Opinion – Bill Straub: As we enter the Age of Grievance, we are left with but a sliver of hope

Oh, but it’s alright,
it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it,
I wonder what’s gone wrong.

-Paul Simon
An American Tune

Last Friday, Nov. 1, a man stood on a stage before a huge crowd in Milwaukee and profanely complained about a malfunctioning microphone. He then proceeded to stroke the mic stand in an up-and-down fashion and simulate oral sex on it.

Today, that man, Donald J. Trump, is the president-elect of the United States.

America should be so proud.

Trump won Tuesday’s election over Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, by a significant margin, garnering 72 million votes and counting, the first Republican to exceed 50 percent of the vote since former President George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Trump, who served as president from 2017 to 2021 until he was denied re-election, attained this status despite a malevolent personal background that would have understandably destroyed the prospects of any other candidate. He is an adjudicated rapist. A convicted felon. A misogynist who once bragged about grabbing young women “by the p—y’’ as a means of introduction. He instigated an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 against the very same government he will soon once again lead, endangering the lives of scores of lawmakers and his vice president, Mike Pence, in a futile effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost.

That’s not exactly the path Washington and Lincoln took to the presidency. Hell, it’s not even the Warren G. Harding route.

The list of atrocities, incredibly, goes on. He had sex with a porn star just weeks after his wife, his third, had given birth to a son. He vowed to use the Justice Department to investigate his long list of enemies. He has plans to call out the military on the “enemy within,” aka his political foes, who he claims pose a greater threat to the nation than Russia. He once vowed that, upon reassuming office, he would see to the “termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Yep, the Constitution.

And the lies. More than 72 million Americans decided to place their trust in a man who is a pathological liar. That is not an opinion. The Washington Post found that, in his four years as president, Trump uttered 30,573 false or misleading statements and that practice continued throughout this election process. He spread the word throughout the campaign, for instance, that Haitian immigrants, in this country legally, dozens of whom settled in Springfield, OH, were stealing and eating the pets, dogs and cats, of their neighbors. Officials from Republican Gov. Mike DeWine on down denied the claim, yet Trump continued to repeat it, knowing it to be false, including during his lone debate with Harris.

And there’s so much more.

The voting public on Nov. 5 chose to ignore this massive indictment. This for a man whose average approval rating while in office, according to Gallup, was 41 percent, ending in January 2021 at 34 percent after he wrecked the economy because of his inept handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

Yet it now appears that 72 million people believe America during those years with Trump in the White House were actually Shangri-La.

It’s simply impossible to explain.

Scott Jennings, the oily right-wing commentator/Trump apologist from Dawson Springs who plies his trade on CNN, smugly attributed Trump’s success to the “revenge of just the regular, old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to. They’re not garbage, they’re not Nazis, they’re just regular people who get up and go to work everyday and they’re trying to make a better life for their kids. And they feel like they have been told to shut up when they have complained about things that are hurting them in their own lives.”

Jennings, as usual, is full of it. No one of any status among Democrats refers to working folks as “garbage” or “Nazis,” although Biden did refer to a speaker at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” as garbage. Jennings knows that, so you define his statement. And who told any working person to shut up, figuratively or literally?

Perception always trumps reality in politics. There once was an Age of Reason. We’re living in the Age of Grievance, and no one fits this period better than Trump, whose entire political career is based on personal gripes.

Trump did little to assuage the complaints of “the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to” during his four years in office. He championed a tax cut that had limited benefit for those folks but was basically aimed at filling the pockets of the wealthy. By the time he left office, unemployment reached 6.3 percent. At one point, in April 2020, it peaked at 14.8 percent. It is now, under the policies adopted by President Biden, at 4.1 percent.

To be fair, unemployment skyrocketed during the pandemic.There’s no question about that. But Trump’s bumbling and fumbling during the COVID crisis, assuring the public it was no big deal at the outset of the epidemic, made a bad situation infinitely worse.

Regardless, the economic upturn that began during the administration of President Barack Obama continued after Trump assumed office. But the U.S. economy under Trump was slowing down even before the pandemic. The nation added fewer than 2 million jobs in 2019, the lowest level in nine years. By the end of Trump’s presidency, which included the COVID crisis, the economy offered 2.7 million fewer jobs than when he started. Trump, in fact, was the first president since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began recording the monthly employment rate in 1939 to experience a net job loss.

This is the man who’s going to save an economy that, according to the stats, doesn’t need saving. And his concern for the working man is a mirage. This is a developer who constantly grifted workers over the years and once acknowledged that he refused to pay overtime when warranted.

As of July, almost 16 million jobs were created during the Biden administration and unemployment sat at 4.1 percent, which is considered at least near full employment. The economy has grown 2.8 percent during Biden’s tenure but it’s fair to note real weekly earnings declined 2.4 percent as a result of inflation due to various factors, including actions from the Federal Reserve, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, implemented to reinvigorate post-pandemic America, and soaring gas prices after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Inflation hit 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest level since the 1980s. It has since declined to 2.4 percent. And the recession that just about every economist anticipated never arrived. Trump claimed inflation under Biden was the highest in history. That distinction is actually owed to President Woodrow Wilson, who presided over a 17.8 percent inflation rate in 1917.

If you want to see inflation spark wait until Trump, as promised, raises tariffs and evicts however millions of undocumented immigrants he intends to toss out, thus forfeiting a source of cheap labor.

There were, of course, other issues. U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions have risen 273 percent during Biden’s White House tenure, but totals have decreased in recent months and Trump stood in the way of a Republican-developed package to further address the issue that carried Biden’s imprimatur. Violent crime is raging, Trump maintained. Murders are actually down 9.1 percent under the current administration.

Harris ran a credible campaign, rushing into the breach after Biden, under pressure because of age and infirmities, dropped his re-election bid just a bit more than three months before Election Day. She ran hard, took it to Trump, savaged him in their only debate and operated efficiently and wisely.

In the end there were too many mountains to climb. She’s half Black, there’s only been one African-American president, Barack Obama, and a woman, there’s never been a woman head of state in America. The latter is proving to be a particularly difficult obstacle.

But there’s more at play here than the cited issues. Trump’s support among Latinos jumped from 32 percent in 2020 to 45 percent this year, according to NBC News exit polls, a deciding factor in Trump’s victory The Black vote essentially remained the same – 86 percent for the Democrat Harris, down only 1 percent from four years earlier.

The big disappointment for Democrats, beside the Latino vote, was white women. The Harris team had hoped that a woman at the top of the ticket, coupled with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which held that abortion was no longer a constitutional right, with three Trump nominees helping form the majority, would trigger an uprising.

It didn’t. In 2020, 55 percent of White women voters cast their ballots for Trump. That dropped only three points, to 52 percent, this year, a figure that failed to make up for the lost Latino vote among Democrats.

As usual, the final results leaned heavily on White people, who provided 55 percent of their votes to Trump.

So, the question remains: why did so many Trump voters simply ignore the transgressions that, frankly, in the past would have sunk anyone else?

There would appear to be, and this is just anecdotal, there are no facts and figures currently to back it up, a growing distaste among a large group of voters regarding an American governmental system created to foil the designs of an authoritarian who seeks strong, central authority and exerts control over a nation’s economic, social and political processes.
 
The authoritarian label defines Trump. A substantial sector of the voting public embraces his style, reminiscent of listeners to the old Howard Stern radio program, which includes bullying, racial and sexual allusions, strong profanity and constant attacks on the personalities and appearances of his foes. The result is a nastier, crueler electorate.

In that regard, Trump is a triumphant demagogue who effectively seduces those who feel alienated from the system and embrace his authoritarian motives.

Think about it. Trump, by all accounts, attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election that showed him losing to Biden by 7 million votes, instigated an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 that involved hundreds of his supporters invading the U.S. Capitol, laying substantial wreckage to the building and leading to several deaths.

Hundreds have been charged and sentenced for their participation in the riot. Trump has stated he will pardon those involved.

How many Trump voters do you suppose silently, even publicly, celebrated this attack on American democracy when it occurred? How many really reveled in the ensuing destruction?

If nothing else, it certainly didn’t stop many folks from voting for the man who prompted it.

What does that say about the country?

The ultimate result is, if the 2024 election means anything, that character no longer means much of anything in American politics. That American exceptionalism, if it ever really existed, is dead. The promise of America is gone with the wind.

What we’re left with, in a small, sliver of hope, is the words of the late Sen. Ted Kenndy, D-MA, who told a convention crowd after failing to get the party’s presidential nomination in 1980:

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”