The results of last nights may not have been as dominant as they feared (Ted Cruz–who is probably not the Zodiac Killer–won three states and Rubio even managed to finally win a caucus), but it still shows Donald Trump as the favorite. He gave one of his weird, rambling press conferences in his ballroom, with Chris Christie standing behind him looking like a hostage. His glassy-eyed terror is a metaphor for how the rest of us feel, standing here watching Trump riff on his wall, his poll numbers, his lawsuits, his company, and whatever else pops into his mind at the time.
If supposedly respectable Republicans were clutching their pearls before Super Tuesday, they’re now hiding under their beds and generally drawing their curtains and screaming about the apocalypse. “How did we get here?” ask the least self-aware group of people that have maybe ever existed.
Is it really that complicated? You spend fifty years encouraging white resentment and entitlement—and not even that subtly — and now you’re shocked that a spray tanned combover billionaire reality TV star is looking like your inevitable nominee? Give me a break. The only thing Donald Trump is doing different is he got rid of the dog whistle and just straight up says whatever racist shit comes to mind, and the members of your party eat it up and show up to rallies and beat people up and vote because the stuff Trump is saying is what his voters/fans actually believe.
Of course they want to kick out all the Mexicans. Of course they don’t want any Muslims to move to the United States. Of course they cheer when Trump makes jokes about Megyn Kelly’s period. You’ve just spent eight years telling these people that Obama is not American and that he’s a muslim and is destroying our country, and he hates white culture and is literally out to kill white people, and so of course when someone comes along and says “Make America Great Again” they buy it, because you’ve told them America has been destroyed by some nebulous “socialist secular left homosexual alien muslim [fill in the blank].”
Outside a polling station in Tennessee
The cognitive dissonance required to say something like Mike Huckabee said on Monday, “Does anybody think Donald Trump is a racist? I don’t. I mean, I really don’t. I don’t know of anything in his life that indicates that this man has racist tendencies.”
Really, nothing? I mean there’s not one thing you can think of that would indicate this man has racist tendencies? Not one? How stupid does Huckabee think we are?
I can’t actually even with these fucking people right now.
The thing is, there’s a part of me that gets Donald Trump. Every 5th or 6th thing he says is true, like that George W. Bush was president on 9/11, or that the Iraq war was a disaster. And when he told Hugh Hewitt, a desiccated husk of a human who looks like if you pulled out one of his plugs he’d leak sand, like Karl Ruprecht Kroenen in Hellboy, that “very few people listen to your radio show,” causing him to stutter like a freak, I felt a thrill go up my leg. This is man whose rhetoric about Obama was so over the top that Andrew Sullivan named an award after him, “named after the absurd partisan fanatic, Hugh Hewitt, is given for the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous, and far out of the mainstream of American life and politics.” The fact that Trump is a walking Hewitt Award is not a coincidence, and is in fact the reason he appeals to his base.
Honestly I’m excited for this election. One of two things will happen, either Donald Trump is completely abandoned by the cowards who enabled his rise, and the Republican party as we know it, which has been coming apart at the seems for years anyway, will completely self-destruct and something else will take it’s place, and whichever Democrat gets the nomination will get elected.
The other possibility is that Donald Trump will get elected, because America is racist and shit and we get what we deserve, a not-so-crypto-fascist who lead us into oblivion, who will make it okay to want to put all of our nuclear weapons in a couple of big piles in and around our major population centers and explode them all at once in the most spectacular Fourth of July Fireworks display of all time. It’ll be tremendous. It’ll fabulous. It’ll be YUGE.
It will be what we have coming.
