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There’s no such thing as a disposable Trump voter

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics November 17, 2016 3 Comments

Voters

Life hack: skip the alarm by waking suddenly in the middle of the night to think about how Donald Trump is the next president. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last week, and it really cuts down on unnecessary neck mobility. It’s hard to decide which is worse: his presidency or the knowledge that people voted for him. Handed the reins of our democracy, a little under half of Americans failed to see a lying egomaniac for what he was. Or they did and thought, “At least he’s not a woman.”

It sucks to think about all the people who voted Trump, because the reasons they might have done so seem awful. In the search for the most likely explanation, the contest between misogyny and racism continues. If you prefer to think the best of people, the sunniest plausible narrative is that “economic anxiety” scared people enough to turn against the system but not enough to learn about it. If people only voted for Trump because they’re scared of going broke, they still couldn’t grasp the candidates’ platforms well enough to recognize their own interests. Economic anxiety voted to cut taxes on the rich.

Yet you cannot contemn these people, because we need them. Without at least some of the people who voted for Trump, you can’t put a women in the White House. You can’t make public college free. You can’t fix Obamacare. You can’t even keep a reality TV celebrity from taking the Oval Office. If we intend to run this democracy better, “half of voters are stupid assholes” cannot be our operating principle.

Racism, misogyny, and Republicans’ ongoing hypnosis of the white working class made a lot of people vote for Trump, but did they make every person vote for Trump? It’s dangerous to say there’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, because it puts the blame for this disastrous election on everyone the Democrats failed to convince. Maybe they’re not the problem.

If I could say one thing to the Democratic Party: It’s not our job to vote for you. It’s your job to convince us. Hillary Clinton and the DNC did a good job of convincing me to vote against Trump, but they never gave me a clear sense of what I voted for.

Trump said he would deport immigrants and watch Muslims. That’s disgusting and I voted against it, but what was Hillary’s counteroffer? The college thing was nice, although she kind of stopped talking about it after the primaries. More intervention in Syria sounded both bad and likely—more likely than financial regulation or taxing the rich. Her central promise was to continue the Obama legacy. In a year that saw 16 experienced Republicans wrecked by an anti-establishment bomb thrower, offering voters more of the same seems like electoral suicide.

In retrospect it seems that way. At the time, we all knew she was going to win. Now our comfort feels like complacency, and everything is fucked. Birds crawl along the ground as our blood flies up into the clouds. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Giuliani denies paternity in Bat Boy case

By Dan Brooks in Real News November 16, 2016 0 Comment

Possible Secretary of State Rudolph Giuliani

At a press conference in Washington this morning, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani denied any biological connection to the human-chiroptera hybrid known as Bat Boy. The Donald Trump advisor and candidate for secretary of state described allegations that he is Bat Boy’s missing father as “utterly groundless.”

“Bay Boy is not my son,” Giuliani told a throng of reporters and cryptozoologists. “I am a human being, like you, and I have engaged in sexual intercourse only with human women.”

Bat Boy

A reporter who noted that Bat Boy’s mother is a human woman was not acknowledged. Instead, Giuliani addressed what he called a “conspiracy” to smear his reputation with paternity rumors, at a moment when he was poised to take a position in the cabinet of President-Elect Trump. He attributed the rumors to his longtime political enemies: Democrats, the ACLU, and unarmed black men. Giuliani stressed the importance of moving past issues like these in the coming weeks, both for America in general and for Bat Boy in particular.

“Bat Boy should stop trying to find out who his father is and focus on living his life,” he said. After pausing to lick his lips, he added that the half-human, half-bat child was “a good boy, [who should] keep moving forward [and] drinking blood.”

Giuliani admitted that, during his tenure as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he visited the high castle in the forests of Pennsylvania where Bat Boy is from. But he emphasized that he had no contact with any women while he was there, including the one-eyed gypsy who told People magazine she cursed Giuliani to “sow seeds but harvest only shadows.”

“I have never met Madam Zukov,” Giuliani said, “and none of her predictions have come true.” The 2016 GOP convention speaker briefly consulted a pocket mirror before adding, emphatically, “none.”

Giuliani then discussed plans for the first 100 days of the Trump administration, enumerating policies he might implement as head of the State Department. These included aggressive trade negotiations with China, a federal program to ensure that schoolchildren in remote areas were getting enough iron, and crackdowns on private ownership of tennis racquets and sacks. When asked if there was anything he wanted to say to Bat Boy, currently a third-year criminology major at Drexel, the normally strident Republican grew pensive.

“I would say that wherever your father is, Bat Boy, I’m sure he’s very proud,” Giuliani said. “None of this is your fault. He probably just got scared, because he was so young.”

Giuliani then left the podium in a flash of cameras, bumping into the wall and emitting a series of high-pitched shrieks on his way to a transition strategy meeting behind the White House bookcase.

Well, here we are in the other scenario

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized November 10, 2016 0 Comment

Trump on Celebrity Apprentice, since we don’t yet have pictures of him in the Oval fucking Office

I wrote this week’s column for the Missoula Independent on Monday, when all I could think about was the outcome of the election. It ran this morning, which, as you may have heard, is after the election. The conceit is that I hedged my bets for either outcome, in a column about local traffic light replacement that didn’t need to mention the election at all. I can’t tell if it’s funnier this way or not. Probably the part about stamping tin hats for war with Mexico isn’t really going to happen, but you be the judge. I admit that, as I wrote it, I was picturing a Clinton presidency. What makes God laugh? A plan. We will not be back tomorrow with Friday links, because I am on my way to New Orleans for a much-needed dudes weekend. This, too, was planned with a Clinton victory in mind, but I bet we’ll have fun anyway. In the meantime, keep batting ideas around in the comments. We’ve got the whole future ahead of us.

A note from the management

By Dan Brooks in 2016 Election November 9, 2016 11 Comments

Last night I dreamed I was on trial for attempted murder. I didn’t do it. The man I was accused of trying to kill said that I didn’t do it. I only stood next to him when he was shot, and it was all a big misunderstanding. He was friendly and sad, an old drinker who kept telling me how ready he was to testify on my behalf. My lawyer was ready, too. She thought we stood a good chance of winning this thing. I was innocent, and that helped, although obviously anything could happen. “It’s a jury trial,” she said. My heart sank.

For months I planned the post that I would write today. It was going to be about how I decided to stop writing about politics in Combat! blog. I would still write about it indirectly, sometimes, through close readings of political rhetoric or analogs to history, but I would be done with the horse race, the daily news. That’s not where my talents lie. It’s not what has advanced my career. But more importantly, it’s not where the kind of nuance I care about abides. Political arguments converge on answers so firm and binary they cannot be the truth. When your inquiry can only reach a handful of conclusions, you’re not doing inquiry. You’re doing propaganda.

I stand by my plan to stop writing about horse-race politics, but the post with which I planned to announce it is useless now. It only read in the context of Hillary Clinton winning. I expected to turn away from politics today smug and disappointed. She was a flawed candidate, exciting as a woman but depressing as a woman who responded to our contemporary crisis by promising more of the same. Her campaign drifted into a bland centrism that seemed to synthesize all of American politics: trans rights and war in Syria, a friend of Wall Street who would tax the rich, endorsed by Henry Kissinger and Bernie Sanders. She seemed to represent the dingy underperformance of our entire system— a form of government that, to paraphrase Churchill, was the second worst after all other forms of government.

I guess she represented that to a lot of other voters, too. Her stunning loss, which contradicted months of polling that continuously put her lead between a few points and a landslide, suggests a whole American democracy out there we don’t know about. It takes a frightening shape. The prospect of President Donald Trump scares me, but more worrying are the people who elected him.

To me, and to everyone I know or read, he was a recognizable type of huckster. His presentation was so phony and self-aggrandizing that he was funny. Remember when Trump was funny? Remember when he was an exaggeration of what a lying egomaniac might be? That is what the American people chose this year, not as a comedy sketch, but as our president. They heard him say only that he would be great, and they believed it. To watch this person rise to the nomination was alarming, even awful. But to watch him win, when no one we trusted thought he could, is to suddenly learn our mounting worries where actually a pleasing fantasy.

America did not get to the point where a game show host could almost be elected. It got to the point where he won. What Trump did worked. It worked on a numerical majority of voters. Those are the people who took charge of the nation’s future yesterday, and they are the people we live with now.

It is tempting to turn against them, or at least away from them. It would probably feel good to say enjoy your president, assholes and retire to some perch. Back when President Trump was an absurd daydream, I thought that if he were elected, it might be my excuse to give in to my natural misanthropy. But that would be only another capitulation. When people disappoint us this badly, in a way that leaves us feeling this bereft and powerless, loving them is all we have.

So. Now Donald Trump will be the president, and he will lie to us about what he did instead of what he is going to do. Today beings a period of transition for the country, probably, and definitely for Combat! blog. I planned this. These are not the circumstances I planned for, but they will not change what we do here going forward. We will only have to ignore a politics that demands our attention a little more insistently, and when we look at it out of the corner of our eye, it will be a little uglier. But our gaze does not change with what we look upon. It changes with what we look for, and on what we choose to focus, and how.

Over the next few days, I would like us to have a conversation. If you can think about anything but what happened yesterday, I encourage you to use the comments section. What do you like to see in this blog? What disappoints you? When have we been at our best here, and when have we gotten bored? I have my own ideas, obviously, but I would like to hear from you. Combat! blog has been a practice for me. It has also been a community, and in moments like this I value your readership especially. Welcome back, friend. So much has changed since last we spoke. Thank goodness we are here together, again.

Go vote

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized November 8, 2016 0 Comment

DO NOT VOTE FOR TACOS.

What are you doing on the internet? Stop reading this immediately and go vote—unless you are reading this while waiting in line to vote, in which case, okay, I guess. It’s really important that you vote. Today is basically a free roll on something very bad happening to America, and even though it’s not thrilling to cast your ballot for more of the same, it’s crucial that you do so. This decision needs more input from people who can read. I voted by mail two weeks ago, so I’ve got the whole day to bite my nails. I’m just kidding. I never bite my nails, so any snapping or grinding noise you hear coming from my mouth is purely tooth-on-tooth. We’ll be back tomorrow to talk about the results or declare our unwavering loyalty to whatever brown-shirted citizen police force emerges to patrol the United States, depending on which way it goes. Vote!