When we focus our outrage on big ticket items like the recent refugee/travel kerfuffle, it's easy to miss the smaller and quieter moments of idiocy.
On a recent day packed with affairs of state, our president bragged to the Australian Prime Minister about his electoral college win, before angrily accusing the PM of trying to foist on us "the next Boston bombers." He then clarified his feelings by telling Malcolm Turnbull that this chat, the fifth he'd had that day with a world leader, was "the worst call by far," before abruptly ending it 35 minutes ahead of schedule. I don't know what "abruptly" (the Post's word) means, exactly-- the paper seemed reluctant to literally say that Trump hung up on Turnbull-- but it's hard not to see Trump as a fascinating mashup of stereotypical juvenile behavior associated with both boys and girls. One moment he's a teen boy bragging about a basketball buzzer beater, the next he's a teen girl wearing a Turbie Twist, blurting out something hurtful about her friend's acne, and then hanging up and listening to Taylor Swift on Spotify.
Yesterday, hoping to begin Black History Month on a boffo note, our President said these words out loud-- "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice."
Meanwhile, in a rural Maryland town, the Post interviewed a handful of waitresses and retirees who like Trump because he talks tough, and keeps our country safe.
Here's what needs to be understood by the liberals protesting Trump's election, or his actions, or whatever it is they believe they are demonstrating against.
We live in a country where the residents vote for our leader. And just as many of us on the left caricature the right as a bunch of rubes who hate nonwhite people, and leave it at that, the people the Post interviewed in Accident, MD also have a simplistic understanding of things. Americans on the right and left don't put a lot of time in reading about ideas that differ from theirs. They demonize the other side, and oversimplify the statements and events that shore up what they feel emotionally. And when people get off their asses and cast a vote, they're like kids who eat Doritos for breakfast and then get winded during gym class.
I get that racism is bad. But it's important to recall that other countries have sent a few dangerous nonwhite people to our shores, and those few have killed a bunch of us. I don't like Trump's refugee policy, more because I think it's stupid than because I think it's mean and ugly. It is both of those things, but I don't care about that so much. (I'm not arguing that you should feel the way I do, in case anyone's confused about that.)
I also don't believe that all people who like the policy are mean and ugly people. I see many of them as provincial men and women who know as much about the world as I know about field hockey. (In the article, one resident told a harrowing tale of culture shock they experienced on a visit to the Gomorrah of Columbus, Ohio.) They don't want their family and friends murdered by a stranger, and are perplexed by the apparent liberal idea that we should let everybody in and hope for the best. And while the Trump idiocies I mentioned earlier are hard to spin, these rustic folks don't have to spin 'em-- they'll never know about them because they're not reading the Washington Post.
This is what we on the left are up against. And we need to recall that all these same people will be lumbering out to the polls in four years. And every time we say out loud that we hate these people, because they are racist etc., that gets gleefully used by politicians and their henchmen to make us look like a bunch of big city assholes from some place like Columbus, Ohio.
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