I didn’t think there was another Trump post in me, but the baldness of his bald-faced lies has shocked even the most jaded of commentators. And while I don’t wear the Jade Crown just yet, I covet the title like a green-eyed bastard. In that competitive vein, if I’m going to weigh in on the aftershocks of the #trumpquake like so many others, no doubt, are doing even as I type, then let’s begin classy with a little paraphrasing of the immortal bard:
‘O Donny, Donny! Wherefore art thou, Donny? Deny thy nature and lose thy fame!’
Having no skin in the stocks game myself, I watched with an outsider’s interest as $30B dollars was wiped off the Australian market immediately post-election. Why would our market react so negatively to news from the US? Because we are all neighbours in the global village now, so if the US set their house on fire, chances are the flames will spread. Equity markets are fickle, traders are skittish, and all it took from The Donald were a couple of soothingly epic policy reversals to re-establish the status quo. Business as usual folks. Surprise!
“Hey guys, that wall across the Mexican border? Well, see, parts of it might actually be a fence.” [here]
“Hey guys, you know when I said I’d tear Obamacare down? You know I was kidding, right?” [here]
The status quo, as we know, is what America didn’t vote for. The majority screamed, fu*k the status quo, and voted for a vulgar demagogue who’d entranced them by publicly trashing the administration as corrupt, calling for them to take up arms in civil insurrection if he, their saviour, lost the election. But that was always the qualifier, wasn’t it — if he lost. On the other hand, if he won, well the corrupt electoral system should be honoured, shouldn’t it. If he won, the tokenistic office of President should be respected. If he won, it would be business as usual.
Er, hang on.
Middle America are shamefully stupid to have been gulled by this charlatan. Why would a man who has profited immensely from the existing capitalist paradigm want it to change? Too late now, but surely the dull realisation has begun to creep into their neanderthalian skulls that a vote for Trump was a vote for Trump, not America? If anybody really believed The Donald was planning to magically return white Americans just like them to social and economic primacy, and send those unAmerican free-trade advocates and commie peacenik liberals to the lions, then they should be forcefully segregated from the general population and loaded onto Starship Gullible with all the lemmings and sheep, and given the mission of finding out what’s causing that beeping sound from Galaxy VHS7. There they will find peace (so long as there’s a population of dark-skinned natives to enslave) and form an oligarchic pluto-corporatocracy on planet Stultius. That said (with Latin being out out their reach) they’ll probably name it Epsilonia and get on with the inbreeding.
Flipping the coin, cold comfort aside, maybe there’s less to fear from a Trump presidency than anticipated? No strange comet across the sky, no occluded moon. US haruspicators aren’t finding dead bison with bloated orange maggots in their livers, so maybe we’ll be okay. Trump will be shepherded by the mandarins of government, who are generally sound (aren’t they?) and hopefully some rational policy advisor will sneak into his trusted coterie of white supremacists and media billionaires to keep a rein on The Donald’s more globally-perilous excesses. Of course, the mogul will chafe at the bit when he realises what a token position POTUS really is, and how he can’t just hammer the red button at will, not even when his Peterburgtsy bestie Vlad unfriends him, or he learns (as must eventually happen) that Vlad doesn’t want to bareback him anymore.
Flipping the coin again (yes, a three-sided coin, this is Shakespeare remember?) maybe America knew he was lying and voted for him anyway. Why would they do that? It has to be something fundamental and primal. Did they look at him and think, “hmm … a rich white guy who likes groping women? He must be on my side!” versus Clinton, that shrewish old battleaxe, who identified with educated, well-employed, upwardly mobile, new-generation liberals. Yes, those criminal sonsabitches who dudded America out of its high-industrial era promise of global supremacy and wealth for all.
Of course, when they say ‘wealth for all’ they don’t actually mean all. They mean ‘us’ which excludes women (until she marries ‘up’), Mexicans (no mames, cabrón!), refugees (GTFO all you camel-fuc*ers), people of colour (40 acres and a mule, my privileged rich white ass), or liberals (kill. them. all). But hey, at least he knows his daughter is a nice piece of tail, right? I wonder how many hillbillies voted for Trump? I bet there was a statistically-significant spike for Trump in the trailer-park southern states. The fact remins, to those who handed him their vote, trusting he would metamorphose from the problem into the solution at noon on 20 January 2017 — what made you think this bullshitter wasn’t lying to you as well?
To end on a happier note:
Two hillbillies walk into a restaurant.
While they’re having a bite to eat,, a woman at a nearby table suddenly begins to cough.
After a minute, it becomes apparent that she’s in real distress.
One of the hillbillies looks at her and says, “Kin ye swallar?”
The woman shakes her head no.
Then he asks, “Well, kin ye breathe?”
The woman, turning blue, shakes her head no.
The hillbilly walks over to the woman, lifts up her dress, yanks down her drawers, and gives her right butt-cheek a lick with his tongue.
The woman is so shocked that she has a violent spasm, and the obstruction flies out of her mouth. As she begins to breathe again, the hillbilly walks slowly back to his table.
His brother says, “Ya know, Cletus, I heerd of that there Hind Lick Maneuver, but I ain’t never seed nobody do it!”