Understanding the resilience of Trump

I came across this in the Guardian Opinion columns. I hadn't clocked Suzanne Moore before, but I like her style, even if she's not offering solutions to the protests she voices. You can read the whole piece here:  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/29/

I have expressed the opinion that Trump may well be re-elected. This excerpt from Moore's article may help to show why I think this.

Every day some terrible fact is exposed and social media rouses itself and ... nothing much happens. We are caught in a cycle of ineffectual reaction. Can this man really be in charge of pushing the nuclear button, we ask, every single time he pushes our buttons? Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was going to bring it all tumbling down. It is a belting read, in a-bucket-of-KFC way; greasy and ultimately unsatisfying. Hillary Clinton reading bits of it out at the Grammys is surely the ultimate signifier of impotence. Let’s all laugh at him, us who are so much better.

As a collective strategy, this is proving as futile as my pathetic tweets. The Republican party keeps him in power. The Democrats still appear to be in a state of post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in the loss, unable to put it in the past. Trump has delivered to the right, to the Tea Party element, to the so-called “nativists” (also known as racists). He has cut taxes in ways Mitt Romney lost the nomination for talking about. The liberal revulsion to his misogyny and racism has been mistaken for opposition. It is not enough.

Gary Younge’s recent reporting from Muncie, Indiana, where he also spent a month before Trump’s election, revealed that most Trump voters think he is doing OK (and these people are not even his core supporters). Tax cuts, deregulation and a conservative in the supreme court are all cited as achievements. The underlying forces that propelled people to vote for Trump – a belief he would smash up the system and, yes, racism, are still there. The narrative of a maverick who works against the mainstream media operates successfully in a huge country where news remains suprisingly local.

The focus on his ludicrous ego and ignorance may make us feel superior. But that is all it appears to be doing. He will not be toppled by us jeering at a picture of his enormous arse or reports of his word salad on climate change, his links to Russia and his comments about pussy-grabbing. Not as long as he is supported by racists, the far right, Christian fundamentalists, the global business elite and his own party. And he is. It is time to get serious about what drives this presidency. At the moment, the joke is on us.

Suzanne Moore (Guardian)

Denunciations and accusations

I read that 100 women have signed an open letter condemning the recent wave of denunciations that are making waves at the moment particularly in the wake of the Harvey W scandal. I think they perhaps go a little too far in defending some masculine behaviour, but I also think we need to keep things in balance. I like debate, and when I saw the response of a group of 30 feminists accusing the 100 of trying to "close the lid" on the scandal and of scorning the victims of sexual abuse, I felt that it was they who were trying to close a lid, and that on simple debate. For me, the danger so easily let loose by the media is the one of judging before the evidence or the testimonies and cases are in. An accusation should be taken seriously, and fair play, women have been severely cold shouldered and made to feel guilty, complicit, powerless and ignored in the past, and for that there is no excuse. However, an accusation is not the same as guilt proven. I'm thinking of the witch trials in the past, where after an accusation was made, the accused stood very little chance of survival. The odds were stacked against the accused, in the same way as now, the odds seem stacked against the defendant. The headlines often speak of guilt rather than accusation, or at the least, imply guilt, before all the evidence is in, all the accounts heard. People have to act guilty, lose their jobs, go into hiding, just because they have been accused. That is not how justice should work is it? There will of course be incredibly difficult cases where the accused may not have abused more than one person, and so it becomes their word against their accuser. It is not difficult to imagine cases where people may have been bribed to speak false accusations, where powerful enemies have reason to seek the downfall of a particular person. However, I feel that the processes of careful evidence hearing and taking will in most cases deliver a just outcome, if they are allowed to happen fairly and wisely. And to this end accusations must be handled sensitively and seriously. There can be no return to a male dominated heavy hand of protection for the miscreant as has now so often been revealed to have been the case. And it may be that the pendulum must swing a little wildly before it settles.