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Moderate Republicans: You own Donald Trump

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donald trumpThis is for the folks I know who are moderate Republicans. All of that talk about how the alt-right elected Donald Trump, as we both know, is crap.

Trump won the election with less votes than Mitt Romney lost with in 2012. He won with more than a million votes less than Hillary Clinton lost with in 2016, for those keeping score at home.

There wasn’t a tidal wave of KKK, American Nazis and white nationalists lifting Trump on their shoulders and carrying him past the goal line.

Their turnout numbers increased from 2012, marginally, but they weren’t the determinative factor.

Oddly, you were the determinative factor. I say oddly, because for some reason, the Trump campaign never made 2016 about you, the moderate Republican voter.

The bulk of the campaign was a reach-out to the far, far right, with the rhetoric on immigrants, Mexican and Muslim, with the dog whistles on African-Americans not being able to walk down the streets of their neighborhoods without getting shot, following years of claiming that President Obama hadn’t even been born here.

You could argue that he was talking to you, too. You want limited government, and Trump has promised a hiring freeze in Washington; he’s pledged to bring manufacturing back to the mainland, though it’s kind of like when Nixon had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, bereft of any details on how he might actually achieve it, other than touting himself as a supreme businessman, against a track record suggesting otherwise.

He paid just enough lip service to you to get you to hold your nose and pull the lever for him because he was the Republican nominee, and as good Republicans, that’s what you do.

And of course you did just that.

And now you need to own it.

I say that as I concede what I need to own in backing Hillary Clinton, and there’s a lot. First and foremost, her email nonsense. Dumb move from the beginning, that she decided to use a private email server as Secretary of State.

It’s no matter that her predecessors did the same. A whole bunch of wrongs don’t make a right. The decision was dumb, and her defense of the dumb decision was tone-deaf.

This and this alone should have been a reason for her not to run. Not because the private email server will lead to any finding of potential criminality on her part, because it won’t. Just because it provided ammunition to her political opponents, and you never give ammunition to political opponents.

I backed her, and I own that.

I also own the Clinton Foundation. Again, it is great that the Clinton Foundation does as much good as it does worldwide. But soliciting funds from those who wanted access to the Department of State? In what world is it a good idea to do that?

Not a dime of that went into her personal pocket, but it’s no matter. You give off the appearance of pay-for-play, even if the pay is going to poor people in the Third World.

I backed her, so I own that.

One other thing I own: she backed her husband multiple times when he stood accused of sexually harassing women. No, she didn’t harass anyone herself, as Trump is accused of doing, multiple times, and her sin here is keeping her marriage intact in the face of numerous allegations of infidelity, which I’ve heard numerous social conservatives say that more women need to do.

Those same social conservative critics turned that around on her, suggesting that she was enabling her husband’s behavior, and attacking the integrity of his accusers.

I’ll go ahead and own that.

One other thing I’ll own: backing Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders was the populist of the left, pledging support for universal healthcare, free college tuition and economic policies that would empower the working class and middle class against an increasingly stratified economic landscape.

I made the calculation, based on, oh, about 200 years of U.S. political history, that the party that runs the more centrist candidate against the party with the more ideological candidate wins, and wins big.

Clinton didn’t inspire me, but I thought Sanders, a self-avowed socialist, had absolutely no chance in a national general election.

We won’t know now, of course, but I can’t imagine that his campaign would have made the strategic blunders that will define the Clinton campaign, and if nothing else, he would have gone out swinging for the fences on his policy ideas, not fearmongering against a potential Trump presidency.

Yep, Own that.

Now, to what you guys own. Get ready.

I’ll start with what got the most attention in the media narrative of the election cycle: the women, grabbing, and the rest.

You can’t dismiss his numerous accusers as being money- and attention-grubbers after hearing the Access Hollywood tape, on top of hours of dialogue between Trump and shock jock radio host Howard Stern.

But you know that. Pretty sure you know to own that.

And if you want to argue that this is much ado about nothing, I can point you to a friend who is a sexual assault survivor who told my wife that she has had to deal again with her PTSD from the incident that she endured in the days since the election.

Your vote gave sanction to the idea that the primary role that your mothers, wives and daughters play in our society is as playthings for men.

Again, you own that.

He pissed on the honor of POWs with his nonsense comment on John McCain not being a real hero because real heroes don’t get captured. And then defecated on the honor of those wounded in defense of their country when he said as he accepted a Purple Heart given to him by a supporter that he’d always wanted a Purple Heart, and being given one was easier.

That’s your guy right there that you own with your vote.

He mocked a reporter with disabilities in front of a cheering crowd, playing the role of middle-school bully on a school bus.

I have had the fortune to work for the past seven years with a company that employs people with mental and physical disabilities, and I worked a summer in college as a counselor at a camp for kids with disabilities, and I’ll tell you, life-changing experiences, both.

You might take for granted being able to do little things like get out of bed without assistance, go to work where you want to, be able to contribute to society in myriad ways. Spend an hour with these folks, an hour, and you will never take what you can do with ease for granted again.

Your guy makes fun of people with disabilities for laughs. Own it.

He doesn’t make it a point to pay his bills. I’m not even talking here about the multiple bankruptcies that his companies have filed, though that’s an issue, too. I’m focusing here on him hiring small businesses to do work on his projects, then deciding not to pay them, citing one pique or another, and daring those that he stiffs to sue him, while promising to drag any efforts to reclaim money through the legal system out for years into the future, to the point of making the effort meaningless.

Just this week, a client decided to do this to me, stiffing me on a bill for a small amount ($250) because the client decided after hiring our company to build a new website that it didn’t in the end want the new website.

That $250 will not at all make or break me, but the ethics of not meeting your obligations should not be lost here.

Your guy considers this a standard business practice. Own it.

The voice given to white nationalism is something that we’re going to have to deal with as a nation for decades to come. Demographic trends that have whites regressing from majority to plurality status in the coming years are a reality that no amount of promised mass deportations and Muslim internment camps can possibly undo.

One way to deal with that is to just accept it, because, again, these are demographic trends. The approach that Trump gave life to is to offer the idea that we can reverse those trends, Make American Great Again-style, harkening back to the great America of the 1950s, hint, hint, before the blacks got all uppity with the civil rights, when women had dinner ready when their husbands got home from work, when the gays pretended they weren’t.

The social upheaval of the years to come is yours. You own it.

That all having been said, congratulations. Your team won, and even if, as I suspect, you’re as uneasy about the roughness around the edges of Mr. Trump, hey, it’s only four years, right?

Yeah, like you’re going to do anything other than hold your nose and vote for his re-election in 2020.

Go ahead and own that, too.

Column by Chris Graham

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