Post-Trump America
As of this writing, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president of the United States (link). In a country where a majority of the populace never wanted him to be president, after a year of his Twitter harangues, the daily embarrassment of his beleaguered spokespeople having to justify, dissemble or outright lie for him, and the injury of a tax plan that takes resources and services from the poor and gives them to the very richest, to think that as many as four out of ten people still think Trump is doing a good job is just astonishing.
We’ve seen all along that Trump’s followers have no interest in either American values or the truth about their authoritarian leader. This week, CNN aired an interview with a woman who had been duped by Russians meddling in the 2016 election. The video shows her in complete denial, unrepentant, defiant in the face of what she did to damage her country (link).
Trump may or may not be impeached or resign in disgrace as a result of the Mueller investigation. But ultimately, Trump is not the problem. The real problem facing us all is what his followers will do once he is no longer in power. They view Trump as having saved America from the precipice of total disaster, a nightmare dystopia in which a black man lived in the White House for two terms.
If Donald Trump goes down, it seems inevitable that they will have little or no skin left in the game of keeping this country together. Worst case scenario, a large percentage of Trump’s supporters will react violently in response. Trump’s presidency may be failing, but it is leaving stormclouds on the horizon, and I fear we are not prepared for what they portend.
Alan David Doane is a writer and editor from upstate New York with three decades of experience in broadcasting and journalism. Follow him on Twitter @alandaviddoane.