You know I know it’s a cliche at this point, but the “But her emails!” was all about mishandling of classified data and trust. This was all so predictable even in 2016 that whatever one thought of Clinton, he’d be worse in every respect. Any character flaw she might have possessed or was imagined to, the reality was he was worse. It was obvious he was worse then. But we failed as a society. Our government failed, our journalism failed, our politics failed. We collectively failed the test. Amongst the most dangerous parts of that failure though is that there are elements of our society, eg journalism, that steadfastly refuse to even believe that they failed. That everything is normal and fine. Fourth estate indeed.
I was about to type that it’ll take us a long time to undo the damage he caused, but the in truth, he may have accelerated the processes ongoing in our society, but this cancer was already present and growing, he metastasized it, not initiated it. Which means, I fear that despite the heady optimism around predictions that personality cults don’t tend to outlive their leader, the Trumpist cult will outlive him and will be a continuing threat to democracy for decades to come. I’m not sure our institutions of government, journalism, and society are capable of withstanding it and much of it is already happening in plain site and from centers of power. Because as it turns out they’re predicting a loss too, but their response is not accepting democratic defeat but a “Red Caesar”.
I’d love to be wrong.
