Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

By unpopular demand
     Donald Trump will be the 45th President of the United States of America.
     The man who couldn't be trusted with his own Twitter account will be given the codes to launch nuclear weapons.
     I'm still in the midst of processing this. There's a great sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I think about what happens next. The man who ran against the Washington establishment with promises to "drain the swamp" has already named RNC chairman Rence Priebus as his chief of staff. There's also talk of Trump putting a climate change denier in charge of the EPA, a Goldman Sach executive as the Treasury secretary, and Ben Carson in the Education Department. This is just within the first few days of the election. So much for ending corruption and cronyism.
     So how did this happen? Who do we blame for this disaster in the making?
     There are so many options.
     FBI Director James Comey is a good place to start. The never ending mystery of Clinton's utterly irrelevant e-mails was not something Congress needed a highly politicized update on days before the election. Particularly when the e-mails turned out to be duplicates of e-mail the FBI already had.
     For all the hype around them, Clinton's e-mails never produced anything more scandalous than the revelation that the people working for her were kind of snarky.
     On that note, you could blame the media. Billions of dollars in free advertising got Trump through the GOP primary. Constant exposure desensitized the public to Trump's many failings and the spectacle of whatever crazy scandal he'd come up next kept people coming back for more. A close race means ratings, so they engineered one.
     You could also blame Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. In a half dozen states the vote came down to just a few percentage points. It's impossible to tell whether the third party vote actually spoiled the election, particularly since Gary Johnson probably siphoned off more Trump votes than Clinton, but in a race this close it was an unneeded factor.
     You could blame the RNC for letting things get this far in the first place. For eight years they've fostered a climate of anger amongst their base in a desperate bid for continued relevance. Non-stop propaganda delivered by Fox News convinced their base that the Freedom Caucus was the only thing keeping President Obama from enacting the apocalypse.
     That manufactured anger took on a life of its own, ultimately embodied by Donald Trump. They could have stopped him in the primary, but instead they turned it into a strange season of "The Apprentice," with Trump running roughshod over sixteen other candidates that may have stopped him had they united sooner.
     Too late now. The civil war within the GOP is over. Moderate Republicans, or the closet thing that passes these days, have lost control of their party to a living cartoon character whose speeches are indistinguishable from a Yahoo News comments section.
     Of course, plenty of blame also falls onto Hillary Clinton and the DNC. This was their election to lose and they did virtually everything possible to make that happen. Playing dirty pool against Sanders in the primary left a bad taste in everybody's mouth. Clinton's natural instinct for secrecy and doublespeak did little to repair her image.
     The fact is that while Clinton is plenty capable, she is not that likable and while that's an absolutely idiotic trait to prioritize in a presidential candidate (it's not as though you'll ever invite her to a dinner party) it is one that voters, particularly Democratic voters, look for and she should have known this.
     For all her preparations and plans, she never bothered to articulate exactly what she would do in office or why people should vote for her. Sanders had free college for everybody. Trump had his wall. Clinton's platform was a labyrinth of scattered policies with no unifying theme. Nothing that her supporters could rally around.
     She ran on a platform of not being Donald Trump, which, to be fair, is all it should have taken. But even to that end she failed at exposing Trump as the paper tiger he is. In three debates she could have dismantled any illusion that he knew what he was doing and simultaneously made a case for herself. She did neither.
     Hillary Clinton had twice the money, decades of campaign experience, the full force of the DNC behind her, the support of every single living President, and massive electoral advantage.
     Donald Trump spent as much time fighting the RNC as he did Clinton, had a VP that disavowed him, burned through three campaign managers, and was a never ending train wreck of scandal.
     Clinton losing to Trump is like the Cubs making it to the final game of the World Series and losing to the LA Lakers. And yes, I am aware that the Lakers are a basketball team.
     But at the end of the day, it all comes down to the voters… or, in this case, the non-voters.
     Ten million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 decided to stay home last week, bringing down our country's already low participation rate. You can blame Clinton for running a weak campaign, but at least she showed up for her part.
     Those that did vote for Clinton can take a little solace in the fact that you outnumber Trump supporters. The country that elected Barack Obama has not been overrun by an angry mob of nationalists. Once again, we have a Republican President walking into the White House after losing the popular vote (because that worked out so well for us last time).
     Finally, we have the Trump voters themselves.
     It would be easy to write off Trump's electoral victory as the result of a wave of bigoted nationalism. Easy, but wrong.
     Roughly 59 million people voted for Donald Trump. While racists and misogynists certainly make up a portion of that number (the KKK is literally holding a parade), they can't possibly be a majority. Ironically, the fact that so many people bundled all of Trump's supporters with the "deplorables" likely helped push Trump over the edge.
     For years now, the regressive left has been manufacturing outrageous culture wars out of nothing. Don't like the new Ghostbusters movie, you hate women. Dress up as anything for Halloween, you're a racist committing cultural appropriation.
     Micro-aggressions. Safe spaces. Trigger warnings. PC culture has become so insufferable that it's no wonder such a large chunk of Millennials so necessary for a Clinton victory switched sides. In the age of the Internet, there is no shortage of people willing to let it all burn to the ground just to spite the other side.
     Others may actively dislike Trump, but simply disliked Clinton more. That doesn't make them sexist. Even voting for the guy that sexually harasses women doesn't make the voter a sexist. It just goes to show how low the bar was.
     For many, political correctness had nothing to do with it. Blue collar white males have been used by Republicans and ignored by Democrats for so long that it's not surprising they flocked around the one guy willing to at least pay them attention.
     I'm not sure what they're expecting. Trump can't put coal back into the ground or un-invent the microchip that eliminated their jobs. Deporting immigrants and tariffing imports won't bring manufacturing back, but at least Trump was willing to offer a comforting lie.
     In other cases, this election was very much about establishment vs. anti-establishment. The government has been broken for so long that they were willing to vote for literally anybody outside of the system. Of course that didn't stop them from re-electing nearly every incumbent Senator and Representative.
     Then there are the people that will just always vote for whoever has the "R" next to their name.
     Regardless the reason, these people are all responsible for what happens next. When health care prices explode again, when we fall back into recession, when corruption and cronyism continue to run rampant, when the rich get richer while the poor pick up the tab, we will know exactly who is responsible.
     But what happened on Tuesday, that's on all of us. The people that voted, the people that didn't, and the people that built such a lousy scenario in the first place. There's no one thing that resulted in Donald Trump winning the election. It was a cascade of failures at every level and no amount of post-election protesting is going to fix that.
     Donald Trump will be our president, like it or not. With luck, the damage done will be minimal and he'll inspire both the DNC and RNC to enact the changes they should have made years ago.
     If that's the case, then maybe this could actually be change we can believe in.
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is looking forward to a great many "I told you so's" over the next four years.

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