It's Great That We're Finally Repudiating Trump But I Wish It Happened Earlier and For Better Reasons

I desperately wanted Donald Trump to lose the 2016 election much more than I wanted Hillary Clinton to win. But it went beyond that. I didn’t just want Trump to lose: I wanted for him to be obliterated. I wanted Trump to be destroyed at the polls, to go down in flames in the biggest, most demoralizing landslide in presidential history. 

I wanted Trump to lose by a margin that made achingly apparent that he had no business even running in the first place, let alone winning the Republican nomination and the presidency itself. 

I wanted the 2016 election to be a powerful repudiation of Trump and everything he stands for. I wanted it to send a clear message that Trump was dangerously out of the American political mainstream, that he was a fringe figure cynically peddling xenophobia that might appeal to hate-filled extremists but would be roundly rejected by the American electorate. 

I wanted Trump to lose in a way that would expose MAGA not as a transformative political force with the power to dramatically change our cultural landscape but rather as a sad, sour aggregation of bigots and buffoons, crackpot wannabe Fascists and loony conspiracy theorists. 

he has fun!

Needless to say, that is not how the 2016 Presidential election played out. Instead of powerfully and unambiguously rejecting Trump and his oily scapegoating the voting public aggressively affirmed Trump’s message of intolerance and hate, hero worship and demonization. 

Instead of telling the world and ourselves that this is not who we are or what we believe in we loudly announced that this is exactly who we are and now apparently believe, and would be sporting a new, more flashy and fashy attitude going forward in keeping with our glorious new Führer Donald J. Trump. 

To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was demoralized. In a horrible heartbeat, Donald Trump and his awful movement of reactionaries and racists became the mainstream. A man who had only recently introduced the phrase “grab ‘em by the pussy” into the political lexicon via a leaked Access Hollywood tape had become the most powerful man in the world. 

The next four years were full of powerful repudiations of Trump and his movement, from The Mueller Investigation to the first impeachment to the second impeachment. 

Trump was seemingly always on the ropes due to some self-created disaster or another. The man had COVID 19, for fuck’s sake, after minimizing or ignoring it for months, and it slowed him down for like an hour and a half. By hour number three he was scarfing down Big Macs and phoning into Fox & Friends. 

For all of the hits he took, Trump remained bullet-proof with his base, his basket of deplorables. No matter how badly he blundered, Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans remained sky-high. 

That forceful, culture-wide rejection of Trump and Trumpism never happened, even after the soon to be ex-president mismanaged an unprecedented health crisis in a way that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the near-destruction of the American economy. 

That has all changed in the past few weeks. The long-overdue repudiation of Trump, his movement and his followers that I have been longing for since 2016 finally occurred. It left me feeling at once satisfied and strangely empty. 

It’s satisfying because we’re finally treating Trump the way we should have treated him all along: as a toxic, radioactive pariah, criminal and con man who has single-handedly made the world a much worse place over the past four years. 

Even longtime sycophants like Betsy DeVos are turning on Trump. 

But the widespread denunciation of Trump from the Right as well as the Left, and not just among Never Trump types, feels a little hollow because it’s rooted less in righteousness and truth than pragmatism, ass-covering and self-interest. 

It’s as if we’re all villagers who have been menaced by a loud, angry, mean giant who keeps everyone in line by threatening to stomp on them and their homes so people refrain from speaking ill of him out of fear of being destroyed by his massive fists and feet of rage. 

And then one day the giant falls down and can no longer walk, let alone terrorize the village the way he used to so suddenly EVERYBODY just can’t stop talking about what a bad dude this giant is, and how they’ve never liked him, and due to all of his bullying and stomping, he’s no longer welcome in the village, nor are his flunkies.

Yes, what Trump did in riling up his followers to register their anger about Joe Biden’s rightful election through violence against lawmakers and vandalism was terrible and unconscionable, a cancellation-worthy offense. 

But the same can be said of literally countless things Trump has said and done during his presidency as well. The big difference is that before Trump wielded the immense, terrifying power of the American presidency, and wielded it vindictively. 

Now Trump doesn’t have that power anymore. People who have been terrified to speak out against Trump out of fear of invoking the Old Testament wrath of him and his followers now feel emboldened to loudly, publicly voice displeasure over his actions at the Capitol and afterwards.

I would not make the mistake of under-estimating Trump and his followers. Anger, resentment and blind rage at perceived enemies have always been core elements of his cult. They’re going to be angrier than ever now that their great golden God has been stripped of his power and status and been exposed as a charlatan, a con man and a fool. 

I’m grateful that as we a people finally got our shit together and told Donald Trump off but I wished we had done it much earlier (preferably November of 2016) and for more noble and less self-interested reasons. 

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