A Tisket, a Tasket, What’s inside Your Basket?

Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump’s supporters can be placed into two baskets: the “deplorables” and the people who are “desperate for change.” I’ve taken the liberty of creating my own categories: The Deplorables, the Government Haters, the Party Liners, the Trump Book Club, and the Hillary Haters. Not all of these people are bad, of course; but their votes will all contribute to an unprecedented disaster in our government, our national security, and the status of the United States of America on the world stage.

Let’s go ahead and talk about the “deplorables” first since they are the scariest ones. I applaud Mrs. Clinton for calling them what they are, and I believe she should neither recant nor apologize for her statement. Trump’s most rabid supporters are angry white men, many of whom are racists who identify themselves with the alt-right, a group that promotes white supremacy and who are—according to NPR—against “multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and, above all, political correctness.”

Sound familiar? Those are the very pillars on which Donald Trump has built his preposterous “presidential campaign.” Flying in the face of political correctness was his rallying cry, and these alt-right supporters, according to Nicole Hemmer, see political correctness “as the greatest threat to their liberty” (quoted by NPR). Ms. Hemmer goes on to say, “They believe saying racist or anti-Semitic things . . . is not an act of hate, but an act of freedom.”

As if having alt-right people and David Duke sympathizers as followers were not enough, Trump hired the man who gave this fledgling group a platform—Steve Bannon—to be the CEO of his then floundering campaign.

Those who cheer for Trump’s racist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic rants, who chant “Lock her up!” whenever he mentions Hillary Clinton’s name, who believe every bit of vomit that spews from his mouth and stand ready to use violence if necessary to support him are indeed deplorable and a menace to our society.

Not all of Trump’s supporters, however, fall into this category, or to use Hillary Clinton’s word, “basket.” The other groups I have mentioned are not deplorable; in fact, some are pitiable, but they are no less a threat. The deplorables won’t change; they have dark, menacing ideas, and Trump has given them credibility and a safe place to vent their bile and venom. The other groups of Trump supporters are not dangerous in themselves; but ballot counters don’t count motive, so they are just as hazardous as the alt-right people.

Most pitiable of all Trump supporters are the Government Haters. These people are so unhappy with their lot in life that they grasp every delusional word Trump says as if it were a lifeboat that would take them to a better place. In the greatest and richest country on earth, millions of people feel so angry, so betrayed, so powerless, so disenfranchised, so cheated, and so dehumanized by their government and their politicians that the rantings of a crazy man sound like words of hope and promise!

Hillary Clinton describes them this way:

people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

I’ve often said that Trump is the effect, not the cause. Anti-intellectualism, failing schools, failing churches, hatred, prejudice of all sorts, political polarization—these are our real problems. Trump simply played on people’s vulnerability, the spineless Republican Party allowed him to take over, and the even more spineless media gave him the free air time to do so. The Government Haters are correct in much of what they say but sadly misguided in what they see as the solution. Their messiah is using them to achieve his goal but would do little for them if elected.

Then there are the Party Line Republicans. They’d vote for a hamster if the Republican Party nominated it. In all fairness, some Democrats would do the same for their party; and party loyalty is not all bad. It becomes problematic, however, when loyalty to party supersedes loyalty to country. President Obama is credited with the statement that we are not red states and blue states; we are the United States. When either party loses its mind and nominates a menace to our democracy as its presidential candidate, every citizen—regardless of party affiliation—should unite to extinguish that threat and keep our country united and safe. The Party Liners are not deplorable, just naïve and misguided.

Certain members of the Party Liners, however, are deplorable: the high-ranking Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the snake in the grass Reince Preibus, who don’t agree with a word Trump says but urge voters to support the party candidate. With leadership like that, the party as we know it is in danger of extinction. But that won’t affect Trump since–even though he’s riding on the wave of party loyalty–he himself has no loyalty to any party. Now that he’s built his mob of supporters who are loyal to him alone, he doesn’t need the support of any party; and he would certainly not work with any party if elected. A demagogue’s power comes from his exploitation of crowd passions, not from checks and balances or due process.

Next up are the Trump Book Club. Book? Oh, that’s right, Trump doesn’t read; and neither do these followers. They’re not bad people; they’re just used to trusting the process to the “experts” and showing up on voting day to follow their leaders’ recommendations. Many in this group pride themselves on “doing their own research,” but that usually means seeking and following the opinions of sources who lean the same direction they do and scoffing at anything which challenges their personal biases. They’re not deplorable, but they are a threat because they’re not informed enough to know what they don’t know.

For me, the most disturbing group in this election cycle is the Hillary Haters. I’m not saying Mrs. Clinton is above criticism or that all of the criticisms against her are unjustified. She has spent her entire life in public service, so she has made mistakes along the way. Ever make a mistake on your job? I made my share of them. Anyone who’s doing anything is going to screw up periodically, and the more a person is doing the more opportunities there are for screw-ups.

What’s disturbing to me about the Hillary Haters is that most of them have bought the false narratives spread by her enemies and have closed their minds to any information that contradicts those narratives. This weekend, I read an excellent article called “Media Narratives Imprison Clinton, Trump—and Voters,” by Neal Gabler (published on Moyers and Company). Mr. Gabler’s premise is that narratives drive election coverage and largely contribute to elections’ outcomes. He explains:

Narratives are the stories and characteristics that the media attach to candidates, so the election turns into a “movie” pitting one protagonist’s qualities against another’s. In this election, we all know the narrative constructs because the media hammer at them day after day after day: Hillary Clinton is a cold, secretive, defensive liar who is nevertheless competent; Donald Trump is a loose cannon who is nevertheless plain-spoken and says exactly what’s on his mind. The media never deviate from these ideas. Indeed, they are high-security prisons from which the candidates cannot escape.

Applied to Mrs. Clinton, this means that

No matter what Clinton says or does, it will always be filtered through the pre-existing scrim. If she talks policy, she is cold. If she insists — rightfully, to my mind — that the email brouhaha is a molehill turned into not just any mountain but Everest, she is defensive. If she meets, as every politician does, with friends and favor-seekers, she is corrupt, whether she has doled out favors or not. These are the traits the media have assigned to her.

Gabler goes on to comment on the Trump narratives and then makes this comparison:

But you may have noticed something. Even the negative attributes the media have slapped on Trump . . . are better than the ones they have put on Clinton. Her actions can all be chalked up to duplicity; Trump’s, on the other hand, to his politically incorrect honesty. Never mind that Trump may be, if you follow PolitiFact, the single most mendacious [For the Trump Book Club people, that means lying] candidate in the history of presidential politics.

In another article, Neal Gabler says:

The bigger point is this: whatever you may think of the Clintons, the scandals didn’t create the meme of untrustworthiness about them. The meme of untrustworthiness created the scandals. The media just kept hunting for those scandals as confirmation of what they had already determined. That is how so many in the MSM work — backwards from presumption to incident. It also happens to be the surest path to career advancement for journalistic opportunists. (“The Media Have a Hillary Story and They’re Sticking to It,” Moyers and Company)

The obvious problem here is that voters have been so conditioned by these narratives that no amount of information about Trump’s criminal activity or his sleazy lifestyle can overcome the narrative that he’s just a straight shooter who wants to help the underdogs. And the much-publicized lists of bankruptcies, failed businesses, and frauds can’t tarnish the narrative that he’s the consummate businessman who will apply the skills that have made him a multi-billionaire (although we will never know his actual net worth) to the national budget and make the country financially great again.

As for Hillary Clinton, the press has never cared much for her or her husband, so it’s unlikely she’ll ever get a break. Press treatment of them is similar to the biblical literalists’ making up a doctrine or taking a position and then going through the scriptures in search of “proof” for their preexisting belief.

If she has a case of walking pneumonia, instead of giving her credit for being tough enough to work through it, they’ll dedicate the next several days’ news cycles to showing how this proves that she really is dishonest and deceptive because she didn’t make a public announcement the minute she was diagnosed. And they’ll demand that she release even more medical records to prove she isn’t hiding anything else. Never mind that her opponent has released a tiny fraction of what she has.

The Hillary Haters are not exactly deplorable, but they’re misguided, and they can be appallingly nasty. Like the media’s, their narrative is embedded, and anything she does will be viewed through that lens. Even when Politifact calls her the most honest candidate they’ve fact checked, her haters call Politifact a phony liberal organization that supports her evil agenda.

Washington Post writer Robert Kagan offers this astute summary:

What Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up. (“This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” 18 May 2016)

The prospect of a Trump presidency is deplorable. The groups who vote for him have different backgrounds and reasons for their choice, but a vote is a vote; and every one of them is contributing to the apocalypse that will befall if this know-nothing is elected. Time to wake up!