C. Fraser Smith, BridgeTower Media Newswires
We search for guidance in language that has sustained and inspired and educated us.
But E pluribus unum seems to be submerged by a house divided against itself.
Pro forma post campaign calls for unity by the divisive Donald Trump would be laughable save for the underlying reality.
President Trump.
You find yourself remembering.
Oh my God, he has “the codes:” the nuclear codes.
Oh my God, he can roll back decades of social progress. All that effort, all that progress, all those hopes up in smoke.
Families are torn apart – or fear they will be. Suddenly people must decide if being right is more important than being family.
Some want to insist nothing much has happened. It will, as always, come out in the wash. Or, this too will pass. Certainly. But in no fewer than four to eight years unless the new president resigns or is impeached.
Neither is likely. The man hates to lose – and he has control of both houses of Congress.
Others try to convince themselves his “build the wall” promise was just a campaign device.
“Better not have been just a device,” a former city councilman in Charlotte, North Carolina, says on NPR. If he backs way from that his whole campaign would be a fraud.
And? You didn’t see that?
There is no balm in Gilead.
‘Not giving up’
So what to do?
We cannot become morally numb, a national columnist says.
Kate McKinnon of Saturday Night Live offers an affecting joint tribute to Leonard Cohen and Hillary Clinton. At the end of it she has Hillary saying: “I’m not giving up and neither should you.”
Many or most will not. A lawyer friend rounds up colleagues to offer to represent people threatened with deportation.
Teachers vow to mount the barricades in support of students who fear their “illegal” parents will be deported.
A hastily contrived graffito on the back window of a van says “Canada Welcomes You.” Might not be true. And you don’t want to leave anyway despite what you said you would do if that man won.
Another columnist says the best way to fight back is to move – to a red state.
One is tempted to play the blame game.
Why didn’t more of us see the threat? Why didn’t we understand the Rust Belt pain, how deep it was? Why wasn’t devastating job loss more of an issue in the campaign? Was the Republican candidate more attuned to that reality?
Clinton was said to be a poor candidate, failing to reach voters with a message offering something more than hope. Hope is not plan or a strategy.
At the same time, we all know, she won the popular vote. And she won it after what must be the most successful outing yet for the big lie. “Crooked Hillary” lost in the sense the lie was never adequately countered by her campaign.
I think she was necessarily focused on how to deal with the Trump bombast – which left her concentrating on her debate performance as opposed to addressing the pain and the “crooked” mantra.
She should have found a way to address he incessant drum beat. A candidate cannot depend on voters to sort things out – particularly when you are silent. With no countering narrative, the charge becomes corrosive, begins to neutralize whatever else your campaign wants the voter to absorb.
Any who allowed her to speak of the “basket of deplorables” – as if she could afford to write off whole groups of voters? She has to own that one. Amazingly rookie stuff.
And yet she may have been the most qualified would-be president in our history. She had been a good and effective U.S. senator, winning the respect even of her Republican colleagues. Apparently they hadn’t gotten the “crooked Hillary” memo.
Meanwhile the remarkable patter of wild or real rumor, verified or not continues.
John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, was reportedly asked to be Trump’ running mate. What would he be expected to do in a Trump administration, he is said to have asked. Run the government was the response.
So what would the president be doing?
Making America great was the reply.
Heaven help us.
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C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR. His column appears Fridays in The Daily Record. His email address is fsmith@wypr.org.
