We all have our worst fears. For some that fear is a victory for Donald Trump in the Presidential election. One that will see the country turn xenophobicly inward, living in a constant state of cowardice, paranoia, open racism, sexism and distrust of foreigners, Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese and of course, Women, Jews, Blacks and gays all under the thinly veiled guise of false “strength”. Torture and War Crimes will once again be back on the table as a matter of U.S. Military police as will nuclear first strike options, NATO will be tossed under the bus while it’s member nations are extorted for cash, we’ll face international trade wars and recession, a giant tax bonanza for the rich and super-rich that will blow a Jupiter sized hole in the deficit while health care, fire, worker, consumer, food, building, water, air, environmental and safety regulations are slashed to the bone so that multination corporations can gain a few more points on the stock market.
It’s gonna suck.
But what just might suck even worse, is when Donald Trump loses.
No, I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton’s presidency will bring any outcome as bad the above litany of frack. I’m saying that Trump and his supporters are very likely not to accept the results and be driven into an even more rabid rage than they were by the election of Barack Hussein Obama II.
Just realize, they think they’re going to win. They really do. Donald thought he won the first debate, so of course they think he’ll win he election. Romney thought he was going to win in 2012 even though he was never leading in the polls. This is how things looked back then.
He never had the lead. Never. Despite that fact, many in the GOP resorted to subscribing to the idea that they needed to “unskew” the polls.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan both believed the public polls were wrong, and that they'd win on Election Day. Their wives did, too. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming," a senior adviser told CBS News' Jan Crawford. An advisor said of Romney, "He was shellshocked." When Romney claimed on Election Day that he hadn't written a concession speech, it sounded like trash talk. Apparently it wasn't. How could they not have seen it coming?
In the last weeks of the campaign, Romney's campaign sounded super confident -- New York's Jonathan Chait wrote that they were bluffing when aides said they could win Nevada, or when Romney surrogate Rob Portman called Ohio a "dead heat." That sounded ridiculous because Romney never led Obama in polling averages of Ohio, and Obama was ahead or tied in all of the last 30 polls done in the state except one by Republican-leaning Rasmussen.
Conservatives began claiming the polls were wrong, that they vastly overestimated what turnout levels would be among blacks, Latinos, and young people. UnSkewedPolls.com changed the number of Democrats and Republicans in polls to show Romney leading everywhere. You'd expect Romney's campaign to play this up publicly to maintain supporters' enthusiasm -- like when political director Rich Beeson said the Sunday before the election that Romney would win more than 300 electoral college votes. But you don't expect them to actually believe it. But Romney, his wife, Ryan, and his wife apparently did.
They believed that shit. They really did. Seriously.
We have now 4 years worth of hindsight to look back and see how accurate the polls really were. This is what fivethirtyeight says about that.
Among the more prolific polling firms, the most accurate by this measure was TIPP, which conducted a national tracking poll for Investors’ Business Daily. Relative to other national polls, their results seemed to be Democratic-leaning at the time they were published. However, it turned out that most polling firms underestimated Mr. Obama’s performance, so those that had what had seemed to be Democratic-leaning results were often closest to the final outcome.
Conversely, polls that were Republican-leaning relative to the consensus did especially poorly.
In reality the polls truly were skewed, but they were largely skewed in the favor of Republicans. And for all we know that tendency to undervalue Democrats might still exist, and supposing that it does, what does that tell you when you look at the current fivethirtyeight trend line of this chart for the 2016 election compared to 2012?
When you look at the RealClearPoliics polling average, Trump did have a lead for a nano-second after the Republican Convention but that’s long over.
Anything could conceivably happen over the next month, so I’m not saying things are sewn up. Things could go sideways. Trump did gain back ground after the tremendous bump Clinton receiving after the Democratic convention but much of that was lost by his horrific debate performance and I see little evidence he’ll improve as dramatically as he needs to for the second and third rounds. Maybe he will, but judging by how he continues to handle “debate prep” with a ridiculous town hall of cushioned soft-balls thrown gently over a velvet plate, I doubt it.
As of this moment Clinton is likely to defeat Trump at 4 to 1 odds. We shouldn’t be celebrating about it before we cross the finish line, but things do look good — so far.
But even with that in mind what we have to understand is the people on the other side are already suffering a fever of white hot rage.
One layer of answer: working-class rage. With his incessant blasts of full-on belligerence, the tax-trimming, loophole-exploiting, Putin-romancing, offshoring Donald Trump voices a performance of rage more convincingly than his opponent, who is never quite free of taint for her association with NAFTA and, more recently, TPP. Beyond doubt, Trump has proved demagogically brilliant — if that is a word that can be placed in a sentence near his name — in exploiting working-class bitterness, never mind that he proposes a “plan” to raise their taxes even as he lowers his own and his pals’ way,way below zero. But white men in particular — and these days, many of them are not very particular — think that he might be the muscle they’re looking for.
Not that Trump’s supporters are necessarily the ones suffering most. As a fascinating study by Gallup’s Jonathan T. Rothwell showed over the summer:
[T]hose who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration….[H]is supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
To put it simply, it’s a class thing, not pure individual self-interest:
…while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.
The second layer of answer might be: working-class white male rage. Men are still more likely to draw their identity from work, and the erosion of prideful work kicks them in the gut, as does the rusting of cities. White resentment finds swarthy men to be convenient targets.
Convient, foreign, not-white, targets. Non-whites who are very likely to win this election for Hillary Clinton as they did twice previously for Barack Obama.
And when it happens, and Trump loses, how do you think all the Raging Trumpkins are going to react? Y’know the people that think Hurricane Matthew is an exaggerated hoax?
Hours ahead of Hurricane Matthews’ landfall on Florida’s Atlantic coast, some climate change skeptics downplayed the danger of what meteorologists say could be the worst such storm since Hurricane Katrina.
Public officials and meteorologists have repeatedly stressed the strength of the storm, especially to those living in the evacuation zones on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
“This storm will kill you. Time is running out,” Gov. Rick Scott (R) said in a press conference Thursday. “There are no excuses. You need to leave. Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate. Are you willing to take a change to risk your life? Are you willing to take a gamble? That’s what you’re doing.”
Yet in the face of those pleas conservative aggregator Matt Drudge, who has a house in Florida, tweeted that “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” and “Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims. Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165mph gusts? WHERE?”
Yes, really . Again, they really believe that shit.
And why shouldn’t they believe that, because their Fuhrer Herr Drumpf apparently doesn’t believe in DNA.
In response to a CNN report on Trump’s role in ginning up public anger at the so-called Central Park Five, Trump said that he still believed that the five men in the case were guilty — even though their convictions were overturned and they were awarded a settlement of $41 million related to their wrongful imprisonment.
“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
The five men were exonerated for allegedly raping a woman named Trisha Meili after DNA evidence revealed that she had actually been sexually assaulted a man named Matias Reyes, who had confessed to being responsible for the assault. Their convictions were vacated shortly afterward and the five men were released in 2002.
These “guys” at the time of this assault, were children. They were interrogated without an attorney or their parents for hours, threatened and some were beaten until they finally confessed to a crime that DNA evidence proves they didn’t commit. At the time Trump called for these children to be executed even though the victim survived and now even after the DNA evidence and the confession of a suspect who matches the DNA Trump still think they did it?
When it’s announced that he’s lost the election will he believe that? And what’s he going to tell the people who’ve been willing to repeatedly threaten the life and deliberately trick Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald into suffering a seizure when that happens?
A couple of weeks later, after my article about how Trump’s business interests would create a conflict of unprecedented proportions, I received a tweet from someone with the twitter handle “Mike's Deplorable AF.” Like many Trump supporters, he has chosen to identify himself as deplorable to mock the label once used by Clinton to describe the racists, neo-Nazis, homophobes and like who have crawled out of the sewer to cheer for the Republican nominee. Mike, however, is indeed deplorable.
In his tweet, which has since been deleted, Mike made mention of my seizures and included a small video. It contained images of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol. I was carrying my iPad, looking at the still image on the video and, without thinking, touched the PLAY button.
The video was some sort of strobe light, with flashing circles and images of Pepe flying toward the screen. It’s what’s called epileptogenic—something that triggers seizures. Fortunately, since I was standing, I simply dropped my iPad to the ground the second I realized what Mike had done. It landed face down on the bathroom floor.
The deplorables are real. The deplorables are dangerous.
And that isn’t all.
Because I have written critically about Trump, I have received innumerable death threats, sometimes just general invocations that I should die, sometimes more specific threats that I should be shot or “lynched,” as one Trump fan wrote. I have been called “kike,” “Jew” and “anti-American Zionist,” even though I’m Episcopalian with a Jewish father (as if that makes a difference). I have received video cartoons that look like they are from Nazi Germany of hook-nosed men dressed in Jewish garb rubbing their hands greedily over piles of money. I have been told to go back where I came from, whatever that means. I have been called “fag,” “pedo,” and once—in an email that made no sense—“nigger-lover.” One Trump fan mentioned he knew which schools my children attended, and correctly named them. Topping it off, some Trump fans have even gone after one of my sons online, although he knew enough to immediately block them.
This is what’s happening to journalist, prominent journalists, who report bad news about Donald Trump’s business dealings now — a month before the election. When he loses, how much worse will they become?
How will the deplorables rage against the rest of us when the inevitable occurs?