Lessons from a Trumpquake

Lessons from a Trumpquake

By: Rachel Marsden

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – In the end, it wasn’t even close. How did an impeached former president and convicted felon end up back in the White House by an overwhelming margin of 312 to 226 electoral votes, and with carte blanche Republican control of the Senate and likely also Congress? Buckle up for a leisurely cruise through Blowoutville.

First, the other guy was a disaster. The other guy happened to be a woman, don’t you know? In fact, we didn’t stop hearing about it, and about the opportunity to elect the first U.S. president in American history. Or the first woman of color, as an added bonus. Or someone from the working class. She’s one of you! You want someone just like you to be your president, right?

Look, if she’s “one of us,” then why couldn’t she answer questions without taking a scenic detour and requiring a GPS map to find her way back to the actual point? No one sitting in a bar at Happy Hour on a Friday, kicking back with a few drinks, is talking with their pals like Harris talked to voters. Trump did.

If she’s “one of us,” then why did she and her surrogates spend so much time trying to scare up votes on the abortion issue when surveys made it emphatically clear that the economy and immigration were the top priorities? Apparently they figured that women would care less about these things and more about reproductive rights – because they’re women. How sexist. How cynically anti-feminist to attempt to manipulate women into supporting the favored candidate of the patriarchal establishment by trying to scare up their support. The issue is ultimately one for the courts and states now, anyway. Whoops, it turns out that women, just being human beings, care more about jobs, security and making ends meet (and less about abortions) than the Democrats figured, with almost half of them (45 percent) voting for Trump, according to NBC News exit polling.

Trump talked exactly like the guy in the bar – and for hours and hours. Nothing could shut him up. Not even being shot at. Three- hour podcast chats. Long-winded improvisations at campaign rallies. Every word, joke, and action was parsed like it was the Gettysburg Address rather than riffing. While much of the media and establishment clutched its pearls, the voting public mostly appreciated the opportunity to repeatedly appraise and assess what fell out when Trump opened the kimono on his psyche.

While Harris and Biden camps discussed whether or not Trump supporters should be referred to as “ garbage”, Trump settled the matter by christening a garbage truck with his campaign logo and pulling on a reflective waste management worker vest. He took the same lighthearted approach when Harris talked about her job at McDonald’s in an obvious attempt to forge a connection with the average person. It’s a visual that’s hard to grasp when Harris has long been associated with the Washington political establishment. So Trump overwrote that fuzzy image with a glaring one of himself in a McDonald’s apron, working the drive-thru and making fries for customers in Feasterville, Pennsylvania.

For Harris, McDonald’s and the cultural touchstone that it represented in our youth, from the birthday parties in the caboose to Big Mac first dates or the glowing “orange drink” on school sports days, was in her past and ours. For Trump, that greatness was still relevant. “When I’m president, the ice cream machines will work great again,” Trump wrote on social media, riffing on the much publicized inoperative state of McDonald’s soft serve dispensers. It’s a wonder that we didn’t hear for days afterwards about how he was lying and wouldn’t actually be able to do that. Voters realized that at least with Trump the next four years will have some entertainment value. Which brings me to the next point.

Trump could give and take a joke. Some might not like the jokes. So what? People are fed up with what has grown into systemic taste and thought policing, led by the regressive left that considers itself the ultimate arbiter of public discourse. Trump blows that shrinking window wide open. Case in point: Harris and her surrogates demanded that Latinos reject Trump in reaction to a joke about Puerto Rico by a professional comedian at his Madison Square Garden rally. Instead, they flocked to him in record numbers, with 46 percent of the vote, proving that they can handle any attempts at humor and don’t need to be infantilized.

And while Harris barreled down her campaign talking point superhighway, Trump didn’t consider any side street too minor for a detour. When a story emerged on social media about disturbing government overreach of a pet squirrel and raccoon being taken and euthanized by authorities in New York state from a family of influencers, it wasn’t beneath Trump’s attention. “I know Don’s fired up about Peanut the squirrel,” said Trump’s running mate JD Vance, referring to it as an example of government overreach.

Harris’ heavy handedness on foreign policy issues contrasted drastically with Trump’s lighter touch in suggesting that he’d just seek to open dialogue given his general distaste for war. People are fed up with the establishment’s fear-mongering in service of its self-enriching war racket.

While college campuses reportedly canceled some classes and even imported therapy animals – like dogs and ducks – to treat the shock of well-formatted minds attempting to come to grips with the reality that democracy has shown their little echo chamber to be much smaller than they figured, the silent majority had just proven that for all the establishment’s attempts at diversity, Trump-style populist thought that challenges the establishment status quo is drastically underrepresented and marginalized.

Until they address this systemic discrimination, they’ll continue to suffer from cognitive dissonance whenever the average person has the opportunity to speak through the ballot box.