Drumpfspiel

Around 1 a.m. on Election Night, I got up from the couch and began walking around the house, pausing at all the “Vote for Hillary” signs my 7-year-old son had made and taped on our walls. Something deeper than heartbreak overtook me.

Everything my wife, I and his teachers had been teaching him for years, and will continue to teach him, about decent human behavior had just been flouted by the election of Donald Trump to the most powerful post on the planet. All these life lessons from adults, who then turned around and made a racist, misogynistic bully the country’s president. If I were just a few years older than him, it would make me profoundly cynical about adults. As in, Holden Caulfield was a Pollyanna.

I shuddered at the task that awaited me in the morning. I’ve masked anger and sadness from my kids. But masking dread, like everything else about this cataclysm, is uncharted territory.

And, sure enough, that morning my five-year-old daughter asked me questions about her Hispanic friends. My son brought up the wall. I got halfway into an explanation of checks and balances, until a voice in my head said, “You’ve been betting against him for 18 months and last night he just became the most powerful person on the planet. And you’re still doing that?”

Nothing about this is normal, and so I can’t swallow the normal platitudes about coming together, unifying, being on the same team, etc. When George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore and yet was awarded the presidency by the Supreme Court, sure, it was a divisive moment for this country. But the country didn’t erupt with thousands taking to the streets in every major city.

So much of the commentary has been about a hidden-in-plain-sight America, economically left behind, completely detached from Washington and traditional media, and angry as hell — as if this phenomenon were something new. At any given moment over my lifetime and for most of my parent’s lifetimes, at least half the country was pissed at Washington. Our electorate is perpetually at a boiling point. Such is capitalism — an endless series of transactions, each with a winner and a loser. The common thread in every election is that the winner connected with that anger — or mollified it — better than his opponent.

And now the narrative is that Trump’s victory proves he was more effective at doing that, which ignores the inconvenient fact that he lost the popular vote, an irony for anyone attempting to paint this as purely a populist uprising. Another inconvenient truth: Trump finished with about 2 million fewer votes than Romney tallied four years ago, a time frame in which the country grew by 10 million people.

So, despite Trump’s ceaseless assault on facts, logic and human decency, people juuust couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary, a point I’ll expand on in a bit.

And while we’re upending echo chamber narratives, let’s turn our sights to the angry, left behind white males trope. It’s been at least a generation since elections were won on that demographic alone. Trump had to have more than those in his basket, and he did: 29% of Hispanics (!), 42% of women(!!), 37% of millennials, and 8% of the African American vote (compared to the 6% Romney got). At least three states that legalized marijuana also voted “law and order.”

I would hope we’ve been long disabused of the notion that Trump’s election had much to do with party loyalty. He spent the last 18 months lobbing grenade after grenade at the Republican establishment that shunned him repeatedly, culminating in the fiasco of a convention in which he was nominated. Multiple once-blue states turned red last night.

Beyond exit polls, there are endless other angles to consider. But if you’re raising a daughter, contributing monthly to her college fund, reminding her of her value and nurturing her self worth, you find your way to this one in pretty short order:

We had a candidate with one of the most polished resumes of anyone ever to seek the presidency, who happened to be a woman. Her opponent was a candidate whose resume consisted of a mirage of a business career and not a nanosecond’s worth of public or foreign policy experience, and who was the most viscerally misogynistic American public figure in anyone’s lifetime. And that guy won. The “grab ’em by their pussies” guy. The That Guy of all that guys.

I’ve seen a lot of commentary about what a flawed candidate Hillary was, how she represented the establishment, how the Democrats have themselves to blame for kneecapping Bernie Sanders. The first two charges could be equally leveled at Trump and the third is obviously N/A. All of which is so inconsequential that it makes my head hurt. I would have voted for a hairless cat that never campaigned outside its litter box over That Guy.

A majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. A majority elected and re-elected a black president. A majority believe immigration does more to help than hurt the country. A majority favor tighter gun restrictions. But a woman in the Oval Office — particularly one who looked poised to be a pretty effective one — that, apparently, was a bridge too far. A few decimals less than half the electorate literally voted for anything but that.

Back to the exit polls. Near the bottom, you’ll see that among voters whose vote was determined primarily by their dislike of the other candidate, Trump took 51% to Hillary’s 39%. Among those who strongly favored their candidate, it was nearly the reverse. The majority of Trump’s voters were really voting against Hillary. The majority of Hillary’s voters actually voted for Hillary.

Shady personal finances? Appearance of undue foreign influence? Irregularities in their non-profit foundations? All cancel each other out for both candidates. We’re brought back to that fully intact glass ceiling.

That’s not to say that this was an election won purely on sexism. But it was unquestionably a pillar. Moving along …

As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” There are a couple of other constituencies to consider:

• Hillary supporters, who took him literally and seriously.
• Third-party supporters, who may or may not have taken him literally, but failed to take him seriously.
• People who didn’t vote, who can go fuck themselves.

Regardless of what bucket you fall in, we didn’t — and still can’t possibly — perceive the exact contours of what Trump represents.

Much like Brexit supporters, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Trump supporter who could explain beyond “he’ll lower my taxes” how one of Trump’s policies would improve his or her life. His healthcare proposal is an anti-proposal. There’s no economic strategy (sorry, reneging on trade deals is a tactic, not a strategy). And his foreign policy is a series of empty soundbites like “knock the hell out of ISIS” and “Islamic terrorism,” the latter he apparently believes that, if you repeat it often enough, you’ll achieve some Betelgeuse effect that makes terrorists go away. (“Shit! He figured out we’re Muslims. Welp, everybody go home.”)

This “he’ll lower my taxes” crowd really deserves its own aside, because the pernicious tendency to vote purely out of individual self interest has been at the root of countless demagogues’ rise. No man is an island, yet very few believe that. Not having kids or having kids in private schools — neither circumstance exempts you from paying property taxes that fund nearby public schools. My health care premiums are going to go up. And I’ll happily pay them if doing so helps dislodge one of the great inhibitors to economic mobility in this country — access to affordable healthcare. And don’t get me started on the idiotic wailing and gnashing of teeth over giving homeless people cell phones so that prospective employers may contact them and thereby possibly get them off the dole. If you really insist on viewing this in self-interested terms, consider what poverty costs the rest of society — welfare, crime, incarceration, etc. — and the portion of it you bear. But selfish pricks are a reliably large voting bloc and respond well to lowest common denominator messages with no big words.

Back to the vague contours. Amongst the opposition, we’re pretty sure some bad things are going to happen under Trump, but we’re not really sure what they are. We’re pretty sure he’s going try to fill Justice Scalia’s seat with a judge who opposes marriage equality and Roe v. Wade. We’re pretty sure he’s going to appoint an EPA chief who doubts climate change.

But seemingly every position he advocated in the campaign was something he opposed two or more years ago. How serious is he about a Mexico-funded wall, mass deportations, the prohibition of Muslim entry into the US, punishing women for having abortions, etc.? Is there another mask to pull off? If so, is what’s underneath more or less hideous than what concealed it?

What’s he going to do about the gathering storm in Russia, to whom we ceded a portion of our sovereignty in electing Trump? Yeah, Putin’s his bro. And …? So? The Clintons were guests at his wedding and in Florida. “Friend” is a notably elastic term in Trump’s diction.

But, gad, Russia. Russia, with whom multiple Trump campaign officials had documented ties. Russia, which openly intervened in the election, hacking emails from the Democratic side while leaving Republican emails untouched. Russia, which is amassing nuclear-capable weapons on Europe’s back door and is regularly prepping its citizenry for war. if Putin continues to put more inches on the table in Syria, the Ukraine or Eastern Europe, how will our Queens-born, always-punch-back President-elect respond to his biggest campaign patron?

And this ambiguity brings me back to the angry left-behinds for whom Trump claims to speak. The same people whose crippling lack of education is highly correlated with the self-proclaimed billionaire’s election. The same people who were wiped out by the economic and legal structures that Trump wrung his billions from. The same people whose lives are so far removed from Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago that those two structures may as well rest on a different planet — one they and their generations will never see.

Do they believe he speaks for them? I mean, aside from being a walking fuck-you to everything and everyone they blame for their station in life? Do they want him to say anything for them besides that? Some men just want to watch the world burn.

I grew up in the South and, as with anyone who’s studied Southern political history, Trump’s demogoguery was perfectly transparent to me. Take your pick from Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Huey Long, etc. Guess what? The South is as full of doomed rednecks today as it was when those three and others were dog-whistling them.

By 2020, what are the odds that Trump will have done more for white, angry left-behinds than Maddox’s Pickrick drumsticks did?