At the top of the list of Americans who deserve four years of President Trump are those who voted for him for no other reason than a deep-seated, visceral antipathy to the Clintons. Voting for Trump because you hate the Clintons is like turning down a good job because the person who offered it to you had their feet up on the desk, or throwing your cable box out the window because the cable guy they sent to repair it was rude and had too many tattoos. No Duck Dynasty tonight, and you deserve it.
It goes without saying that the Republican Party deserves President Trump. The Republican Party is the Dr. Frankenstein in this creaky horror drama. Like the good doctor, it has created a monster which vaguely resembles a human being and is out of control and unpredictable.
Identity liberals deserve a President Trump, for distracting the Democratic Party from the multitude of problems besetting the mass of the electorate to concentrate on the particular issues affecting people who both lack a sense of decorum and have the time for whining incessantly in public. Those whiners deserve a President Trump, yes, but most of them are just kids. Even more deserving of a President Trump are the grown-ups of academia who acquiesced to their adolescent narcissism, and the media, which gave their plaints – which are valid enough, but insignificant compared to the overall distress of the entire 99% – a facade of grave importance.
Do the 29% of Hispanic/Latinos, the 29% of Asians, and many of the 37% of those of various “other” non-white, non-black races, who voted for Donald Trump, deserve President Trump? Assuming that most of those voters are middle-class first- or second-generation Latinos and Asians, or immigrants who have successfully integrated into the middle-class, they are no more to blame than other middle-class or would-be middle-class Americans who came to the conclusion that President Trump was a better bet to help pull them out of the swamp of debt and insecurity than more of the same in Washington, which always just seems to make things worse.
To make an honest mistake out of desperation is not morally wrong or irrational. There was nothing reprehensible – whether you’re a bourgeois, a billionaire or a bum – in having voted for Donald Trump because you genuinely believed that President Trump would improve your personal situation. Simple self-interest is at the core of the democratic process. If it turns out you were wrong, it is not your fault; you did the best that you could with the overload of information you received; you do not deserve President Trump. And, anyway, things might have been just as bad for you with President H. Clinton.
The immigrant community, especially the Latinos, especially the Mexicans, who have cheerfully embraced the Protestant work ethic, keeping it alive while for most settled Americans it has become only the troubling ghost from a steam punk past, do not deserve a President Trump. Nor does the Muslim Community, which quietly, successfully, is navigating the American way of life while tainted, every single member of it, with the stigma of 9/11.
Does the black community deserve a President Trump? No, of course not. Only 8% of black voters supported Trump. If Hillary Clinton had won, though, would the black community have gotten the President that their loyalty and trust deserved? Considering the escalating depredations the black community has suffered under a black president and a black attorney general, it is unlikely.
For Americans who did not vote, the apathetic and the cynical, the question of whether or not they deserve a President Trump does not arise. For the former, it does not matter who is President, as long as they don’t get cancer, can indulge themselves as usual, and the wi-fi doesn’t go down. For the latter, a Trump Presidency will only justify their comfortable pessimism.
Another large group which neither deserves nor doesn’t deserve a President Trump, which may include the largest number of Trump voters, and in which, although I voted for Clinton, I would place myself, is the exasperated – those for whom the mess in Washington is so bad and so resistant to self-reform, that they just wanted to see it brought to an end, by any means.
As one of the exasperated, there is something in me which is thrilled at the sight of the establishment in disarray and everyone in Washington making fools of themselves in the confusion. Part of me thinks: I don’t give a fuck what President Trump does; this was worth it. Of all the statements I’ve read in the press, from voters on both sides, the one I sympathize with the most was that of Edward Tucker, a carpenter in Ohio, who told The Guardian, “I think Trump is nuts, but I’d love to have him as a president to see what happens.”
I am also a cynic, however, so another part of me believes that the Republican and the Democratic Parties, jointly or separately, buoyed by the establishment, if they cannot successfully impeach President Trump, will bureaucratically and legislatively neuter him, and things will go on as before. Needless to say, the liberal, elderly householder in me thinks that probably would be a good thing.
One silver lining to a Trump Administration is that Washington’s reaction to it might put the kibosh on the imperial Presidency, which has been growing ever more powerful since F. D. R. (peace be upon him).