Just a few questions as the sun inexplicably shows its face the morning after Election Night, just so we’ll know we’re talking about the same guy here:
Question: Wasn’t it Donald Trump who set loose the bloodthirsty mob that assaulted the halls of the U.S. Congress and tried to overthrow our last presidential election?
Answer: Yes.
Q: Wasn’t it the same Trump who swiped scores of highly classified government documents from the White House and then attempted to hide them at Mar-a-Lago when the feds tried to get them back?
A: Yes.
Q: And wasn’t it the same felonious Trump who paid millions in a rape case, was found guilty of 34 felonies, has scores of women claiming he groped them, attempted to blackmail the leader of beleaguered Ukraine, was twice impeached, was caught lying to America thousands of times the first four years he was president, and spent the last four years lying to the whole country about losing the last election?
A: Yes.
Q: And this is the guy we’re sending back to the White House instead of some Siberian prison?
A: Yes.
OK, just checking.
Because, somehow, we have to cope with yesterday’s madness, in which Trump won the electoral college vote, the popular vote and swept the table in all the so-called toss-up states.
So let’s not lie to ourselves anymore about character counting in politics.
That day sneaked past us in the darkness of Election Night.
What counted here is an American class and race system, and the cost of food and gas and take-home economics — and who we choose to blame for our problems.
Sixty years ago, John F. Kennedy dragged his feet before introducing legislation aimed at giving Black people equality of opportunity previously denied them across all American history.
Kennedy told his advisors the Democrats would lose the South for the next 20 years if such legislation passed.
He was wrong. The Democrats lost not only the South but many more swaths of the country, and they’re still paying the price today.
The Republicans have overwhelmingly been the party of white people for the past 60 years, through Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy and Ronald Reagan’s phony welfare queens and George Bush’s Willie Horton — even in a time when (according to yesterday’s poll numbers) they’re starting to pick up more Blacks and Latinos than previously.
Trump knows the history. He also knows that race is America’s wound that never heals. And he knows that millions of white people, battered by decades of an ever-increasing economic gap between the rich and everybody else, have chosen to blame some of their troubles on people of color, who have dared to reach for some sense of equality.
That’s why Trump made his 2016 remark about shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”), and he’d still have his supporters. Race has been the sinister shadow over his entire political life, from the moment he descended his golden escalator to his race-baiting remarks about African countries, about Puerto Rico, about Muslims, about majority-black American cities such as Baltimore.
And the Democrats imagined they could overcome all of that by running a candidate of color — a woman, yet! — and change the course of history.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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