for his New York Times column this morning titled Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy.
Blow begin with Trump’s “victory tour” which he notes seems to reinforce the minority of the voters who supported him rather than reaching out to the country as a whole for whom he is supposed to serve:
He is choosing to push America further apart rather than bring it closer together.
And be clear: It is not the job of the defiant to conform to a future president who makes them completely uncomfortable. The burden of unity lies with Trump, not his detractors.
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Here one might hear echoes on this site of Sanders supporters who claimed it was Clinton’s responsibility to reach to them. As an aside, I remind those who were diehards that she did precisely that, sitting down with Bernie, modifying some of her rhetoric to include his ideas, and as a result coming up with the most progressive platform of any presidential candidate in history. But that is an aside.
Blow’s column is hard to summarize, because it so packed with pertinent and pointed expression. He reminds us that Trump is seemingly unrepentant in his rhetoric and what Blow describes as “his emerging Legion of Doom cabinet” which is why Blow concludes of Trump and those who oppose him
resistance then is an act of radical, even revolutionary, patriotism. Resistance isn’t about damaging the country, but protecting it.
After reminding us of the lack of a “reset” on white supremacy — which we also know has led to an explosion of repulsive incidents against people of color, Muslims, etc, — Blow in two short paragraphs sets the framework which we need to understand the necessity of our responses:
Furthermore, the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure has threatened to kill many of the ideals that we hold dear: decency and decorum, inclusion and empathy, truth and facts themselves.
Trump and his agents of idiocracy are now engaged in an all-out crusade to exaggerate the scope of his victory, rewrite racial history, justify their vendettas and hostilities and erase the very distinction between true and false.
I am now pushing - or even beyond — the limits of fair use in direct quotation. And yet I am not even halfway through this powerful column!
Blow covers in detail the exchange between Jennifer Palmieri and Kelly Anne Conway at Harvard, and then offers a devastating remark about leaders and power, and what it reveals about them. While we do not yet know how Trump will use the power of the Presidency (although we have some pretty clear indications that one of his primary purposes is to enrich himself and his kids), Blow notes that how he obtained it — through lies and the unleashing of the impulses that have lead to so many incidents — is devastatingly clear.
Blow cites Pew data of the low esteem in which Trump is held compared to all recent President-Elects. He cites Nate Silver as noting that Trump is the only President-Elect since primaries became as important as they did in 1972 to fail to win either a majority of the popular vote in the general election or a majority of his party’s primary vote.
He also warns us of the direction we can observe from recent incidents like the recent (and ongoing) diplomatic misadventures in his phone calls, the refusal to rule out going after Hillary Clinton with a special prosecutor, Lewandowski’s saying that the executive editor of The New York Times should be incarcerated for having published the Trump tax data that he did, and of course the shocking remarks by Scottie Nell Hughes on the radio show of Diane Rehm where Hughes asserted that there are no longer facts.
Here I must push fair use, because after this there are two back to back sentences that in context are a punch to the gut, the first at the end of the paragraph on Hughes and the other standing by itself:
Folks, Dimwit-ism is a disease easily spread and denigrators of the absolutism of truth are its vectors.
This is why resistance isn’t only principled, but essential and even existential.
Ponder those words for a moment.
Both sentences.
Consider the implications for how you act and speak as we go forward.
If your mind is still not made up, then perhaps the one paragraph left in Blow’s powerful column will help you. And I will risk being challenged in offering these words to you because they are so important:
We are not in an ordinary postelection period of national unity and rapprochement. We are facing the potential abrogation of fundamental American ideals. We stand at the precipice, staring into an abyss that grows darker by the day.
the potential abrogation of fundamental American ideals
That is why we must speak and act differently than after any other election in my lifetime.
The very fabric of America is being shredded before our eyes.
The continuation of our Constitutional republic is very much at risk.
Franklin warned at the end of the Constitutional Convention that we had a republic if we could keep it.
This election has unleashed the very real possibility that we cannot.
And the actions of our putative next chief executive not only put our democracy at risk, but also the safety of the world on many issues — health, economic, climate change, even the continued existence of humanity because of the increased possibility of nuclear conflagration.
This is a remarkable column by Blow.
Even pushing fair use I have not done it justice.
Please, go read it and then pass it on.