alias Bruce.

Why Trump is the death of white men as we know them.

Smart people keep saying this but that’s because reality keeps shouting it: Trump is part of nature’s answer to the temporary global authority of white males who have massive treasuries and armies but tiny appendages of social perception.

There Trump is, braggingly brushing what he calls “dandruff” off the shoulder of French president Emmanuel Macron, a younger white male who thinks he can save the burning clubhouse, or at least inherit membership points. There Trump is, making his pear-shaped golf swing at his Florida swamp playground while he brays the planet into incompatibility with human life. There Trump is, lavishing sick job-starved white men with shamelessly wicked promises about coal mines and winning wars and grabbing women by their privates.

I fear it will get worse before it gets better. America, with its 18th-century patrician presumption of noblesse oblige, hasn’t yet had time to create a working model for addressing bad monarchs.

But make no mistake: Trump is the last titanic white man, the final Caucasian male officiate ranting oaths from the lifeboat, the end of the line for a brand of capitalist maleness that is rotting on the shelf in a rapidly-browning and broader-gendered market of humanity.

Every white male who cuts you off on the highway, or who floors his burp-tuned exhaust all the way to the next red light, or who votes to economically screw himself in order to savor a momentary blow at brownness or femaleness, is screaming, “This world is killing who I thought I was, and I don’t want to die.”

That goes with the territory when any animal stakes out unsustainable turf.

Being unaware of the world will kill you every time.

It’s time America stopped lying about Trump.

Enough already of this ceaseless business of shock, horror, and “can he last?” gibbering among America’s gobsmacked journalists and politicians.

I get it that many in the news and electoral industries are bursting their brains trying to make sense of Trump’s rampaging wickedness and seeming immunity to accountability.

But come on, CNN and Democratic Party. Your outraged perplexity is of no damn help here. Had you listened at any point prior to November 8, 2016, tens of millions of Americans could have bluntly filled you in on what we’re dealing with here and what we have to do about it.

For starters, here are three truths that are well understood by the vast majority of Americans – including many white and brown voters, Clinton and Trump voters, Sanders voters, and people who didn’t bother to vote at all:

Trump is not a horrible accident or a foreign invasion. Sure, clandestine Russian boudoir videos and hacked electronic polling systems and malleably anti-informed voters and predatory fake news algorithms on social media all helped set the stage for the Trump presidency. But Trump began when the first white plantation lackey chased the first brown escaped slave into the swamp for money. Trump is every white American who has ever whipped, jailed, feared, fled, lynched, envied, and depended upon brownness as a foil for his or her own invented identity of oppositeness. Trump is the nation’s oldest perpetual offspring: reborn again and again to the embered white demands of cotton and the Reconstruction backlash and Jim Crow and the Nixonian Silent Majority and the urban-aimed War on Drugs and The Wall. The vacuum of insatiable whiteness re-creates the need. Trump provides this moment’s satisfaction. Trump is the youngest 400-year-old American alive. Accidental and contrived? Hell, no. Trump is intrinsically organic to the American diet.

The United States is not a democracy. This is blasphemy to well-meaning campaign donors who have summer homes along the nation’s finest beaches. But it is unbearably obvious to the rest of us. Twenty-first-century America is not even within screaming distance of democracy. The flagrant rule of money over politics has made American democracy an ad slogan and a joke. The United States is a mega-plutocracy whose elite is so surreally wealthy that it excretes sufficient waste to keep its suppressed majority high above the world’s average standard of living. Today’s American corporate monarchy has so far managed to keep a relatively privileged but still abused and suffering white body politic obeisant to unfairness – as long as these white subordinates get the share of privilege to which they have learned from experience to feel entitled.

Trump did not win with lies. Trump won by digging his filthy incisors into a truth that the money wing of the Democratic Party wouldn’t touch: the system is rigged. Modern corporate capitalism is a king’s game that has as much to do with free and fair competition as leprosy has to do with flawless skin. I know: duh. Virtually every working and non-working person in America knows this – except for those who have canyons full of money and those who aspire to. Trump said it aloud – The System Is Rigged – and he said it with a raw and bitter rage that played perfectly to a group of roundly cheated white folks who can’t yet admit that their role as racial overseers is soon to be history. Bernie had a compelling structural prescription (watch his devastatingly detailed policy rundown, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, of how to cure us of profit-driven health care) and a passionate presence, his awkward-white-guy pedagogy and shortage of mainstream traction notwithstanding, and he could have beaten Trump had the Democratic National Committee not vetoed his opportunity to do so. And Hillary, from her “Stronger Together” jingle on downward, was an exercise in noncommittal sloganeering that inspired legions of passionate hopefuls to stay at home on Election Day. The tragedy of Trump for our country is that he won by dishonestly co-opting the economic populist message that the corporate Democratic Party was afraid to touch – and that he then blended it with brutal racism and misogyny as insurance with his bitter core audience.

The good news, amid the current and future horrors, is that on the day when a charismatic, media-savvy progressive dares to unapologetically own a non-bigoted, f**k-you narrative toward today’s American monarchy, there will be tens of millions of citizens who have reason to listen.

Ijeoma Oluo and what it costs to be white.

Being white really must suck. Because it’s a scam. From its very beginnings, the whiteness sales pitch to Caucasians has been a bold and persistent lie: “This is a thing about you that makes you superior and will protect you.”

Sure, I see how the invention of whiteness was expedient for an enterprise built on the unpaid labor of people who happened to have brown skin. Whiteness made economic sense as a way of creating a corporate culture for the unforgivable. Problem is, though, that whiteness, as an employee morale-booster for capitalism, is strictly short term. It was only a matter of time before the acceleration of greed, to use Cornel West's word, “niggerized” working white people who now find themselves in a warp-speed free-fall at the hands of the one percent who actually own the economy.

This is what made Trump necessary. Gluttonous growth at the top requires that white people near the bottom continue to settle for racially-printed Monopoly money to try to buy back their shrinking privilege.

So it is supremely ironic that the kind of fretful punditry that a century ago was devoted to “the Negro question” – as in, What do black people want and how do we resolve their complaints? – is now dedicated to the equivalent question about angry white people.

Blogger Ijeoma Oluo has a response:

Almost every day I get a message…from a random white person — on Facebook, Twitter, or email — offering to provide me with the “white perspective” that they think that my work on race and feminism is missing. “Just to give a more well-rounded picture,” they’ll explain, or “Having been a white person my whole life, I think my insight would be useful to you,” or, “I think I can help you understand how this issue looks to white society.”

To which I say: Physician, heal thyself.

No, I do not know everything. I do not cover every angle all the time. Sometimes, I’m flat-out wrong. But here’s the thing: I do know white culture. I know white culture better than most white people know white culture. I know white culture, white history, white politics. I know it better than you because if you knew why you were really in my DMs right now, you’d be embarrassed. Why do I know white culture so well? Because I’m a black woman. And while I, and just about any person of color who has spent their lives in a white supremacist society, know enough about white culture to write a book or two on whiteness and option the bestseller movie rights, y’all know almost nothing about us and even less about yourselves.

Why? Because you don’t have to.

Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of white culture. In fact, it’s required your ignorance. The dominant culture does not have to see itself to survive because culture will shift to fit its needs. This shift is cheaper and easier when you don’t look too closely at how it’s being accomplished — if you never ask who is picking up the check. And no, you hardly see us at all — even if you love us. You can’t; we don’t exist as whole people in most of the places that you have been getting your information from.

And as much as I’d like you to see me — as much as I’d like systemic racism to simply be a problem of different groups not seeing each other — I need you to see yourself, really see yourself, first. This is the top priority.

I’ve left out a lot; read the entire piece for Oluo's detailed cataloguing of examples of what black people know about white people.

My friend Aubrey, a black person steeped in not just American but global culture, took Oluo’s piece to be a petulant (and doomed) demand that white people solve the problems to which black Americans are subjected. I told him I don’t read it that way. To me her point that we black folks can’t do white folks’ inner work for them is completely compatible with the larger mission of what we can do.

I say: Hey, hostile white brethren: Get on the train, or catch up later. I as a black progressive am not waiting for you. We and our allies will create a narrative, and ultimately a reality, of non-purchased non-oppressive public policy with you or without you. You as whites have the relative luxury of skepticism about our experience. We as black people have, from centuries of experience, the imperative of necessity.

Cat lovers versus fascism.

I recently learned that I have something in common with a close relative of a friend of mine: a love for cats.

My friend's relative has inherited cats from other people, and he considers his companionship with a cat (or any pet) to be a lifetime commitment. So have I, and so do I. He, at one point, went into hock to pay the astronomical medical expenses of a sick cat for whom he felt responsible. So did I. He has carried out reverent funeral rituals for his cats and their wild sentient grace. So have I.

But there is also something we do not have in common. He is a fervent and committed supporter of President Donald Trump. I am a fervent and committed opponent of President Donald Trump.

He, as an active Trump proponent, is exactly the kind of person I want to demonize for his energetic support of an amoral and demented tyrant. I want to see him as a traitor to all that it means to be lovingly human. To me, he is in fact such a traitor: he is helping to prop up a regime that continuously tells flagrant lies, foments untold repression and suffering, and hastens the extinction of humans on earth.

I want to see him, this eager Trump enabler, as being that and only that. But I can’t. Because he is also a person who, more deeply than many of my passionately-Trump-fighting progressive friends, is in touch with a bottomless awareness of shared life and kindness that I revere.

This, for me, is the hardest work of our politics right now in America: not simply the work of opposing and defeating evil, but the much harder work of honoring and nurturing and even recruiting the good that confoundingly coexists with our understanding of evil in ourselves and others.

If we, as progressives, are brutally and selflessly honest, we will see that the “enemy” in the Trump phenomenon among our co-Americans is not the simple homogeneous mass of dog-pack supremacism that we are tempted to see, but is instead a motley mess of mourned privilege and betrayed hope. It includes those of us who wanted better but who settled for worse; those of us who believe, naturally, the bigoted lies we are taught by our families and inspirers; those of us, meaning all of us, who simultaneously do kind and cruel things; those of us who have trouble seeing the ways we all fit together; those of us who would all be on the same side of this battle if we were not being bombarded by our inherited hunger for manufactured necessities like being brown and powerful versus being white and secure.

Even as the Trump regime rolls its dice on the raw audacity of making itself the one and only police, our job as citizens is to know when we are being played: whether as hungry ex-slavemasters, as hungry ex-slaves, or as two mutually estranged protectors of cats who, sooner or later, will need to start protecting each other against a maniac who loves no one.

President Trump, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and a week of atrocities

Tom McCarthy's Jan 28 Guardian piece is a good peek into President Donald Trump's jealous-toddler view of the world and what drives his policy moves, which are best understood as tantrums. What's most terrifying is that his triggers for his despicable acts rest so trivially, and even randomly, on perceived personal slights and disrespect (does the trajectory of Trump's weeklong tear have anything to do with media having dissed his tiny little inauguration crowd?).

 

Maybe it is ever thus with tyrants. But Trump does seem a wicked prototype for the pasty postindustrial piggycrat. He is eerily reminiscent of Dune's Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (below), right down to the first name and the iridescent hair. Call him King Twitter Thumbs. The tub of lard and lies whose tweets kill people.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from McCarthy's piece on this week of atrocities from His Grand Petulance:

 

Donald Trump's first week: carnage, both real and imagined

Tom McCarthy in New York

 

 

Saturday 28 January 2017 10.38 ESTLast modified on Saturday 28 January 201717.00 ES

What started with an ominous inauguration speech has ended with executive orders on everything from immigration to banning refugees and reigniting the fossil fuel industry. What does it mean for his presidency?

 

The crowd was small, the weather was bad and the speech, which described “American carnage”, was dire. For the tens of millions who voted against him and countless concerned others, Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States felt ominous, no matter how widely Barack Obama smiled and no matter how gracefully he and Michelle Obama made the transition from hosts to departing guests.

 

The feeling of foreboding did not last. It was overtaken within hours by the realization, at the arrival of the first of the new president’s executive actions, that the most outrageous campaign promises Trump had made to the smallest core of his supporters were now official US policy, or about to be.

 

Within a week, the rally chant “build the wall!” had morphed into a phrase published on White House stationery: “impassable physical barrier”. A proposed ban on Muslim immigrants took shape as a suspension of visa programs from countries that, as Trump put it, “have tremendous terror”. Grumbling about excessive government regulation had become, in one document, an exhortation to bureaucrats to help an oil company skip the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

 

“He’s delivering the goods to his core constituency in a really visible way,” said John T Woolley, head of the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there are a lot of things that he’s raising that may be above what he truly has the ability to do.”

 

Seven days into his presidency, the accumulation of Trump’s official actions, at the rate of as many as five a day, has created a new national reality on central policy concerns from the environment to voting rights to international commitments to immigration, healthcare and trade.

 

“You have to consider this a pretty aggressive use of executive power early on,” said Julian E Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Using it not only on one marquee issue, which presidents often do, but on a series of major campaign issues, all within just a few days.

 

“So it’s rapid-fire, but more importantly, each one is a pretty significant decision.”

 

More difficult to assess than the new president’s official actions, but for many Americans just as significant, has been the impact on the public of Trump’s simple presence in office – the finally inescapable fact, as it were, of Donald Trump as president.

 

During the campaign, Trump’s lies about the fake scourge of voter fraud, his vain obsession with the size of his crowds (and his hands), and his explosions of bile and irrelevance on Twitter could be semi-ignored as the faults of a mercurial political figure who was quite likely, at least, to lose.

 

Now Trump is in the Oval Office and his lies are voiced by a press secretary standing behind the White House seal in the Brady briefing room. It was there that Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely declared on the day after the swearing-in that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. Trump’s audience was in fact significantly smaller than Obama’s 2009 crowd, but members of the media who tried to brandish evidence of the fact were shouted down.

 

Spicer rolled out another whopper days later, informing the country that the president still (wrongly) believed millions of votes had been illegally cast in November. As supporting evidence, he pointed to a 2012 research report on voter fraud, prompting the author of the report to categorically deny that the report said any such thing.

 

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Trump told ABC News a day later, embroidering his fantasy. “They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me.”

 

For Americans who doubt his leadership, just as disturbing as Trump’s new freedom to spout untruths with significantly inflated authority were early reports on his conduct behind the scenes, as he made his first decisions as the most powerful individual on Earth.

 

Repeatedly, Trump threw thunderbolts from his Twitter account – threatening to “send in the Feds!” to stop violence in Chicago and impugning Chelsea Manning – immediately following negative coverage of those topics on Fox News, which Trump told the New York Times he watches morning and night.

 

It was TV coverage of his small inauguration crowd that prompted Trump to trot out Spicer. The bad press had not allowed the president to “enjoy” his first weekend in the White House as he felt he deserved, the Associated Press quoted “one person who has spoken with him” as saying. Trump’s decision to act on voter fraud was inspired, Trump told members of Congress, by a conversation with a German golfer.

 

If Trump’s character is immutable, however, his executive actions may not be. His orders have the power to guide the conduct of federal agencies and officials, but cannot contravene existing law.

 

Woolley said: “The question always is – and this is a real question for Trump – whether the president is going beyond the scope of the law, whether he’s infringing on congressional power, and whether he’s infringing on the divides between national, state and local power.

 

“There’s going to be a festival of lawsuits about almost every controversial action that he takes.”

 

Next week, Trump is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and announce a nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court.

 

Here’s what he got done on week one.

 

(McCarthy's entire piece is here.)

This is how stupid Trump thinks his followers are:

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe the easily-disproved “alternative fact” that Trump's inauguration crowd in DC was not dwarfed by Obama's in 2008 or by the Women's March in 2017.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that giving brown people less will give struggling white people more – while the rich boldly suck up even more of virtually everything.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that going back to giving more power to for-profit health insurance companies will somehow, for the first time ever, give people more generous choices at lower prices.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that you can gut government (e.g., freeze federal hiring) and wildly expand it (e.g., build a wall, prosecute women for abortion, enforce a ban on Muslims) at the same time.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that suicide bombers and shooters are a greater danger to each of us than more poisonous air, water, and food.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that virtually all of the reputable climate scientists in the world are scammers and that the handful of climate denial scammers are telling the truth.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that a white serial bankrupter who stiffed contractors and ran a phony college is a better ally than a black president who lowered unemployment and favored a higher minimum wage.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to trust a notoriously greedy billionaire because he repeats the obvious truth that “the system is rigged,” even after he fills his cabinet with greedy billionaires and brazenly pursues policies that favor CEOs over everyone else.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to continue to cheer on the Trump regime’s increasingly brutal scapegoating (e.g., of women, Muslims, blacks, brown immigrants, and LGBT people) while Trump’s billionaire policies lay waste to the lives of working white people.

None of this is new. Dictators thrive on telling bald-faced lies to desperate people.

But what we don't know is: How many Trump followers will see through the con? How many of we Americans as a whole will actively risk being targeted, fired, jailed, or worse to protect our futures and that of our kids? And how many journalists will actually fight – and by that I mean put their careers and possibly their physical safety at risk – for what is provably true and morally non-negotiable?

Red, blue, and rich: game over.

In the United States, as in most other non-democracies, national politics is a moral sport of the wealthy.

The wealthy players fielded by America’s Red Team feel varying amounts of actual heartfelt care, ranging from the frigidly mercenary to the heatedly passionate, but are for the most part selfishly negative in their agenda. The wealthy players who take the field for the Blue Team are generally more empathic and positive. But both teams’ players perform in a steel-shielded arena where winning or losing may be ecstatic or hurt like hell, may earn roars or ridicule, but won’t affect their personal comfort or lifestyle or that of almost anyone they know.

American presidential and congressional politics, like the NFL or NBA or any other corporate-sponsored contest, is a cage match among fiercely-driven elite gladiators who, regardless of who wins or loses, will all leave the ring rich and surrounded by validators.

That is why Hillary Clinton and the Democrats lost in 2016. That is why mainstream media reporters and pundits have become irrelevant to what Americans feel and believe. Insulated by corporate cash, with its gilded chokehold on who gets to compete for national leadership, the Blue Team has confidently hogged the mainstream “progressive” mic while growing ever more more clueless about what its voters have to say and need to hear. And the Red Team has increasingly cornered itself with the clash between its lunch-bucket rhetoric and its robber baron policy.

So, with the official political podium and official media closed off to angry and hungry voters who have known for decades (for people of color, make that centuries) that this nation and its economy have been broken by its masters, where could people go for attention?

To Twitter. And Facebook. Where, unlike the ruling American news operations and political parties, it is still permissible to truthfully say, “The system is rigged.”

Problem is, competent and decent potential Blue Team leaders were either self-silenced on this built-in function of economic inequality (Clinton), or blocked within the party (Sanders). And Red Team leaders were happy to exploit anger but incapable of blaming the rich for anything. So the field was left wide open for a celebrity demagogue named Donald Trump to declare, with veracity, “The system is rigged” – while lying about everything else and steering white rage toward people of color, women, and Muslims. All while he and his henchmen exploited Twitter’s and Facebook’s vulnerability to fake news and false accusations.

So the kinder corporate Blue Team lost this election because it convinced itself that it understood working people while having barred them from the actual field of play since at least the Reagan years. And the meaner corporate Red Team lost its stature and what was left of its self-respect in its cave-in to Trump’s white faux-populist scam, but in so doing it rode the coattails of his audacity.

And now, with fascism in the wings, the callow wealthy Reds and the outraged wealthy Blues regroup on the field, with as little to lose in their actual lives as before.

But for those who stand to lose everything, the Red and Blue game is over.

The meaning of President Trump, in 100 words:

This (President Donald Trump, with an administrative roster of goons and clowns like Steve Bannon, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, et. al.) is what a country gets after corporate-run decades of making public-interest government a bitter joke, after serving up Hillary Clinton as its best offer, after proving that corporate journalism is useless to actual people, and after suckering white working people into believing that niggerizing others is their only relief from being repeatedly kicked in the head by white bosses.

This is what the U.S.A. gets when it creates an evil mythology for non-rich white people and then breaks it.

Standing Rock wins for now, Obama takes a stand, and Trump awaits like a nuclear whoopee cushion.

Yesterday was a good day at the Missouri River in North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a resounding victory when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied passage for the Dakota Access pipeline – in proximity to tribal water supplies and sacred ancestral lands – and announced it would look for other routes. It may be a temporary victory, but it is an important one in our country, where a lame-duck Obama administration represents the last gasp of what passes for sanity in American corporate-funded politics. It happened only because thousands of protestors and their military veteran protectors put themselves in harm’s way – and in daily view of global media.  

What Trump’s congealing administration will do in response to this and other crises is anybody’s guess. His incoming regime only further unfolds the question of what happens when money so poisons politics that even the self-preservation of future-thinking conglomerates falls victim to kinglike egoism and present-tense profiteering. This moment’s money talks, and all else walks.

What do we know of what comes next? Nothing. Trump’s co-optation of the rage of white working poor voters – after the Republican and Democratic parties left them stranded roadside for decades – could lead anywhere. He could develop a taste for ideology and move toward becoming what Noam Chomsky calls an “honest ideologue” in the Hitler mold, as opposed to Trump’s heretofore anchoring in ego and lazy impulse. He could push the nuclear red button at the prompt of a tweet. He could tire of the hard work of an actual idea-driven pursuit and quit or be impeached within a year, as David Brooks has reasonably suggested. Or he could simply implode from stubborn ignorance and confusion in the face of his impossible promises to his voting base (An unbuildable wall? A fantasied flood of new industrial blue-collar jobs? An assurance of better health coverage via a crippling of popular Obamacare reforms and a free rein to greedy insurance companies?). If Trump is known for anything, it’s for pitching suckers and then ditching them – be they investors, contractors, voters, reality show apprentices, or members of his own leadership team.

The big and terrifying question that we have to live with and deal with in the coming months, and perhaps years, is that no one, probably including Donald Trump himself, knows what in the world he will do. He is a pathologically self-blinded narcissist who awakens each morning as a kind of raging baby billionaire: the Frankenstein creation of a political culture where elections themselves have become banal, profanely scripted, chain-jerking reality shows. In a de-evolutionary swamp that has spawned the successive amoralities of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney, how is Trump not a fit? And how is he not a deadly joke who could blow up the American state?

And so the corporate sector gets what it paid for: a white electorate in morbid withdrawal from the promised salve of privilege.

Any way you look at it, being a racial ex-boss is a dead-end job.

If you are willing to hear a West Virginian’s calm explanation for why Trump won the angry white vote, read this.

It is accurate to say that West Virginia attorney JB Akers’ detailed blog, Trump Won and I Don't Understand Why You Don't Understand, is self-promoting for his law practice, uninformed about the diversity and depth of suffering in urban communities, and disingenuous about the continuing appeal of racism and misogyny to non-college-educated white men whose footholds of security and cultural authority have been shattered.

But it is also essential that you read Akers' explanation of why economically shipwrecked white men and women were willing to vote for a cretin like Trump in their desperate hope for some kind of overturning of the status quo.

It is time for our self-defeating bullshit to stop. Pissed-off progressives and people of color need to be smarter than to anoint Trump’s win as a simple expression of white male supremacy and brutality, although Trump used this toxic lure brilliantly in his fake populist pitch. Furious whites who have been left to starve by the Demopublican economy need to be smarter than to treat the Hillary Clinton platform as any real expression of the hungers of progressives and people of color, although the 2016 Clinton campaign aggressively posed its corporate-friendly political jingle as the voice of “change.”

We know better. White people without college educations know when they’ve been scammed for decades by a crew of Senator Silverhairs from both parties. Blacks, Latinos, and other voters of color know when a toothless “Stronger Together” slogan falls short of what it takes to make them surge to the polls to vote their interests.

To be sure, Clinton’s winning the popular vote and still losing the 2016 election has, once again, ripped the scar tissue off the national deformity of the Electoral College. Add to that James Comey’s coerced interference and the unfathomable capabilities of Vladimir Putin’s digital regime and we have an electoral outcome that meets no trustworthy standard.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Hillary Clinton lost what should have been a commanding advantage from the beginning because she and her party were afraid of what angry drowning people on all sides really wanted: a passionate, fearless rebuke of business as usual in the post-Reagan economic state. And Trump was able to dishonestly occupy that turf because the Democrats, in jettisoning Bernie Sanders, abandoned their last claim to it.

That is what happened. That is what we have to face in order to discern what we do next.