I was blessed with the opportunity to hear two old white Arizona Republicans discuss Trump at length today. The pair of men were having lunch at a local noodle joint where I was hacking away at a lesson plan for my novel writing class. I know the men are Republicans because when referring to the party they used the pronoun ‘us’. It is equally important to note that the distinguished themselves from the Tea Party. It got really interesting when they started to talk about Trump as the underdog and rooted for his success. Still, it wasn’t his policies they were rooting for so much as the man himself.
Everyone has that family member—be it uncle, cousin, or what have you—that likes to sit back with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face waiting for you to realize what the real world looks like and for some agent of that world to walk up on you and smack you in the face. Generally speaking, that’s the guy who voted for Trump and that is also these two guys sitting across from me. To them, Trump is representative of the guy who does the smacking against a crop of Americans (democrats, apparently) who thought they ran things and could push the world in their direction. Everything Trump says or does ‘off the hip’ makes them smile because it comes from a place they see as genuine and has impacts that they see as only hurting their enemies/detractors and resulting in a net gain for themselves. Every time Trump does a canned speech or behaves as ‘the media expects’ they smile and say, “see how easily he plays your game?” In other words, he cannot lose.
Their Trump is the bull in the shop that used to be an old fashioned American gas station but was co-opted into a China shop by touchy feely liberals. His job is to smash and to remind them how bad ass and wonderful he is for smashing. The problem is that they are feeding a level of megalomania that threatens to shatter the unity of these 50 states. In the last few weeks there have been bills proposed in congress to dissolve the EPA and the Department of Education, casting the control of such things back to states who have shown disparate ideas about what education and environmental protection is. In other words, the fuse has been lit to dissolve the ability of our nation to set national standards for education and environmental protection. These are the first two steps towards a corporate-based state system. Trump is supposed to guard against that, but in his run towards pleasing ‘that old uncle’ I fear a lot of people will get trampled and freedom as we know it will become a memory.
For once I hope the Underdog (who isn’t) loses.