That craggy-faced master of the art, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill Jr., famously pointed out that all politics are local.
I’m here to tell you about that.
It began for me in mid-summer this year when I was taking my usual morning walk on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, and a bunch of young teenage punks on bikes came busting by, and the nearest one yelled at me, “Hey, buddy — vote for Trump!”
“Kiss my fucking ass!” I yelled back and that delighted the whole pack of them.
Think of it: this was before Trump was even nominated, and here were these kids – too young to even vote – out stumping for him in their crude punk way. What was up? What had infected these kids who would ordinarily care as much about electoral politics as they would about Federal Reserve interest rates? Did they sense in Trump a validation of the chaos that was increasingly becoming the weather of their stunted lives? There was a whisper there of what was to come, but I turned a willfully deaf ear.
After all, when Trump had thrown his “Make America Great Again” baseball hat into the ragged presidential ring, already bulging with experienced professional politicians, I had offered a thousand-dollar bet to my Trumpaholic friends that he would never get the nomination. Luckily, there were no takers.
These Trumpsters I know are stone television addicts to a person, giant flat screens dominating every second of their waking indoor lives. I began to see a correlation between time spent in the hypnotic craw of television and a distinct propensity for all things Trump. They would rather be entertained than governed, and that was fine by Trump. They spoke each other’s language: the bruised syntax of reality TV and the relaxed dialog of their “shows,” not the scolding schoolteacher patter, rote and ready, that flowed endlessly from the mouths of the empty suits flanking Donald J. Trump on the debate stages. He was eminently understandable, and if his messages were creepy and wayward upon any kind of reflection, my boys left that reflection to the liberal pundits they already despised. Trump was putting these asshole debate opponents in their places – so cool!
The fact that there was a nigger in the White House was still up their asses, too – and now a woman? No fucking way, Jim! Trump uber alles!
And the over-televised coverage of the Trump rallies appealed to the memories of the rock concerts of their heydays. All these people going nuts while Trump stirred them up like “Stairway to Heaven” and then leaned back, chin thrust out like Mussolini, was right up their (blind) alleys.
Also this summer, when I rode my bike to the quiet bayside pagoda in Cape May Court House, I passed a golf course, and as the summer went on, Trump signs began to appear on the lawns of the homes bordering the country club like poisonous red, white, and blue mushrooms. These were the homes of solid white upper middle class citizens, not yapping punks on bikes. I chalked it up to the fact that Cape May County here in New Jersey was historically solid Republican, due in great part to the large number of retirees here. The rest of the country couldn’t be so short-sighted, I rationalized, but the seeds of worry and doubt were beginning to slowly, inexorably grow.
Then he was nominated. Down the way, the quiet woman with the two little semi-dogs hoisted a giant Trump flag on her pole along with the stars and stripes already there and a Trump signed appeared on the lawn across the way. More and more Trump signs appeared as the nomination validated people out of their political closets. The only Clinton sign I ever saw was on a lawn in St. Paul, Minnesota, during a trip to visit an ex-wife in Minneapolis. It was as if the Clinton people were so smug in their certainty of Hillary’s victory that they didn’t need any plebian lawn signs. Hell, on election day the Clinton people were already popping champagne on the plane. Shame-shame-shame.
And the whispers of disaster in my sphere were growing louder. On Facebook, my friend the writer Lewis Beale chided time and again that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. He obviously saw something. I took it reluctantly with increasingly large grains of salt. The romantic in me doggedly clung to my belief in the wisdom of the populace. Silly me.
And then Michael Moore came out with “Five Reasons Trump Will Win” and send a giant “Fuck You!” to the political establishment and I cursed him as a fat traitor (while reluctantly considering his rationale).
In Thomas Merton’s last journal he pointed out the religious aspects of American football. So true. In the movie. Concussion,the point is made that the NFL owns a day of the week – Sunday, formerly a day of traditional religious worship.
Trump tapped into this football fanaticism bigtime. Time and again you see NFL – and NBA – players point out that they’re entertainers as well as athletes. Ironically, the majority are African-American, but Trump capitalized on this propensity for the American public to go all-in for anything that entertains them. Trump rallies were like rock concerts, sure, but they were also like the deafening Twelfth Man Seahawk fans in Seattle.
Then there were the hats. Until recently, I thought that Trump’s constant appearance in his trademark “Make America Great Again” baseball cap was really cornball. But now I see the marketing wisdom there. His so-called “base” wear baseball caps like their grandfathers wore fedoras; even in his standard blue suit and red tie, that cap made him one of them by some dark sympathetic magic. Hardly anyone at a Trump rally wasn’t rocking a Trump hat. They were portable Trump signs and I’m sure he raked in a lot of money selling both hats and signs.
While Hillary rocked lame-ass pantsuits. Who can identify with that? White women obviously didn’t.
As election day neared, dark clouds moved in from the edges of my psyche, polls be damned. On election day, I ran into Tina, who had been a waitress at a local diner, who told me she was living 90 miles away now, but had driven down to vote for Trump. Whoa. Omens.
That night, I mostly read a thriller, checking CNN from time to time. Then I put the book aside and just watched as the results inexorably piled up and the handwriting on the outhouse wall became indelible. By the time I dragged myself to bed, we had reached perdition.