Donald Trump is unloved.
He wants to go to Kenosha, Wisconsin, largely because there is an election coming up and going to Kenosha is a better look than not going to Kenosha, even with a pandemic happening. Trump has been trying to make it look as though he is capable of the human emotion known as "empathy" in a bid to improve his standing with the coveted "suburban white woman" demographic.
However, no one wants Trump to go to Kenosha, least of all Democratic Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. In a letter addressed to the White House, Governor Evers begged Trump to reconsider his plans to visit the city, saying he will only make things worse.
Trump's deputy press secretary Judd Deere responded to the letter by saying that Trump couldn't wait to come and was "humbled" by all of the "individuals from Kenosha" who can't wait to see him.
All of these individuals are, of course, named "George Glass."
Is it possible for Governor Evers to refuse to fund Trump's visit in any way? Because if so, he should do that.
Trump is also being excoriated by Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who blamed him for the violence in his city and the shooting death of a member of the right-wing extremist group Patriot Prayer this past weekend.
The fact is, this shit wasn't happening regularly before Trump. It wasn't. It would not be happening now if he were not President. Partly because he is so terrible and partly because him being president in and of itself is so goddamn bizarre and such a violation of previously existing social norms that people don't feel quite as tethered to reality, or themselves feel pressure to adhere to previously existing social norms.
The hope among Trump's supporters was that we would all eventually adjust to this new reality. That Trump's behavior would be normalized, and that their own behavior, by proxy, would also become normalized. That they would be able to freely express their racist and sexist opinions on social media without anyone calling them racist or sexist. As we all know from having attended middle school, there is immense power in being able to be terrible to people while remaining socially "popular."
We did not adjust. We are just angry, and so are they because they didn't get what they wanted, either. We are angry at them for saddling us with Trump and we are angry at Trump for revealing that these people exist in far greater numbers than we had previously assumed and emboldening them to be worse. Trump's election revealed that many of the polite fictions that had kept the country intact were, in fact, bullshit.
The term "American Exceptionalism" used to refer to the idea that the United States was the exception, for a variety of reasons, to Marx's rules of history — that there were certain factors that made it unlikely that revolution would ever happen in the United States, "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions." The basic rule, really, was that you can only push people so far, you can only make them so miserable until they rise up against their oppressor. Revolutions are not pleasant and they don't happen unless things are so bad that a revolution is a pleasant alternative.
This was, of course, a long time ago. and other factors have since replaced those — entertainment, escapism, belief in magical bootstraps, the feeling that things will never get so bad that they can't be fixed. But Trump has brought chaos, he's taken away people's hope for change, and while we may not have a full-on revolution, he has certainly pushed a lot of people beyond their capacity.
It's not going well.
