Election protests Washington. Ted S. Warren AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.In the end it was filmmaker Michael Moore who got it right. It wasn’t Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, with his sophisticated polling models, or Nobel Prize winning economist and liberal pundit Paul Krugman, who confessed on election night that “I truly thought I knew my country better than it turns out I did.”
“Trump’s election,” Moore declared in October, “is going to be the biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history.” A “fuck you” to media and political elites who, Moore observed in July, inhabit “a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president.”
How telling that the candidate who launched his presidential run assailing Mexican immigrants as rapists ended his campaign and became president-elect as an icon of rape culture. Trump opened a Pandora’s box of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, fat-shaming and anti-immigrant hatred. He hinted that the opposing candidate might be assassinated and declared outright that she ought to be thrown in prison. He called for inflicting tortures “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” on terrorism suspects and asked three times in a one-hour briefing why, if we had nuclear weapons, we couldn’t use them. He tweeted and retweeted the ravings and ugly memes of fringe alt-right white nationalists and neo-Nazis and these, in turn, sent online death threats to Jewish journalists and started a tweetstorm to repeal the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Trump attacked a former beauty queen, the family of a “gold star” veteran, and a disabled journalist and sneered that the father of one of his main primary opponents was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He stiffed contractors and other small businesses that worked on his buildings and supplied his casinos and golf courses. He opened a fraudulent for-profit “university” that extracted tuition from naïve students who fantasised about becoming real estate bigwigs. It became clear that Trump owed much of his wealth to legally dubious “stock-for-debt” swaps, a near-billion-dollar write-off of “net operating losses” on his federal returns, and a similar amount of local tax abatements for his garish New York buildings. He was hypocritically living off the public purse, notwithstanding his attacks on the undeserving poor who received modest, inadequate government benefits.
