How Donald Trump Turned Me into a Patriot
By: Charles Bastille
Tags: Biden, Politics, Patriotism, Democrats, Trump

This happened because Americans don’t pay attention to the world around them. They celebrate celebrities, not knowledge.

Trump turned millions of Americans into Patriots

Eventually, this forty-year descent into the abyss achieved something.

It gave us Donald Trump.

This informed many people that the soul of America had been badly damaged.

Even people who don’t pay attention to things were figuring out that something had gone horribly wrong.

And it turned us, many of whom have sort of watched as the country edged closer to what Umair Haque calls a failed state without lifting a finger to try to stop it, into patriots.

It woke up young people and women.

As the morally destitute fringes of Trumpism marched within their little clumps of hatred, gaining wide press coverage no matter how small their tiny hate fests, it scared the part of the population that Richard Nixon once called the silent majority and forced them to march to the ballot box.

Is this a march? Or is it Cosplay gone bad?

Anthony Crider, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Trump was a trigger for many women who never would have otherwise voted. Many women were so repulsed they ran for office.

For Blacks, Trump was a continuation of the same kind of thing they were already used to in many ways, but he was boastful about oppression and was so in our face with his attitudes towards people of color and immigrants that he motivated many of them to move to the streets and the ballot box.

To progressives, he was such an outrage that many didn’t even take him seriously until after he won. Many Bernie voters were so repulsed by Hillary that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her, thus setting back any hope of serious progress on things like climate change with four years that we will never get back.

They knew that their refusal to compromise might give conservatives something like a 6–3 majority in the Supreme Court, but they were too angry over their man not winning to care.

Then, Trump took office and began to operate.

Wide-eyed, appalled, and stunned citizens were flayed daily by his awful tweets.

It was almost like being assaulted every day by some crazy uncle lurking in your bedroom, shaking you awake as his mane of orange hair flops around and he wails on about a disjointed set of complaints.

We woke up every morning for four years with a good kick in the teeth and a knot in our stomach.

It motivated all of us who were repulsed by his behavior to bone up on things like, “What the hell is an electoral college?”, and “how many supreme court justices does it take to make a majority?”, and “what is a filibuster?”

We learned about voter registration deadlines and requirements. We learned who Stacy Abrams is.

We became patriots.

And today, because of this, and because of the attitude of young people, I have a little hope about the future of politics in America for the first time in 40 plus years.

I have this sense that maybe people have figured out they’ve been conned. Not by the Con Man in Chief, Trump, but by all politicians. From both parties.

And I get the sense that Joe Biden, who is a decent enough guy, will need to be more than a caretaker of the capitalist system he’s been in the middle of all his life.

Because Americans want something more.

Many of them marched in the street because they were outraged at what happened to George Floyd:

Many Americans are outraged by what the con job of the last 40 years has done to their livelihood.

But the patriotism comes from the fact that they are also outraged by the oppression of a group of people with whom they often have little interaction in their daily lives. They see the excesses of oppression on their phones and they want to take action.

Will that outrage stick? It seems to have stuck among young people.

History suggests that Biden will do what Democrats always do. He’ll fix the economy and be a good steward of the same economy that is leaving millions of people in the dust with outrageous housing costs, impossible education bills, terrible healthcare, but a very happy stock market.

But maybe he will look at the nation he has inherited and decide that he wants to be more than the journeyman politician who was the stop sign to the worst presidency in modern history. I mean, almost anybody who can steam up the window in the back seat of a car should have been able to do that.

So. Maybe he’ll actually do something. Maybe he will want a legacy.

Now that there are so many new patriots, like you and me, we can hold his feet to the fire in ways that people didn’t really do with other Democrats.

Maybe, just maybe, we can ask him to govern like a Democrat, instead of another Wall Street hustler.