The most foreshadowed scandal in American history: What does that foreshadow for America?
By Steve Berman | July 15, 2017, 11:18am | @stevengberman
It’s interesting that everyone who dislikes President Trump does so on the basis of him being a bald face liar whose word is worth exactly nothing. But on the other hand, this has been the most known fact in America since sometime in the 1980s.
Trump has been nothing if not true-to-form. Therefore, this thing with his campaign/family and Russia has to be the most foreshadowed scandal in American history.
We knew it was coming, for all the benefit of the doubt many conservatives have yielded to Trump in office.
The main reason Trump was elected is because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. I think just about everyone in America can agree on that fact, except Hillary Clinton. Ironically, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did everything they could to ensure Trump would be the man she would run against in the general election. Their stupid mistake (among many).
What does this mean for America? Colbert King, in his WaPo op-ed, focused on all the things we knew about Trump and yet he won. But he didn’t focus on all the things we knew about Hillary Clinton.
Of all the candidates the Democrats could have run, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had to be the worst possible slate they could offer after eight years of President Obama. The left thought they’d achieved national consensus on their policies and therefore they could press for a caretaker, or a socialist.
Obviously, they were wrong.
On the Republican side, so much rabid frothing caused a fractured race where a legitimate Black Swan like Trump, who had unmatched name recognition and cojones the size of his buildings, could bust in on a faux-populist platform, and convince just 70,000 voters in key swing states to hand him the Oval Office.
What does that really foreshadow about America?
We’re broken at a deeper level than mere politics.
In February 2016, I concluded, after conversations with otherwise-sane drinkers of Trump’s potion, “Actually, I’d say we’re screwed.” We knew we were going to get a Trump/Clinton race.
In April 2016, Grover Norquist was prophetic when he said:
Try winning 270 electoral votes while threatening to damage the nearly 186,000 energy jobs in Ohio, almost 73,000 jobs in Pennsylvania and more than 100,000 jobs in Colorado.
Trump won Ohio and Pennsylvania, but lost Colorado. He lost Colorado because of Gary Johnson and his Libertarian 5 percent, Jill Stein’s batty Green Party’s 1.3 percent and independent Evan McMullen’s 1 percent (mostly from the Mormon population).
American voters knew exactly what the choice was: a liar versus a liar. We chose the liar that wouldn’t lecture us with his lies.
The biggest lesson about the 2016 election, and now 2017’s very predictable scandals, is that Americans want to be left alone, free from “shaming,” lectures, and being told how terrible we are.
Half the country likes to lecture the other half about the things they value, and the other half isn’t listening. This works both ways on the “political correctness” spectrum.
Maybe actual politicians will learn something. Either you can feed the dysfunction by shouting to your friends and ignoring your opponents, or you can pursue principle and get government to leave Americans alone.
It’s obvious the Democrats and Republicans haven’t learned this lesson. It’s unclear that they ever can.
Cross posted on The New Americana
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