LA TIMES published interviews with Trump voters today, including one in California:
"We're called redneck, ignorant . . . "
The Californian had been a loan officer earning six figures, now sharing a house with four people and commuting 3 hours for $29,000/year. If he speaks of "survival," he's also speaking about desperation. $50,000 in student loan debt! Whew!
So they put a human face on this disaster. And I have a story, or parable of sorts.
A man and his wife struggle to make ends meet in their home. She takes care of the kids as a homemaker; he works in a factory. They have some several thousand in a savings account. Soon, he loses his job, goes on a bender, and wonders how his family will survive. He's desperate.
So unbeknownst to his wife, he goes down to the bank, withdraws all the money, and heads for the Trump Casino’s roulette-wheel. When asked to place his bet, he says "All in!"
He loses the money. Then, the wife confronts him. "What have you done? What have you done?!" she asks.
So this time, we got a candidate who is a known quantity in terms of his psychology, personality, business and even belatedly his tax history. What we didn't know from actual tax returns, most of us keen on the subject actually inferred from what we know and don't know to a fairly accurate degree.
Before the campaign, we knew a lot more about Trump than we may have known about Clinton, Bush or Obama. We saw him in the news back in the '90s; we saw him on the "Apprentice" before we changed channels for something more real. We saw his wife on the front page of the New York Post, naked as a jay-bird. We've heard from businesses who dealt with him and minorities against whom he discriminated. We've now heard from women who came forward about his behavior. It would seem that Trump was a bad bet.
And we -- I say "we" -- could be asking ourselves little by little over the next four years: "What have we done? What have we done?!"
But Miskulin's vote didn't matter anyway and he didn't elect Trump -- he was just a cheerleader. First, California is a blue state, although you could say Miskulin's vote counted in the decision. Second, Mr. Miskulin no less than any of us is simply a fourth of a person, given the nature of the Electoral College. That, I think, was a value placed on slaves before the Civil War. And given the outcome for California, Miskulin is essentially a non-person.
A non-person, like an illegal immigrant, except that Miskulin can vote to have his vote count for nothing.
Further, all this talk about "Trump changing" miraculously is nonsense. A man of 59 years can't have much of a view of the future if he spoke like an adolescent about grabbing pussy. Trump is who he is, and he's not going to change. For a person like that to change for the better, they must experience failure.
We, on the other hand, would not be comfortable risking our fortunes like Trump did with his when he created his 18 years of carry-over loss deductions. Who's to say he won't take greater foolish risks with our country?
Now I have one thing to add here.
In 2000 November, I wrote a letter to a friend in Florida with casual predictions about the future. She later wrote back to me in 2008: "Do you realize that you wrote this in 2000?" However, before that, on September 10, 2001, I and two friends were sitting around a campfire in the North Cascades, eating, drinking and talking. We speculated about the future. We thought we'd soon be in another war, that there would be another headline terrorist attack perhaps directed at the Trade Center, that there was something wrong with the real-estate market and we were headed for trouble. There was an entire list. So obviously, the following morning, at the Artist's Point Ranger Station, we were more dumbfounded than most, and as the next eight years played out, our amazement grew.
I haven't got any predictions to make about the runaway roulette wheel -- not yet. But since I got through eight years of President Cornpone without destroying my TV, I'm going to sit out the next four years, taking notes. And frankly, I really don't want to wait four years to get rid of this . . . . big gamble of a Likely Loser who needs to lose. If he experiences that loss while he's president, we're all Losers -- period.