Election thoughts

Having shot my mouth off beforehand, I feel I should reflect afterwards.

The Republican party deserved Trump. They still do. The rest of us did not, including most of the people who voted for him hoping for some kind of positive change. As I said before the election, the best we can hope for from Trump is a standard Republican administration, which is not what the country needs right now. The worst is.... worse.

For example, both Trump and the Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare. The Republicans have been foaming at the mouth about it for years, and they are the ones who would pass the legislation. Even if Trump was lying about it, he would have to not merely fail to do anything about it, but actively veto the legislation when it came up. So a great many people will lose their health care; some of them will get sick; and some of those people will die. In the middle east on the other hand, Trump has openly promised to kill more people. Carpet-bombing Isis-held areas might sound appealing, but actually doing it would kill a lot of innocent people and make a bad situation a whole lot worse.

So I hope that most of what he said was lies - excuse me, "campaign talk". Comments since the election have been consistent with that, but frankly I've no reason to believe anything Trump says.

A couple of things about the reaction to Trump's election:

• Protesting that Trump is "not my president" is not smart. Sure, Trump was thoroughly hypocritical to complain about it, having called for protests in 2012. But all that means is that protesters now sound as much like sore losers as Trump did then. The USA has a process for picking a president. It was followed, and Trump is what we got. So he is "your president". By all means protest when he picks unqualified or unhinged people for his administration, or when he starts making terrible decisions. Protesting just because he's been elected will leech away the credibility of later protests.
• Don't imagine that the electoral college will undo this for any reason. Clinton might have won the popular vote, but that's not the system. I think it's a daft system, but that's the system that both sides campaigned on and everyone voted on. Change it and you'd need a fresh election. The time to fix it is before the next election, not just after the last one.
• No, the election wasn't hacked. Hacking an election on that scale would leave very visible traces, given the mish-mash of systems in use and all the people involved. It might get hacked in the future and we need serious work on the electronic voting systems across the country... but hoping for recounts to get the "right" result back is living in dreamland. If you want to worry about election-rigging, fight voter suppression laws. In time for 2018.

And a couple of things to hope for:

• Only Nixon could go to China, as they say. Perhaps Trump will turn out to be a really smart president who will bring people along on something like health care or climate change, once he gets into office and confronts the realities. An ice-free arctic in a couple of years might prove a convincing argument. I will not be holding my breath.
• An incompetent version of an infectious agent is called a vaccine. I said before the election that we needed to reject Trump strongly, because the next version would be sharper and more insidious. But if Trump is incompetent in office or clumsy in his support for the alt-right, he could well be wrecking the chances of the next populist right winger.
• Ignoring the administration itself, a close Democrat victory might have been the worst possible result. The Democrats would feel no need to reform, because they won; and the Republicans would feel no need to reform beyond some primary rule changes to keep out the next Trump. After all, they would have run Donald Trump and nearly won anyway! But now, the Democrats will need to face the reality that they lost to Donald Trump; and the Republicans will need to face the reality that their support is heavily Trumpified - and in four years, that support may melt in the face of a failure to deliver on its promises. Much of what Trump promised was irresponsible or depended on rolling back the clock; it will either not be done, or will end in disaster.

So that's my hopeful scenario - a disastrous Trump presidency sparks reform. Good luck, everyone.
 

Endorsement is probably a strong word.

Hillary Clinton is an unexceptional centrist politician, made slightly scary by 25 years of Republicans behaving like she's the dark lord incarnate. She's smart, determined, and experienced - even her enemies will give her that - and I think she'll make a decent president. Because of all that experience, she'd be very unlikely to be much worse than expected; and it's quite possible that she'd be better. Her big problems are that she's neck deep in the money pool that plagues US politics; and she's really bad at connecting with voters in public. She does not strike me as inherently worse than most of the political class; she's just better at it.

I have been waiting some time for an election where I could reasonably vote third party, to try to encourage the major parties to clean up their act. All I need is a fairly generic pick from each side, so that it wouldn't make that much difference which one got in. I hoped that the 2012 campaign would encourage the Republicans to move back into the center so I could do that. I have been utterly disappointed.

Donald Trump is an ignorant, incoherent, inconsistent blowhard. He isn't even a very good liar; for example he publicly denied saying something that was still up on his own twitter feed. He talks as if he assumes that no-one will remember anything he's ever said before, and he treats people as suckers to be milked for whatever they have. When the Access Hollywood tape came out I was amazed that it caused such a stir. With everything he'd said and done, *this* is what it takes to make people look twice? He treats everyone like that; it's just that there are extra ways of treating women badly that aren't available with others.

If Trump got into office the best we could hope for is that he would do nothing but play golf and make irrelevant bloviating speeches about how great everything was now. If not he might use his office to further his own business career, turning the US government into a tool for attacking his enemies and rewarding his friends. At worst he might wreck our foreign policy and start a major war, or leave his successor heading towards a cliff at high speed. If he loses, he may overturn the table and bleat about vote rigging, eating away at public confidence in the very system of government. Putin would love that.

But even that is not the full story of the harm he is doing. A great many people are watching him and taking notes on what works and what does not. The next Trump may well have a better record in business, a smoother delivery, no incriminating tapes, a capacity for hard work and preparation, and a more subtle way with dog whistles - but the same divisive message that it's all *their* fault. The next Trump might win, and win well; eight years of a capable politician wreaking the same havoc could do incredible damage to the US and the world.

For all these reasons, Trump must lose and lose badly. He needs to lose by a margin that makes clear that he has been rejected utterly by the country and that next time it will be worse. This country has the chance to make a statement on November 8th. Vote against Trump; vote to make Republicans feel that by embracing Trump they have given the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Vote against down-ballot Republicans who endorsed him, so that next time they will feel they have more to lose by tolerating such people than by calling them out.