The Troll In Chief

Photo: Hamish Reid.

Much of the Left’s response to Trump’s election has so far struck me as bordering on delusional — especially the relentless efforts to battle Trump as though he were fighting the same fight that they are. He’s not. He won that fight a long time ago.

Some things to remember:

• Trump’s not playing by your rules (the old rules). He’s not fighting the previous war. He — and his supporters — don’t care for your niceties or traditions or share your approach to “truth”. Trump’s now the Troll in Chief. Screaming “that’s not fair!!!” or using a tone of aggrieved outrage (“He can’t say that!!!”) when he does or says something that you just don’t think is fair or normal or The Done Thing in the past only makes you look like a bunch of whiny kids being very successfully trolled by the smirking class smartass.
• Trump may be the Troll In Chief, but he — and, more importantly, his administration and his allies in congress — are deadly serious about what they plan on doing. Count on it, especially where the supreme court is involved.
• Allied to this, Trump doesn’t need to actually succeed with his promises or actions, he only needs scapegoats to blame (and attack) when they fail. You are those scapegoats.
• Dave Pell discusses this here more coherently than I can, but I’ve been banging on about this for nearly a year now: most of the things you think make Trump unfit to be President are the things that got him elected. Stop condescending to his supporters or assuming they’re all dupes or deluded or will wake up some time soon — most of the voters who voted for him probably knew what they were voting for, and probably liked what they saw (or disliked the alternatives). They mostly didn’t much care about detailed policies or expert advice (expert advice has not, of course, served many of us well over the years, has it?). They admired a certain attitude they saw in him, and are just itching for a fight. Or change (same thing, really). Many of them see themselves in him — or a version of themselves they’d like to be.
• You inhabit a bubble. The false news didn’t just come from the Right — remember all those pre-election articles in outlets like Occupy Democrats and Mother Jones that kept claiming some lefty media figure or celebrity utterly destroyed Trump or took him down with or without a stupid Facebook meme or Youtube video or late-night TV show appearance, or those people who kept smugly calling him such a “loser” (such a winning loser, no)? Delusional. Utterly delusional. (Or maybe it was all just lucrative clickbait to cash in on the delusional. Whatever. Did you ever read beyond the headlines?) Those articles probably did at least as much damage as any right wing efforts. The Troll In Chief popped that bubble some time ago, but a lot of you are behaving as though it’s still there — all those leftist conspiracy theories about votes and false news just feed the self-absorption and the ineffectuality, as do idiotic articles about how Trump MUST! BE! DISQUALIFIED! by the electoral college because of his commercial interests or whatever the theory du jour is. Get out of the bubble if you want change you can actually believe in.
• Trump won the election as it was run, not the election you now wish had been run. Stein’s doing a great job of raising her profile by challenging selected results (and good luck to her), but realistically, it’s over. It’s a done deal. Get over it. Petitioning the electoral college to get Clinton elected because of the popular vote is, under the circumstances, the very definition of futile gesture politics (and be careful what you ask for — that sort of changing the rules after the game because you don’t like the results will be used against you sometime). Warming over the remains of old conspiracy theories probably has your opposition in stitches — all that pointless running around takes energy away from actually doing something constructive….

Sadly, doing things that actually matter — like changing the way presidents are selected and elected in this country — would require the sort of long-running well-managed attention to detail and unified fronts that the left in this country seems totally allergic to nowadays.

Take it to the streets; take it to the cities; take it to the states. But don’t just sit there like bewildered sore losers screaming “it’s not fair!” “he didn’t really win!!” and “he can’t do that!!”. He can, and he will.