It’s clearer now than ever that Donald Trump doesn’t want to win this election. He seeks now only to further coarsen the discourse, delegitimize a new president by fomenting fear and distrust about the process that is likely to elect her, and destroy the Republican Party with burn-the-house-down vindictiveness.
I take no pleasure in what has happened to this once-great party in the last 20, but especially eight, years. It’s true that Trump is a Frankenstein’s Monster of the party’s own design—the apotheosis of hyperpolarization engendered by decades of cynical politicking and the othering of half of America. But who can take joy in witnessing the complete destruction of our village by it? To the extent his erstwhile supporters have abandoned him, they still own this. They made him.
The saddest takeaway of 2016 for me, truly, is that boasting about sexual assault has been normalized by a major party nominee as “locker room banter.” Not so much because the candidate said so, or because party leaders won’t retract their endorsements, but because a solid 40 percent of the country is on board with it.
Rational, objective minds must relentlessly reject this, of course. But when 40 percent of the electorate supports a candidate that personifies this revulsive behavior, our polarization has ensured that what was once unconscionable has become normalized in the dialectic as par for the course.
This is not the kind of banter I’ve encountered in any locker room I’ve been in or would tolerate in any locker room I’d ever want to be in. And it wasn’t a locker room, by the way, it was a workplace.
If it had to come to this before conservatives rescinded support for the most boorish, abjectly unqualified major-party nominee in US history, they abdicated a responsibility to stop not just his candidacy but the complete degradation of the political processes and the office these ostensible patriots hold dear.
To those who continue to support him, I say only this: “What’s past is prologue.” History repeatedly shows us that the future will not look back kindly on those who maintained unwavering support for an unabashed racist, xenophobic, misogynistic know-nothing who bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women while a callow, sycophantic ass laughed along.
There is no good excuse. No legitimate defense. No room for the false equivalences about he and Hillary Clinton being mutually flawed candidates. This man is no leader. He is the living embodiment of all the ugliness that nativism has wrought. And he cannot become president.
“Make America Great Again” was never more than a dog whistle for “Take Our Country Back.” With Trump, the GOP has taken it back 60 years. But here’s the thing: we don’t have to stay there. Republicans can and must work not to take the country back to an unnamed era, but to take their party back from a dangerous churlishness that should never have driven it.
We’ve been through harder, darker times than this and come out better on the other side. As Clinton says, “America is great because America is good.” We fought a Civil War to eradicate the human evil of slavery; we came together during World War II and became a superpower in the process; the months after 9/11 showed us at our best and most united. Whether we choose to wake from the hangover of this election with sane and sober voices is up to us. I remain hopeful that we are again up to the task of calling on our better angels.