OK, I’m calling it. With zero precincts reporting, Donald Trump cannot be president of this country.
He brags about committing violence against women. He judges people by their race, religion and national origin. He talks like a Third World dictator who would use the criminal justice system as a personal revenge machine.
He cannot win this election, even though appealing to the worst part of the American character will get him millions of votes – including one from a certain resident of Augusta.
“Is he a slimeball?” mused Maine’s Gov. Paul LePage in a radio interview Tuesday. “I’d be the first to say that he’s not my ideal of the kind of guy I want my daughter going after.”
But Trump has other qualities that, in the governor’s opinion, make being a “slimeball” forgivable.
“Sometimes, I wonder that our Constitution is not only broken, but we need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law because we’ve had eight years of a president, he’s an autocrat, he just does it on his own, he ignores Congress and every single day, we’re slipping into anarchy,” LePage said.
Given the week we have just lived through, it’s a stunning statement, and not just because it cites three different political systems that begin with the letter “A.” We know Paul LePage. He calls people of color “the enemy.” He claims refugees fleeing oppression are freeloaders. He would deny life-saving medicine to people who have overdosed on drugs because it provides “an excuse to stay addicted.”
It’s not news that LePage is a blowhard. But hearing an American governor call the U.S. Constitution “broken” and suggest that we need some “authoritarian power” to fix it should show everyone how far we have sunk.
LePage is right. There is something broken in our system. The proof is Donald Trump’s success in this campaign.
If Trump hadn’t repeatedly sabotaged himself, we might really be electing a wannabe authoritarian dictator this year. That’s something that America needs to fix before another candidate who is a little smarter and less accident-prone takes a run.
A lot of the blame goes to the Republican Party. Since the 1960s, it has used anti-civil rights white grievance as fuel for the conservative agenda. This time around, Trump was able to dump conservative trade policy, conservative foreign policy and some aspects of social conservatism, and still have plenty of support from Republicans to win the nomination and pull into a September tie for the presidency on grievance alone.
But before liberals get too smug and superior, let’s acknowledge their role in this.
We are about to elect a president in Hillary Clinton who is running on a platform of not being a racist, paying her taxes and refusing to make fun of people because of their weight – kind of a low bar.
If Donald Trump were not in the race, we would be writing about a Democratic Party that has run out of gas ideologically. If she wins, Clinton will be the second-oldest person ever elected to the office, and she champions ideas developed in the mid-1960s when the world was a very different place. The Democrats are going to win this election because Trump is handing it to them, but if a normal Republican had been on the ballot, it’s hard to see how Clinton could have overcome her personal baggage.
It’s not just the political parties that have let us down. We in the news media are going to have to figure out a better way to cover politics.
To avoid looking biased, we write about tactics instead of policy. We love conflict and can’t look away when candidates go after each other. We treat elections like a sport, where predicting the winner seems like the goal.
Which makes us a sucker for a guy like Trump, who knows how to make our jobs easy.
Other institutions could also do some soul-searching.
How do evangelical Christians end up supporting a guy who gives Howard Stern permission to call his own daughter “a piece of ass”? How do schools graduate students who don’t know that a president can’t throw his political opponents in jail? Why do voters believe more in invisible conspiracies than what they can see with their own eyes?
Donald Trump will not be president. But millions of people think that he should be, and like our governor, they will still be around on the day after Nov. 8.
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