Election Thoughts

The Weekly Lately #051

I’m writing this at 4:13pm on Election Day. I think Harris will win over 300 electoral votes. And Trump? He’ll do what anyone would do after being resoundingly rejected by voters: complain, whine ‘like a dog’ and announce he is running again in order to keep the ‘political persecution’ angle in play as his court dates approach.

It’s all so fucking boring. And it isn’t like the bar is particularly high for him. I swear, if the guy could stop whining for a second and also convincingly pet a dog he’d win fifty states.

That’s my main takeaway from the last decade of American politics, the Trump Decade, whatever you want to call it — this weird backdoor pilot for an America that never was and will never (God willing) quite be, rejected almost entirely since it premiered, revolving around an individual who never really had much of interest to say.

The whole thing has been a bit like Being There, the novel about an intellectually disabled  (or perhaps just sheltered, or perhaps both, I haven’t read it since college, where I majored in Writing and spent most of my time listening to Leon Redbone and dissociating) gardener who finds himself whisked to the top of society merely because others mistake his meandering as wisdom.  Trump has branded his own habit of answering ten thousand questions no one asked about as ‘The Weave’ in a bid to gin up ratings, and some of his folks lap it up. They have to. What is the other option? Admit you’ve been conned? 

Trump of course isn’t fit to hold ‘Chauncey’’s rake, but the punchline of the piece is the same, and it isn’t on the Orange Man — it’s on us, well, at least on those of us who heard the ramblings of a frightened and embarrassingly small soul and thought ‘that’s our guy!’.  But, out of the goodness of my heart, I’m willing to extend the blame to all Americans, including myself, Hillary Clinton and the phalanx of shitty comedians, vitamin salesmen and Twitter ‘operatives’  (why choose?) who figured the Trump Train was a good way to get ahead. And it may have been, for a few years. 

Unlike Being There, which runs a brisk one hundred and thirty minutes and starred Peter Sellers when movie-fied, the Trump Decade seemed like it would never fucking end. Well, maybe it will today.

It’s all so boring, which isn’t to say it hasn’t been important. Just ask some Ukrainians, wondering if today is the day that will seal their fate, if a new American president will trade temporary ‘peace’ to an aggressor for a few chunks of their sovereign territory.  Or ask any (yes, not all, but I’m on a roll here, so don’t argue) woman, made less free by the Trump court in a very special two-part episode that no one asked for (“Brett Gets Carded”), whatever Trump says. 

Maddeningly boring, but important — that’s the Trump Decade. A main character incapable of change, people supporting him for that reason and a world (such as it is) at risk of spinning off into who-knows-where. Well, we do.  

It’s for that reason — the childish nothingness at the core of the Trumpain scream — I think Trump will lose. Very little unites Americans at the moment, other than our shared identity as consumers. And the Trump Show is simply old, thank you very much. I love shitty brain rot TV, but after a few episodes of Judge Judy even I get queasy.

It will go away not because it is indicative of moral rot or fundamentalist overreaching or because the Special Counsel is finally allowed to put on a trial, but because Trump is a boring show. And we know what happens to boring shows.