11
" For Donald Trump, life is a struggle for dominance. In every encounter, one party must win, the other must lose. The tough will prevail. The weak will be victimized—and they will deserve it. He explained his philosophy in a 2007 speech. It’s called “Get Even.” Get even. This isn’t your typical business speech. Get even. What this is, is a real business speech. You know in all fairness to Wharton, I love ’em, but they teach you some stuff that’s a lot of bullshit. When you’re in business, you get even with people that screw you. And you screw them 15 times harder. And the reason is, the reason is, the reason is, not only, not only, because of the person that you’re after, but other people watch what’s happening. Other people see you, and they see how you react.1 He added later: If you’re afraid to fight back people will think of you as a loser, a “schmuck”! They will know they can get away with insulting you, disrespecting you, and taking advantage of you. Don’t let it happen! Always fight back and get even. "
― , Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
15
" Pulse shooter Omar Mateen does not seem to have received any direction or support from ISIS or any other international terrorist organization. ISIS inspired Mateen, but Mateen did not report to ISIS, even to the extent that there was any ISIS to report to. Mateen exemplified a new kind of international terrorist movement: a virtual movement that shared ideas and rhetoric rather than money and weapons. Just such a movement of international terror would kill hundreds of people worldwide in the Trump years, a movement of white racial resentment that often looked to Donald Trump as its inspiration and voice. The year 2019 suffered a peak in mass shootings in the United States, forty-nine shootings in total according to computations by the Associated Press, USA Today, and criminologists at Northeastern University. (The researchers defined a “mass killing” as taking four or more lives apart from the perpetrator’s.) The majority of those killed died at the hands of a stranger—typically a white male loner impelled by grievances against society.3 The deadliest mass shooting in US history (as of the end of 2019) occurred in October 2017. Stephen Paddock, a sixty-four-year-old white man, opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas from a thirty-second-floor hotel room. Paddock killed 58 people and wounded 413. More than 400 other people were injured in the rush to escape the attack. After firing thousands of rounds in only ten minutes, Paddock killed himself by a gunshot in his mouth. "
― , Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
17
" Nor is it a trivial matter that whites and men do so strongly feel themselves beleaguered by cultural change. In January 2019, South Carolina’s Winthrop poll conducted a fascinating experiment. Winthrop polled people of all races across eleven Southern states. One question was phrased in two slightly different ways. Half of the people surveyed were asked whether they agreed that “whites have privileges that non-whites do not have.” The other half were asked whether they agreed that “non-whites face barriers that whites do not face.” Logically, of course the two questions mean exactly the same thing. But they yielded very different answers. When asked whether they enjoyed special “privilege,” only 50 percent of whites agreed. Among the most conservative whites, only 36 percent agreed. But when asked whether nonwhites faced extra “barriers,” 70 percent of all whites and a majority even of the most conservative whites agreed.18 People do not like being negatively judged. When they feel negatively judged, they hunker down. On the other hand, people do have a sense of fairness. When that is appealed to, they respond more generously. The parlor games that permit people in public forums to speak of whites and men in terms they would never use to speak of other groups exact an important real-world price from American society. They provoke a truculent reaction that otherwise would have lain quiet. Progressive politicians may feel that provoking this reaction is worthwhile if it can mobilize a progressive populist surge. This vision of politics bumps into some inhospitable realities. Of those Americans who did not vote in 2016, the majority—52 percent—were white. Among those who did not vote despite being registered (and those are the nonvoters most likely to show up in 2020) the white majority was even bigger. Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that in the industrial Midwest, the population that was registered to vote in 2016 but that did not cast a ballot was 68 percent noncollege white.19 In other words, the most accessible pool of nonvoters in the most decisive region of the country are precisely the group least likely to respond to “Woke” messaging on immigration, race, and gender. "
― , Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
18
" Yet the Woke messaging keeps flying. Speaking in New York’s Washington Square on September 18, 2019, Senator Warren let fire this zinger. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.”20 But if Warren ever arrives in the White House, it will be because of men—not all of them, obviously, but sufficient numbers of them. And the lesson of the Trump presidency is that insulting voters loses their votes. Those who aspire to conjure up a counter-Trump movement of militant progressive forces imagine that American demographics have tilted to the point that a politics of (in their view) righteous grievance can outvote the (in their view) wrongful grievance that Trump has summoned up. They are kidding themselves about their math, but even if they were correct, what kind of answer would that be? Trump is president not only because many of your fellow citizens are racists, or sexists, or bigots of some other description, although surely some are. Trump is president also because many of your fellow citizens feel that accusations of bigotry are deployed casually and carelessly, even opportunistically. Anti-racism can easily devolve from a call to equal justice for all into a demand for power and privilege. We speak, you listen. We demand, you comply. We win, you lose. "
― , Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
19
" In the throes of World War II, the great free-trading Secretary of State Cordell Hull reviewed the misery that America First nationalism had wrought on his world. After the last war, too many nations, including our own, tolerated, or participated in, attempts to advance their own interests at the expense of any system of collective security and of opportunity for all. Too many of us were blind to the evils which, thus loosed, created growing cancers within and among nations; political suspicions and hatreds; the race of armaments, first stealthy and then the subject of flagrant boasts; economic nationalism and its train of depression and misery; and finally, the emergence from their dark places of the looters and thugs who found their opportunity in disorder and disaster.34 Chastened by that memory, the Americans of the postwar era committed themselves to a new kind of world. It’s not a defect of the system that Germany no longer fields a giant Wehrmacht, that Japanese merchant shipping is guarded by American warships and aircraft rather than Japan’s own. It’s not a rip-off that South Korea pays for beef and fruit by selling electronic goods, or that the United States pays for electronic goods by selling beef and fruit. That was the plan all along. Trump talks of “great deals,” but he can feel certain that he has scored a great deal for himself only if he has imposed misery and ruin on his counterparty. "
― , Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
