Vandal in Chief

Vandal in Chief
Adam Haslett says that Donald Trump is causing us to lose "whatever frayed threads of decency" still hold "American political life together." He adds that "there is so little fellow feeling left among us these days that we are compelled to seek it in our national leader." "Indeed, his (Trump's) skill is precisely this: to create an entire national theater of shame in which he induces that very emotion in his followers, on the one hand, while on the other saving them from having to acknowledge its pain by publicly shaming others instead." "His recent misogynist tirade against a former Miss Universe is just one in a series of instances in which he has figuratively offered up the bodies of women for public denunciation." "Just as physical violence monopolizes attention in real time, so theatrical and rhetorical violence is in the political spaces." [1]

"And thus we arrive at the dominant trope of the endless attempts to account for Trump's rise: the seething, racially tinged anger of the white working class." "Yes, Trump is inciting racial hatred and mainstreaming white- supremacist politics more directly than any of his Republican predecessors dared to do. But for all the attention this does and must receive, it is not that he is doing." What Trump has taken advantage of is "not so much as raw anger, but rather its more basic predicate: the shame of being lesser than."

"Operating under the delusion that Trump and Clinton are equally bad options, some anti-Trump conservatives have refused to vote, or pledged to support a third-party candidate. That some cannot testifies to just how poisonous is the partisanship in our country, to the point that even conservatives who acknowledge Trump's unfitness cannot bring themselves to admit that Clinton represents an even marginal improvement. Any conservative alert enough to have joined Never Trump must  wake up and realize that it's his or her civic duty to protect he country from the ravages of a megalomaniac by voting for Hillary Clinton." [2]

ADDENDUMS:
*"Our arrogance and barbarism in maintaining the American empire has earned us the hatred of most of the world. We are not 'the golden city on the hill' but a monstrous rogue nation." [3]

*"But Trump has embraced and normalized the political fringe in unprecedented ways -- and that could have far-reaching effects." A CNN poll showed that his support among likely GOP voters nearly doubled once he started talking about the birth certificate. [4]

*Hides account for only about 3 percent of the market value of hogs and cattle, which are mainly raised for their meat. 'More than 60 percent of the world's cowhide and leather comes from developing countries." The proportion of sheepskin is even higher. [5]

Footnotes
[1] Adam Haslett, "Vandal in Chief," The Nation, October 24, 2016.

[2] James Kischick, "Danger of Trump transcends politics," Albuquerque Journal, October 22, 2016.

[3] Letter to the editor by Al Salzman, The Nation, October 24, 2016.

[4] Tim Murphy, "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief," Mother Jones, November/December 2016.

[5] Bob Schildgen, "Hey Mr. Green!" Sierra, November/December 2016.