I’ve got bad news for you, America. Hillary has ruined the election for us. If you haven’t already heard it, here is the remark she made:
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
For more than a year Donald Trump has been struggling to keep this campaign clean, open and honest. He’s taken the high road from day one. There have been no cheap insults from him, no petty name-calling, no whining about how he’s being treated, and not one disrespectful word about Clinton or any of her supporters, not a single thing that anyone could fault him for. He has led the most civil presidential election campaign in the history of the world.
Now Hillary Clinton has spoiled all that. She made a complaint about Trump’s supporters. Everything had been going so peacefully and politely, too.
Hold on, news bulletin coming in – Trump’s been saying what? He’s been doing what? How many times? He’s been doing it for years before the election, you say?
If any of you Republicans haven’t figured it out yet, I was being ironic in the paragraphs above. I know many of you don’t understand what irony is. You prove that every time you praise your official presidential candidate. So let me lay it out for you.
Trump supporters keep saying we should tell it like it is, no sugar coating or political correctness. If that’s true and we are going to be telling it like it is, then Hillary Clinton got it right.
Well, mostly right. Her only mistake, as she said in her correction, was saying ‘half’. If you want to be honest you have to admit we do not really know what proportion of Trump supporters are deplorable. It might be half, less than half, or maybe even more than half. It all comes down to where you set the bar for deplorability.
One of the problems is the word itself, deplorable. It’s kind of long, four whole syllables. Trump and his supporters hate four-syllable words. It’s also a fancy, highfalutin’ kind of word, something an intelligent, well-educated person would use. Trump and his supporters hate intelligent, well-educated people.
How about something less fancy, more crude. If I were writing this Trump style I would change my title to ‘Donald Trump is a disaster and all you other disasters are voting for him. Believe me. Believe me.’
All the polls agree that Donald is running away with the disaster-lover’s vote. Believe me. Believe me. Hillary is hopelessly behind in that bloc and falling farther behind every day. (You love to talk about your poll numbers, Donald. Talk that one up.)
But let’s avoid both fancy and crude and go for simple instead. Donald Trump is a bad person. When bad people vote for president they naturally want to vote for other bad people. Like tends to like. It’s as simple as that. That’s one of those wise country sayings the good ole boys like to use – you know, plain country folk, the guys millionaire and billionaire Republican presidential candidates try to appeal to.
Just how bad are Trump and his followers? Let me count the ways:
Donald Trump lavishes praise on Vladmir Putin. He says that dictator and “alleged” murderer is better than our own American President, the one the American people freely elected twice.
That’s deplorable.
His supporters sucker punch African-Americans at his rallies while the rest of the crowd cheers and Donald offers to pay any court costs.
That’s deplorable.
He bragged that he could gun someone down on 5th Avenue and never lose a vote. His supporters cheered. He called Hillary a criminal who could shoot someone on stage and get away with it. His supporters cheered.
That’s deplorable, and that’s deplorable.
He makes up crude nicknames about everyone who opposes him. He claims to be the voice of regular working class people but then brags about how rich he is, saying everybody who makes less than him is a loser. He couldn’t even remember the date of the “7/11” terrorist attacks after writing it down, for God’s sake.
Deplorable and deplorable and deplorable.
He skipped the seventh Republican debate, complaining about how unfairly he was being treated because he got a few medium tough questions from Megyn Kelly. He justified himself by calling her a ‘bitch on the rag’ who was being unfair to him. (That’s the tell-it-like-it-is translation of what he said. His actual words were slightly more politically correct.)
He then promoted a competing event which he claimed was to raise money for veterans and promised a huge contribution of his own. (Veterans are people who actually joined up to fight for our country. In other words, not Trump.) There was a big publicity campaign and a lot of press coverage but not one penny was donated to anyone. Four months later, after being publicly shamed by reporters, Trump finally made a grudging donation, all the while complaining about how unfairly he was being treated.
When asked on TV about support from David Duke and white supremacist organizations he said with a straight face that he didn’t know who David Duke is and what white supremacist organizations are. When asked about it over the phone the next day he said with a straight voice he couldn’t hear the question the day before, his earpiece was broken.
He promises to keep American jobs for American workers and then hires people from overseas to work at his Florida resorts. He vows to restrict immigration but wants the government to issue more H1B visas, the ones that are supposed to be used for geniuses from other countries, like Albert Einstein, for example. Those are the ones he uses to bring in foreign workers to mop floors at Mar-a-Lago, the ones he uses to bring in the helpless young women he puts to work at his modeling agency.
That’s also the same kind of visa he used to get his present wife. You remember how he got rid of his American-born-and-raised wife and replaced her with an immigrant? I guess it’s all right to replace Americans with foreigners if the foreigner happens to be a ten. By the way, many people are saying Melania stayed in America illegally. I don’t know, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but lots of people are saying it.
He calls himself a builder, but where are his calluses? Trump has never held a hammer or saw or any tool other than a ceremonial gold-painted shovel. He sat around in luxury suites making phone calls till he got a deal, then skimmed off his commission and dumped the real work on somebody else to do, some bunch of loser working class contractors with threes or fours for wives. (Or husbands on occasion, in which case a rating isn’t necessary. It’s all right if a husband is less than a ten.)
And on the subject of building, he bragged about how he got of Atlantic City with a fortune “before it totally cratered” he said, but left out the part where he helped crater it. Nothing about all the working class people he left behind to rub their calluses and stare at the bills they sent to Trump and Trump sent back unpaid.
He casually joked about Hillary getting assassinated. Except no, he really didn’t mean it. Except, yeah, maybe he did. Then he says Hillary’s secret service agents should get rid of their guns, leaving both themselves and her defenseless from all the Trump supporters who applauded his assassination “joke”. This from the man who never goes anywhere without a squad of armed men, the same men that he’s bragged he doesn’t really need, by the way. He can handle any attackers all by himself, thank you. He just doesn’t like going to the trouble.
He spent years – not months, years – championing the birther cause, the claim that President Obama was born in Kenya and raised as a Muslim terrorist. That’s championing, mind you; not promoting, not supporting, but full-on championing. He anointed himself as the name, the face and the voice of the whole idea. “I made him show his birth certificate,” he boasted, and then went years more saying/not saying the birth certificate was a forgery and saying/not saying that the state official in charge was murdered to cover it up. Then suddenly after all those years he contemptuously announces: No, I never said any such thing, that was my opponent who did all that, I’m the one who proved Obama is really American.
Deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and deplorable and . . . .
******
Do you get the idea, or do I have to keep going? Because I can, you know. So can you. Anyone with an average knowledge of the campaign could give a hundred examples like these.
Imagine if you took the time and trouble to list all of them. Imagine how long it would be. Two hundred? Three hundred? Five hundred? I’m sure someone could do that. A thousand, even?
A thousand sounds excessive, but maybe it isn’t. Remember, Hillary’s critics go all the way back to her school days for examples. Donald is a year older than her. How many bad things has he managed to keep hidden over the last seven decades? And don’t forget we still have a month and a half to go. Trump says something bad almost every day and has been doing so going all the way back to the beginning, and presumably will keep doing so all the way to the end. His starting announcement had more than a few disgusting remarks.
Why don’t we make it two thousand.
We don’t need an Einstein or a Steve Jobs to figure this out. If you say and do bad things over and over, day after day, month after month, year after year, then you are a bad person. If you believe in someone who does that and support him and vote for him, then you are a bad person, too.
Donald Trump is deplorable. That is a fact, not an opinion. By any reasonable definition of the word and many unreasonable ones he meets all of the deplorability requirements. That means the people who cheer his twisted actions and repeat his despicable statements automatically become deplorable also.
Hillary Clinton got it right. She just got the percentage wrong. Maybe.