Trump's going to lose- now what?

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Donald Trump is probably going to lose, and by most accounts, he's going to lose by a lot. This happens to coincide with his party members jumping ship on him- an unholy combination of Trumps decreasing popularity and his claim that he's capable of handling women's crotches with impunity.

For Republican politicians, it's an incredibly fine line. This man is the walking embodiment of political Russian roulette. Un-endorsing the current presidential nominee (and implicitly endorsing Hillary) could cost governors or senators or mayors dearly in the eyes of today's all-or-nothing voter base. Supporting him means attaching your name to an unstable nuclear reactor. The next thing he does (or the next thing he's discovered to have done) could not only ruin his odds, his brand and his life- it could also do the same to them. To those paying attention, the line he crossed seems hilariously arbitrary: This man has talked shit about Popes and prisoners of war. He's been accused of sexual assault and peeping at underage women. He's made fun of a person with atypical arms and advocated for killing children.  But if you think that's bad, get this- one time, on a bus in 2005, he made a lame joke about grabbing vaginae. TUCK AND ROLL.

Actions are taken when the perception of circumstances necessitates them, and conversely, the actions taken indicate the perception of circumstances. When Republicans blasted away from Trump at warp-speed it was because they knew Trump had finally pussy grabbed his way past salvation. The timing, though, didn't go unnoticed.

The implications, when you think about them, are insane: Somewhere, in a meeting room, somebodies political adviser has almost certainly said the phrase “Sure, voters were cool with lies, stupidity and advocating war crimes, but this Billy Bush situation is going to really piss them off.” Jump off the Titanic and hope to hell you can swim far enough away to avoid getting sucked down by the whirlpool.

The question isn't so much whether or not Trump's implosion will drag the whole party out to the woodshed, because it probably won't. The only thing Trump supporters hate more than a Democrat is a loser, and when Trump lies beaten and broken, there probably won't be anyone willing to stick around. Winning is what he has always claimed to be able to do, and he had a flawless political record to back it up. This might be his first campaign, but he's never lost a campaign.

It's really how he got there in the first place. He didn't come out of nowhere- before he was screaming about the Mexican rapists and email servers and untenable plans for a wall, he was a massive public figure. He was famous and successful on at least a superficial level. In the beginning of a political career, especially when starting at such a high level, name recognition is everything, and Trump isn't just his name- it's his brand. Call it the Trump tautology- he is a successful person because he is great, and he is great because he is successful. It's a fun narrative, and it works, even if it the story isn't super conducive to words like “settlements” and “divorce” and “bankruptcy”. It didn't matter until later, when words like "grab them by the pussy" got thrown in as well.

When he loses the election, he'll lose some of his identity, and some of his brand sheen, and some of his speculative wealth, if not actual. But this probably isn't good news.

As fun as it is to wallow in the irony, there's always a backlash- if the GOP has done their job, the narrative will change. Two years from now the story won't be that Trump was the symbol of the party or its members or its backers, but that he was just another washed-up jerk-off that crashed and burned, while the rest of the party shook their heads. This means a difficult task for anybody trying to link Trump to any future party candidate.

In the upcoming elections where Democratic candidates pay for commercials that show side by side profiles of Trump and whichever white male they're trying to paint him over, it won't stick: Trump himself will become the problem, not the things he said. So once the election is over and they completely disown him, they'll guaranteed their survival for at least a little bit. Their entire platform exists as a contrarian position to people they can paint as bad guys, and since the election is almost certainly going Hillary Clinton's way, it doesn't look like they'll be running out of bad guys for at least four more years.

Nobody who likes Trump now won't like the next Trump. Even though their candidate will lose, So what? They don't need to change their mindset, because it was their candidate, not their ideals, that self destructed in the final weeks of the campaign. There will still be a federal government in which there is at least one Democratic representative or executive or judge, meaning there's work to do.

What has become abundantly clear in this election is that what people want isn't policy discussions- they want wars of attrition, to see whose good luck and good publicity and gaffe defenses can last long enough to inspire enough people to get off the couch or spend a few minutes more on the drive home from work to hit a voting booth. The name of the game is elimination, not governing.

Even when the GOP had a majority in the House and Senate after they won the absolute shit out of everything in 2014, the actual act of governing was more like a snake pit under a throw rug than an actual responsibility. Attempting to push policy usually means somebody pushing back (arguably as our founders intended.) Today, though, compromise is seen as failure- the fact that the Democrats maintain the ability to resist equates to a GOP loss. And if this election will teach us  anything, it's that some people don't mind supporting psychopaths, but nobody would never support a loser.

The Trump supporters aren't going anywhere, even if he is. Trump didn't create the xenophobia or resentment that his base nurtures- he simply gave them a flag to fly over it, swam out, and rode the wave (right into the rocks). Trump might lose a few billion dollars in brand value but the base isn't going to fade into the background. If anything, they'll only become more and more angry- and the anger will build, only to find a candidate who is somewhat competent, and knows enough about elections to not run for office when there's the possibility of somebody digging up a recording of them bragging about trying to fuck married women.

The classic problem of current identity politics boils down to this: there is a party that claims to want to help people by enacting policy, and there is a party that claims to want to help people by first destroying the other party, then figuring the rest out later (and honestly, who knows what the truth actually is.) Oh, sure, there are certain stated policies, but ask everyone in rural Illinois that owns a “make America great again” hat about Trump's position on getting oil from OPEC and let me know what they say- I imagine the vast majority of answers will involve a shotgun.

But really, you can't blame them for being angry. The political landscape was already bloated and ineffectual, and when news comes at you constantly, from every direction, then on the slight chance that any law gets passed, the trickle-down is so staggeringly slow that the conversation has pivoted five-hundred times, so that we don't know what is and isn't the result of it. God forbid anyone we elect actually takes the time to consider it, debate the minutiae of it, make it better. Cooperation is for the weak, and that's how both parties want it, apparently.

Try this at home- a copy of either party's official platform and sip (SIP) a drink every time the platform, which by definition is supposed to list the policies they want enacted, mentions the opposition. Christ, you could probably just subtract the specific number of policies from the total of times one party blasts the other and you'd still be too wasted to walk. Even if Democrats get ever-so-slightly more specific about the exact actions they want the federal government to take, the reasoning behind it never strays far from “because the other guys don't want that.”

When Trump loses, the smarter Republicans will disappear for a minute. There's no plus side for Ted Cruz or Chris Christie or whoever to be seen shaking hands with people who claim the elections are rigged, even if they'll be slitting each others throats to make their message resonate louder with that same group in three years. At this point, fuck policy- it will be a full time job trying to retain the public image of being Trump without being Trump. Like it or not, in two and a half-ish years from today, we'll get to see what happens when GOP presidential hopefuls need to lean on the fervor of the Trump supporters of today- will they try to throw equal parts policy minutiae and loud-mouthed insanity into a blender, then splatter the result on the wall and figure the voters will go along with whatever, or will Trump go down in history as a prototype of the more suave politician that's willing to rub elbows with the post-deplorables?

Today's Trumpers are now the main driving force behind the dogma that, at one time, could be at least superficially controlled by the overly emphatic patriotism and the swirling speeches of whichever prominent white person was willing to spend 24 days a month speaking at different county churches. Back then, the racism was subtle, implied, never stated because as long as we weren't “racist” like the Nazi's in The Blues Brothers, we weren't really racist. But then there was Trump, who presented racism not so much as mere demagoguery, but like one would present a thesis. “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're bringing guns, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.” He explicated the inner monologue of every bigot everywhere. Give the guy some credit- he said it straight-forward enough to mortify the planet, but with enough of a vague cop-out at the end that it forced the GOP to jump in line behind him, lest they lose out on some of that sweet, sweet vote from the batshit sect.

Unless we've all grossly underestimated the size of the the “fuck it, let's just vote for this guy to see what happens” crowd, we have to assume that one political loss in one election year won't be enough to convince the “hang Hillary” folk to address American politics on some sort of traditional “this is what I think about what you think” level- the fire's already been started, and there's no turning back. The monkey is out of the bag, man, and it ain't going back in, unless the party gets enough of a hold of itself to convince the Trumpers to shut the fuck up long enough to convince enough Hillary 2020 voters that she's ineffectual, so much so that they'll forget to vote on November 8^th.

Then we're right back to where we started before this entire shit-show nuked modern politics into Fallout 4 territory. Four years from now we'll get to hear all of this again, but in the GOP best case scenario, the voice will be quieter, and probably not going on coked-out twitter rants at 4 in the morning.

What will happen to Donald Trump? Probably nothing. Almost certainly, he'll get lost in the clusterfuck that will be the new era of the GOP sad-sacks trying to shit on President Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo's legacy, with probably equally ineffective results. If we're lucky, he'll fade into oblivion, making sure to preemptively check for microphones on whoever he's cheating at golf or trying to fuck via a trip to the furniture store. But if we're luckier, he'll remain in the public eye, long enough to convince James Woods or whichever Baldwin brother decides he has enough of a chance to carry on the crazy torch. If the crazy train comes in again, well, at least now we know how to deal with it- we simply won't deal with it, and let it destroy itself. Grab some popcorn, enjoy the rest of the show, and pray we get to talk about policy sometime before we die.

Here's my twitter. swellbo@gmail.com is my email.  Say hello!

The Uncanny Valley, or Why I'm Grateful For Donald Trump

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Why do people like Trump?  Is it because he's honest?  Because he's independent?  Because he's tough?  Because he has help from wizards?

OK.  So maybe he lies his ass off, maybe he's not funding his own campaign anymore and maybe he's hilariously self conscious about the size of his fingers. But I don't care about any of that, because everyone knows all of that and nobody else cares.  

But I think I know what's really going on here. When people talk about Trump being honest or genuine or tough, what they're really talking about isn't what he's saying, but how he says it. Or, rather, how he doesn't say it.  Trump doesn't speak like a politician, and even though that alone should bury him, he is winning so much that I'm tired of his winning.

Intentionally or not, Trump is the harbinger of Ragnarok in American politics. He's taken the traditional trope of the American politician and smashed it with a fucking sledgehammer. The vast majority of politicians have either turned into archetypes, the same types of people wearing the same suits and the same gigantic American flag pins.

They may say different things, but they speak in the exact same way. Politicians, as we think of them, use the same inflections and gestures.  They relate everything to universal truths or allegories. Before this election cycle, the delivery of the same repetitive message was essentially formulaic.

And sure, there might have been some tremors at the base of the GOP before this. The rise of the Tea Party and the slow exodus of the hard-line evangelicals from the pulse of popular right-wing politics might have caused a minor fracture, but there was more than enough duct tape to fix it all up, or at least hold it together until the end of the Obama presidency.

Just run the playbook. The GOP, being the ones who invented this shtick, thanks to the hard work of people like Frank Luntz, were the ones who stuck to it the hardest.  

And why not? Selling the work of today's Republican congress isn't so much like selling policy as it is selling the fecklessness of their political opponents. All the GOP needed was somebody to rally the troops.

At first, it was supposed to be Jeb Bush, who had amassed an ungodly sum of money long before he even announced his candidacy, even though there never really seemed to be anybody who both A. knew he existed and B. was willing to forget his big brother's presidency existed. Watching the video where Trump bitch-slaps Jeb over his brothers quest for mythical WMD's, you can actually see the look of death in his eyes- sheer panic, and then a calm, a sense of the inevitability, where even he realizes it's over. His eyes glaze, his life flashes before his eyes, and the soul of his political ambitions collapses and then ejects into the ether.

From there, we basically ran past the blink-and-you-missed-it cameo of Marco Rubio, the little engine who almost could. Being a young, good looking Cuban dude was more than enough to build the confidence of the Republican base in Florida.  But not on the Presidential level.  You need an angle. He totally could have pulled it off, too- a little more pandering via establishment talking points (gun control or tax code reform would have worked like gangbusters, but all anybody got was nothing. I figured he would have at least championed something small like “Christmas v. Happy Holidays,” but what the hell do I know? Like the senator, I'm probably dehydrated.)

Then things got as weird as anyone thought they could get (at the time.)  Dr. Ben Carson, renowned Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John's Hopkins University Hospital, surged ahead, then went bat-shit crazy faster than the time it took to read this sentence. There's always a screwball candidate, and sometimes the guy who tried and failed to convince people he stabbed somebody is the guy who gets to enjoy the limelight.  If nothing else, it gives us all a break from people who are peddling a more nuanced brand of lunacy.  It was like taking a Jaegerbomb in between two Maker's Mark Manhattans.

Was John Kasich there? I feel like he was, right? Rand Paul rings a bell, maybe... Bobby Jindall? 

I remember Chris Christie.  He's currently on a quest to become Trump's VP by way of being his last resort booty call.

It was all supposed to lead us to Ted Cruz. He was the Frankenstein's monster of his party's ideals: An educated, intelligent, articulate person who could take their fight to the Democrats at the public stage. Here was a guy who previously clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and also previously ate bacon cooked on the barrel of a goddamn machine-gun. The pendulum was primed to swing back at Democrats- who, in the grandest ambitions of their opponents, were supposed to be the metaphoric stand in for the typical, elitist politician.  They just needed Cruz to remain somewhat relatable to the voter base and safe from other Republicans (most of whom seem to think that he's a piece of shit.)

And then: like an unholy orange ray of doom, a bottom feeder celebrity in the form of a chimpanzee with worse hair and nothing better to do than say “fuck it” and run for Pesident, descended an escalator and announced his candidacy while declaring, with certainty, that Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists to the United States. And then he got more popular than all the other candidates combined.  (He's also currently gaining momentum with Hispanics.)

So how the fuck did this happen?  I can tell you.

Politics has hit the Uncanny Valley.  Put simply, once something with human likeness starts approaching perfection, at some point it stops being interesting, and starts becoming appalling.

See the "Zombie" tag on this diagram?  Trump has put everyone else right there.

By Smurrayinchester - self-made, based on image by Masahiro Mori and Karl MacDorman at http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings2005/uncannyvalley.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2041097

Everyone of voting age has been around the current media cycle to know what a politician “sounds” like, or, say, what our bosses "sound" like.  Growing up, we are supposed to imagine that our bosses are all going to look and act like Ed Rooney or Bill Lumbergh, only to find out they're (mostly) not caricatures of power hungry pencil-pushers. When you meet your bosses, you find out that they're kind of like you: they have problems, and families, and rent to pay and shit to do. They don't always look spectacular.  They're real people. 

But politicians aren't regular people.  Not anymore. Their families are carefully cultivated. They give millions of dollars to people who help them decide what to wear, how to walk, talk and stand. And who knows? For the most part, it could be well intentioned. Perhaps the majority of them are simply trying to approach the largest number of people possible because they have the best ideas to implement in the place they live.

In one moment, it all went to shit. With no warning to soften the blow, it became apparent that all those countless hours and countless dollars did was create facades that are the antithesis of what connects with real, actual, breathing human beings.  Politicians have hit the uncanny valley, and since there aren't any real people left, some of us started cheering for something much, much uglier.

No political counsel, no campaign manager, no force on earth or heaven could possibly have a plan for Hurricane Trump. How could they? These people have spent their entire careers, and to some extent their entire lives, praying and sacrificing to the gods of public relations to know what to say and when to say it. They spent thousands of hours studying issues, reviewing policy, and meeting important people. They got to where they were because they were the best at portraying politicians.

They were the kids in chess club, and suddenly there was Trump: the new, gigantic kid from out of town who flipped over their tables and decided that everyone was going to play Monopoly by the rules he made up half an hour ago.

(Sidebar: It's only now occurring to me that there is some serious sexism in the media's handling of Trump and Carly Fiorina. When she made the outlandish claim about a fictitious taping of secret brain harvesters working at Planned Parenthood, the media debunked it and everyone moved on. But when Trump says [insert anything he's said here] it's a fucking story? What's the difference? If Trump made that kind of bullshit claim, people across the country would be dancing on the ashes of every abortion clinic in the continental states.)

But goddamn if it didn't work. People love the guy. Enough people love the guy so much that it's tearing apart the same political party that won the absolute fuck out of everything two years ago.

You couldn't publish a list of everything wrong with Donald Trump online without needing to rent an entirely separate server. He's a stupid man doing stupid things for stupid reasons and I hope his campaign gets put down hard, the sooner the better. But I'm still thankful for Trump. 

Because for all of the things he's done wrong, he's doing something incredibly right- he's destroying the efficacy of the trope of the American politician. Everyone who craves power via a carefully crafted public persona now realizes that what's important to people is somebody who is using their actual brain to come up with actual solutions, even if the brain belongs to a terrible person with awful ideas.

We should all be thankful for Trump, because he's shown us who we all are. Now, it's time for him to fuck off, and every other politician to take off the masks and show us who they really are.

Sam lives in Austin, TX, and is trying to say "President Trump" without vomiting.  Follow him on twitter, or send some hate mail to swellbo@gmail.com.

If Trump wins, everyone loses.

When talking about Trump the politician, even if you're a fan of the guy, you have to admit that a gigantic part as to why he's a viable candidate is because he's a massive celebrity. I'm not saying that's the only reason, although I personally believe that the same people who vote for Trump would vote for Honey Boo Boo if hers was the only name they recognized on a ballot. I'm just saying that him being a household name hasn't hurt him. Actually, he's turned out to be pretty damn good at using his celebrity status- he makes enough headlines to stoke the disenfranchised portion of today's Republican party.  A little more than seven months into his campaign, and his opponents haven't gotten close to matching the hype.  (Although, to be fair, unlike another candidate, he hasn't commissioned his own rap song... yet.)

What everyone thought was a gimmick, though, has suddenly turned out to be a serious campaign. His style of blasting uncensored, balls-out bigotry has somehow stuck with enough people to not only gather attention, but significant political support. Since July 2015, Donald Trump has lead in the Republican polls in Iowa and New Hampshire (although as of now, Cruz is beginning to close the gap in Iowa.)  When he makes fun of a reporter with a disability, he does so in front of tens of thousands of people. 

Actors, musicians, politicians, celebrities, and whatever occupation describes Sarah Palin have actually gone in front of television cameras-that they knew were recording-and said that they endorse Donald Trump.  Holy shit, it's becoming abundantly clear- some people want Donald Trump to win the primary!

Republican primary campaigns, at least within the last two decades, have been races to the middle- contests to see who can smile, nod and quip their way to the largest demographics, while winking and nodding to the uber-active, guaranteed-to-vote extremists.  Here is where the Donald should have faltered- he's currently catching a ton of criticism for his recent stump speech at Liberty University, in which he confirmed suspicions that he doesn't actually know fuck-all about Christianity.  His tax plan increases taxes on the wealthy. Actually, if you want to see the departure from the right-wing norm, ask him how he feels about universal health care- and he's still crushing the primary.

Should he win the primary, he'll switch gears.  He'll probably start listening to the Christian advisers he hired in September (worst The Apprentice ever) and immediately veer towards the center, to grab as wide of an audience as he can against Bernie or Hillary, but for now, and until it actually seems to slow his campaign down, you can still expect more of the same vile, ignorant shit that comes out of this mans mouth.  Why should he stop, when he's the only one saying what his base is thinking?

While other candidates roll out slogans like “Unleash the American Dream” and “A New American Century” (or... just their not actual first name with an exclamation point?) Donald Trump fires off “Let's Make America Great Again.”  I'm no expert in linguistics, but doesn't supporting this man mean endorsing the idea that America isn't great? I'm not sure, but I would suggest that the majority of the conservative populace wouldn't wear a hat that says “America isn't great anymore” to the Republican National Convention. Doesn't matter.  Not even implying the ultimate GOP heresy is enough to derail the Trump train.

Despite what should be a classic tale of how to piss off voters until you're cast into political oblivion, he has legions of people who want him to win the Presidency.  According to some polls, his approval ratings are rising.  But putting his name on general election ballots certainly wouldn't help Republicans. By every possible indication, Donald Trump would get curb-stomped by any Democrat in a general election.

If you're a Republican, this has three major consequences:  The first is that your political arguments will be represented on a national stage by somebody who is absolutely terrible at articulating them. Unless the average voters political views boil down to “Fuck veterans, Mexico, Islam, and women" between now and November, or Trump walks his clown-shit crazy comments back far enough (something I don't believe he's capable of), he will lose.

The second is that you're losing at least another four years of the presidency.  The Republican Congress under Obama openly stated that they wanted to "ensure he was a one-term President." Which probably won't work here, because of reason number three:  When Trump gets destroyed in the general election, his stink will carry over to every single Republican candidacy for at least the foreseeable future. 

Every single Republican will have to distance themselves from Donald in ways I can't even try to predict.  Right now, Donald Trump is polling heavy with the average, middle of the road conservatives.  That will stop when he loses in the general election, and then there needs to be a massive change in the message of the GOP.  Like Jeb Lund said, "the difference between Trumpism and the rest of the Republican party is basically ten beers."  How do you possibly separate yourself from the central emotional base of your ideals? This is important- Trump is running with the Republican Cliffs-notes, and when you lose the nuances that normally buffer the nasty parts away from the public eye, you lose the entire argument.  And if there's one thing that Donald (and America) hates, it's a loser.

However, at this point, maybe only losing the general election is the best thing the GOP can hope for. Trump has said repeatedly that he would run as an independent if he wasn't given the nomination, which would turn any 2016 Republican candidates' brutal uphill battle into an even more hilarious impossibility. Even then, the fracturing of the party between the Trumps and non-Trumps would be the point in time where we'd see the full separation between the people who endorse the honest, outspoken craziness as opposed to the subtle hidden craziness. After that, you might as well ask the Castro brothers what color they'd like for the carpet in the Oval Office in eight years or so.

So unless you're one of the people who genuinely believes that, in spite of reason, data, and common sense, Donald Trump can win the presidency- who really wants him to win the primary?

Democrats might; for no other reason that it's a lay-up.  However, I don't think anyone has enough confidence that the people who'd vote so that Trump doesn't get into office outnumber the people who would vote to put him there.

Additionally, this isn't just any position the man is running for- this is the Presidential nominee of a major American political party, and that means something. That's symbolically important, not just for one party, but for the entire country. Letting this person win the nomination means sending a God-awful message to the rest of the world. Our arguably staunches ally is having debates as to whether or not they'll let the man into their country. Do we really want him to be the voice of a faction, just for the sake of a political victory? Even with a win, we implicitly acknowledging that a great number of us support the kind of bigotry our own Constitution insists we abhor.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe Trump actually does have a reasonable plan to fix flaws in the government, and is just taking a crazy route to get there. Or, maybe I'm in the minority, and most people are aligned with the character he's portraying- an unhinged, unholy blend of Ted Nugent and orange soda that's playing this game out of genuine interest, and not complete boredom. Perhaps we'll just get lucky, and he'll decide he's over it and wants to go back to making millions by going bankrupt.

Nobody wins if Trump does.

Sam lives and works in Austin, TX, and is a little sad that 1/4 of these articles have been about an asshole with a combover.  Follow him on twitter, or give him better article ideas at swellbo@gmail.com