So... Donald Trump is going to be President. Right. That's still a crazy sentence to write, but, what're you gonna do? There's been a lot of posts over the last week trying to sift through the debris and figure out just what the hell went wrong, but the answer isn't all that complicated: Hillary Clinton had massive flaws as a candidate that she barely cared to recognize, let alone fix, and it cost her the election. She did very little to bridge the wide policy divide between herself and young voters, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise that those voters declined to vote for her.
The Clinton team also laid the blame for their defeat on James Comey, but, again, if the mere existence of more emails is enough to topple a campaign that'd gone on for two years, that campaign has more substantial problems than politically-minded FBI agents. It's not like Clinton wasn't warned, repeatedly, about these faults and how to correct them; it's just that, in the end, she decided that saying Trump is incredibly uncouth would be enough to win the day and we're just going have to live with the aftereffects of that decision for longer than any one term in office.
Which brings us to the question on everyone's mind: What happens now? Trump is about to find out that when you ride the anger of a mob to victory, that mob expects you to deliver. And now that Republicans control both Congress and the White House, I expect the GOP as a whole to slowly realize that now that there isn't an "Other" for them to point to, there's nothing to separate them from the anger of their voter base, should they fail to do so.
And fail they most definitely will. Anyone expecting an economic miracle from massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations need only look at Kansas, which has been in a perpetual state of budget crisis since Sam Brownback cut taxes down to nearly nothing and got exactly fuck-all in return. W. Bush pushed through what was then the largest tax cut in history which produced the worse economic growth since the Great Depression. But maybe, this time, it'll work out the way Republicans always say it will, and then, we can all go buy ourselves some ponies with the windfall.
Also on the "guaranteed disasters" policy list is the intention to gut all the financial regulations that came from the Dodd-Frank bill. Now, that bill has a litany of problems, but it at least acknowledges that having an unrestricted financial sector is a bad thing and maybe we should at least try to rein it in. Republicans, obviously, disagree, and think an industry with such a sterling record of money laundering, identity theft, collusion, and good old-fashioned theft is best left to its own devices in policing and monitoring its own behavior. And if 2007 taught us anything, it's that nothing can ever, ever go wrong when nobody pays attention to what the financial industry is doing. Nope. They've got it all covered.
But wait, Trump said that one time that he would reinstate Glass-Steagall. To which I say, if anyone really believes that a virulently anti-regulation party is going to reinstate one of the most famous and stringent banking regulation bills in our country's history, than their ability for self-delusion borders on the professional and we should all be appropriately impressed.
And then we have the Obamacare plans. Trump recently said that there are parts of the law he likes, but his Congress and his base sure as fuck will still hate it and will expect him to follow through on his "Repeal and Replace" promise in the first 100 days. That most of those people will suddenly find themselves without health insurance is, of course, not something they're thinking about, but, hey, a Democrat did it so by definition it must be the worst thing ever. What will be really interesting to see is if Republicans actually follow through on Paul Ryan's plan to dismantle Medicare. Now, Medicare is the most popular government program, ever. Attacking it is the surest form of political suicide and that's before you factor in that Medicare is usually the single biggest factor that the GOP's aging voter base is even alive. I've never thought much of Republican politicians mental prowess, but even I think they can't possibly be so stupid as to directly attack a huge and loyal part of their base so brazenly.
*Speaking of the little shit, I'll be legitimately surprised if Paul Ryan is still Speaker of the House come January. The only way I see Ryan keeping his position is if he goes through a humiliating and debasing apology gauntlet Trump will put in front of him to prove his loyalty. I don't doubt that Ryan will submit himself to said gauntlet, but I wonder if it will be enough to save him, in the end.
I also think you can toss the whole "drain the swamp" ethos out with the garbage, too, especially since the people running Trump's transition team are the same kind of swamp things he spent so much time railing against like, three weeks ago. As usual, it's not that Washington is full of political insiders that's the problem, the problem is those insiders aren't working for your side. Appointing Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff is a pretty telling move, namely, that the main qualifications to serve in a Trump cabinet are less about your political abilities and more about your loyalty to Trump. I'd also bet money that the other big reason Priebus has the job is that Trump needs a conduit to the mega-donors and other party elites that hate his guts. So it'll be interesting to see how Trump fills out the rest of his cabinet, which I'm sure, will provide no shortage of horror shows in the years to come.
All of this and I haven't even touched on the threats to women's rights, the LGBT community, Muslims, Hispanics, the Supreme Court, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement, the cuts to renewable energy, immigration, education, or what will happen to protestors like those standing against the DAPL. It's simply too much to process all in one go. But, I do know this, the poor, the broken middle class, the working man who barely scrapes enough to get by, all those people who voted for Trump are going to be fed to the wolves on a silver platter by that pampered and spoiled child. Trump, if left unchecked, will usher in the world as they always thought it should be, and, far from being masters of their own destinies, they'll be ground to dust by corporations and the rich in a economic system that keeps them around because shit doesn't clean itself. This wouldn't be so terrible, if not for the fact that we'll all be trapped in that world, too.
*This paragraph has been edited to clarify the point I was making.
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