Larry Wilson: Racketeer seeks another shot at the grift
During the 2016 presidential campaign, some like-minded — right-minded — singers banded together and created an album full of songs about how awful it would be for America if what then seemed the longshot candidacy of Donald Trump were to succeed.
Most scoffed at the notion, at the same time as they engaged in protest against the possible election of the lying bully from Queens.
The great Loudon Wainwright III was a disbeliever, too, but in his contribution, “I Had a Dream” — “His face was bright orange and his hair was just weird / But we were made great again, embarrassed and feared” — he acknowledged the lousy possibility: “Dreams come true and there’s prophecy / And sometimes a nightmare is a reality.”
Bad things happen to good people, and the nightmare came true. It was both less-worse — we are still here — and worse — no one could have predicted the true nightmare that was Jan. 6, and the collective insanity of election-denialism — than we had feared.
It is not the biggest thing, the “embarrassed” part. But I am proud to be an American, and it makes me sick at heart when I travel outside our borders and face the incredulity with which the rest of the world views our having elected Trump, and our being on the verge of doing so again.
During the summer of the Clinton-Trump election campaign, I was standing at the bar of Royal Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands, a golf course ranked No. 2 in the world, not precisely a redoubt of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist). Hearing the roar of a helicopter about to land out by the first tee, I jokingly asked the woman pouring me a Guinness if that were possibly Donald Trump — whose mother was born in Scotland — arriving for a visit.
She replied, without missing a beat: “Oh, no sir – Donald Trump would not be welcome here.”
Britain, other countries certainly as well, are not above electing eccentric egoists, viz Boris Johnson — not that Scotland had anything to do with that mistake. But the former prime minister, while goofy and unacceptable as a national leader, is not a fool. Well-read, writes actual books, well-versed in international affairs. Whereas Trump, even after his election, declared: “People call it Britain. They call it Great Britain. They used to call it England.”
Did they?
With Tuesday’s election looming, with polls showing the popular vote essentially evenly split, though no one has any real idea about the Electoral College, I wonder if American conservatives realize how much of a better place they would be in if they had run a normie against the Democrats’ relatively inexperienced and unknown Kamala Harris, a last-minute entry into the fray, who in 2019 put her own initial presidential campaign on hold before a single primary vote?
Donald Trump is of course not an actual conservative, though he pretends to be in order to garner votes. He’s a former big donor to Planned Parenthood. He’s a former donor to Hillary Clinton, for that matter. He’s a whatever-works-for-him kind of guy. But even his ardent supporters would have to admit that he is viewed negatively by huge numbers of Americans.
What if the Republican Party were running a Mitt Romney type — or, hell, Mitt Romney — against the vice president, who also has high negatives in polling?
Someone who wouldn’t have any trouble garnering the backing of every stripe of conservative, rather than being in a situation where the most Republican Republican ever, Dick Cheney, is voting for the Democrat?
We’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know what an ordinary contest of both sides touting their plans would be like.
One way or another, we’ll be rid of the scourge of Trump and perhaps therefore Trumpism soon enough. There will be attempts to rebuild a sane GOP, although JD Vance and, shudder, Don Jr., heir to the family scam, will try to disrupt that. But here’s hoping that process will begin Nov. 6 rather than after four more years with a racketeer in the White House.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.