hands. Republicans picked-up Senate seats, however, and will be more resolutely backward-looking and vengeful — Trumpian — than they already are.
But we can no longer deny or escape that racism is, and will remain, a living and corrosive presence in American life; if it were not, Trump’s frenetic rallies of the past week, coupled with that appalling advertisement that even FOX News refused to broadcast, would have been fatal. The fact in plain sight is that a lot of Americans resent being expected to treat blacks/hispanics/gays/non-WASPS/et cetera with ordinary decency.
It’s clear, too, that a lot of Americans have no problem with Trump’s ignorance and garish pathological lying. Let’s be clear here: Trump doesn’t merely shade things; he makes up ‘facts’ out of thin air that have no correspondence with reality, I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters don’t know that; they ignore that because … why? My best guess is that Trump hates the same well-educated and accomplished people that they do, the same people in whose circles they will always be outsiders. Trump, like them, has never quite managed to scrape the shit off his shoes.
It will undoubtedly become more dangerous than it already is to be a journalist. After all, there will be efforts to hold Trump accountable for his misbehaviors, and those efforts — duly reported by the ‘fake news’ — will undermine the mad, malice-eaten, feverish fantasy-world that Trump and his supporters inhabit.
Simultaneously, Trump will ratchet-up the rhetoric against his enemies, and that means his abuse of the media is going to intensify. Just as there are people out there ready to mail pipe bombs to Trump’s enemies, and people who fantasize about killing Jews and blacks, there are people seething about journos and who would gladly kill a bunch of them.
The good news, I imagine, is that Trump will have no more to say about that caravan of hungry peasants headed our way.