The Politics of Deplorability

I’m going to start with an old joke. I should warn you here that it’s a bit of an off-color joke, but it illustrates the point I really want to make here. Consider this an advance apology and a warning. Here’s the story, via Quote Investigator:

“They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree.”

I think the joke is pretty obvious. Now onto Hillary Clinton and the Basket of Deplorables. First, I actually do disagree with the language used, but that’s just because rhetorically it’s weird. Neither here nor there, though. One reason most politicians are trained lawyers is that at its core, politics is about making a case. Either for yourself or against the other person and very often doing both at the same time. I’ve long maintained that the way to win this election is to make it a referendum on the other person. Look – I think Clinton will be a fine President, she’s almost too qualified, and I would vote her against any of the clowns that currently occupy the smoking crater of the GOP. But the simple fact is that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of her, and you play the hand you’re dealt. Both Trump and Clinton by definition have to paint this election as the lesser of two evils, because a majority of voters think they’re both pretty evil.

Clinton has made this case basically from the primary on. Trump is unhinged, he’s a lunatic, he’s a crazy person, he’s a chaos candidate – sorry, wait, those are what the members of his party have said about him. My bad. Anyway, she’s called him unfit and unqualified and a million other things. But shockingly, none of them really stuck. She had to go further, she had to go bigger. She had to be – dare I say it – a touch more Trumpian.

The Basket of Deplorables is an incredibly calculated feint. It’s designed to look and feel like a gaffe because the media loves gaffes and gaffes are more fun to cover than the truth. But here’s where the realpolitik comes into play. We all know that some of Trump’s supporters are cavemen and monsters. Like the above joke, we’ve already decided those people exist within the Trump Tent. Now we’re just trying to determine the degree.

So there’s the first step of the process – the pearl-clutching and faux outrage, the how dare she? – but it’s immediately followed by the second part, which is: Not half! Maybe, like, a few. But half?! And now the debate isn’t about Hillary Clinton saying a mean thing; it’s about determining the specific threshold of truth to the mean thing she said.

Put another way: Hillary Clinton basically said Donald Trump eats lunch with a fleet of bridge trolls. And Trump, and Pence, and all of their surrogates now have to say “Look, there’s one bridge troll (David Duke), but we don’t like him.”

Now the conversation isn’t about Clinton, it’s about Trump, and Duke, and how far Trump’s affinity for bridge trolls extends. The simple fact is that it’s not one bridge troll. It’s all of the bridge trolls.

Trump can pretend Clinton called millions of people “deplorable” and “un-American,” but don’t forget one of his speakers at the GOP Convention thinks the franchise for women is when America started going downhill.

Trump can do outreach to African-American communities, but it was Milo that got banned from Twitter for going after an African-American actress.

Here’s a quote from Kellyanne Conway.

Here’s an article from Breitbart, the website Bannon ran until recently.

And Paul Manafort’s history of dictator-advising.

Here’s Corey Lewandowski assaulting a female reporter for Breitbart!

Trump can distance himself from the KKK all he wants, but he can’t distance himself from literally every campaign manager he’s employed thus far.

Clinton doesn’t want the bridge troll vote, any more than Trump wants the Latino or the African-American vote. That’s why this matters. Because there are people who deep down in their soul think Trump is a monster who has surrounded himself with monsters, but maybe they can reconcile that with some bullshit about lower taxes. Maybe they can hide behind the claims of political correctness that dog Democrats. Maybe they can believe that David Duke has a warped understanding of the Trump campaign.

Or they can face the reality. These are the people Hillary is talking to. She is making the case that supporting Trump gives tacit support to the white supremacists, to the racists, to the xenophobes, to the Islamophobes, to the misogynists. We know they’re there. Now we’re just trying to determine the degree. And if you vote for Trump, you have to accept the moral culpability that comes with that vote. Just because you’re not in the Basket of Deplorables doesn’t mean you’re not voting for that basket to have a whole fuck of a lot more power than it should ever have.

Clinton has a relatively hard base of support. So does Trump. This battle will be won and lost over the independents who dislike both of them and the Republicans who hate Trump but might just sell their soul and vote for him anyway. Clinton is no longer providing them cover. A vote for Trump is a vote for a candidate enthusiastically endorsed by the KKK. A man who surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. A man who turned first to a dictator whisperer and then to someone who has “given a platform to racists the alt-right.” A man who has the gall to say Clinton has criticized millions of Americans when his entire campaign is built around criticizing millions of Americans.

Square that with your conscience.