We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our "American exceptionalism." We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win "hearts and minds" that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course.
Having read ten thousand pages of world history at a clip, as well as at least that in increments, the United States of America is pusillanimous compared to any other world power. We ain't noble, we ain't great, but this constant need to pretend that the United States is somehow exceptionally bloodthirsty or despicable only serves to illustrate naïveté.
Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster. I thought the bit I put in bold was insightful. There's a great temptation to pin all the ugliness on Trump because the alternative is far harder to face. Trump is the tip of a very large iceberg.The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America's president look like?
I've been saying for awhile now that we really need to face the fact that Trump isn't necessarily unrepresentative.