Orange Meltdown, Con't

I have to agree with Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch here, as I have several times in the past. The problem in America is not Donald Trump, but the series of enablers and broken guardrails that made the last four years possible in the first place, and there's no greater empirical proof that the American democratic process is flat busted than the fact Trump and his nutjob voters are within a couple of consecutive bad coin flips of another term.

Maybe Trump’s neo-fascist narcissism was the big story in the fall of 2016, but the bigger story in the fall of 2020 is the mass delusion of the millions who elected him once and who are within striking distance of doing it again. I’d argue that the most important journalism of the week was neither the Woodward book nor Goldberg’s Atlantic scoop but from Time’s Charlotte Alter: “How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election — and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy.”

Alter spoke with voters in places like Ozaukee County, Wis., who almost surely weren’t watching the TV clucking about the Woodward book because more likely they were on Facebook or wherever they determined that “an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rape and torture children and drink their blood.”

Voter Kelly Ferro told Time that Trump is revealing the truth and that Americans' “eyes are being opened to the darkness that was once hidden" — referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory in which an anonymous whistleblower named "Q" (who may be, some even think, a John F. Kennedy Jr. who didn’t die in a 1999 plane crash) says Trump has been sent not only to smash “the deep state” but also to break up a child-sex ring of top Democrats and Hollywood stars.

The growing belief in conspiracy theories like QAnon — and its bold move into the mainstream by hijacking legitimate concern but also deep misunderstanding about the actual issue of sex trafficking —helps explain why voters and opinion leaders on the right are less than concerned this weekend about the coronavirus death toll nearing 200,000 and more about a Netflix movie called Cuties, an acclaimed French coming-of-age film that has been conspiracy-mangled into Hollywood (and even Barack Obama, who has a deal with Netflix) promoting pedophilia.

QAnon and its tentacles are perhaps the most overt example of an electorate where suspicion, rage and resentment is far more likely to fuel public reaction to the 2020 election — and all the concurrent crises like COVID-19 or the West Coast wildfires — than the rational responses that political science majors (like me) were wrongly trained to expect.

We see it in the growing backlash against any sort of racial reckoning in America, where thousands of football fans in Kansas City loudly booed a simple moment of silent pregame solidarity among Black and white players on the Chiefs and the Texans. We see it in the growing paranoia in Oregon, where a mass tragedy such as the wildfire that calls for a communal response has instead seen militias setting up armed checkpoints because of wild rumors about antifa. And we saw it on Saturday night at a Nevada airport where thousands of Trumpists raced like lemmings, packed together and not wearing masks, in a state that’s had high rates of COVID infection, to hear their Dear Leader and pretend the virus had never existed.

It’s why Trump seems impervious to the fallout from national dysfunction that caused 20th-century incumbent presidents like Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush I to lose elections. Neither sky-high unemployment nor a deadly pandemic has kept the polls from showing Trump in striking distance here in Pennsylvania, the state which — given the daunting Electoral College math — could prevent Biden’s rescue mission. My Inquirer colleague Julia Terruso visited the Western Pennsylvania outpost of Norvelt — a town literally created by the it-takes-a-village communalism of FDR’s New Deal — and found an electorate instead wrapped in a reality created by Fox News. “We don’t want our houses burned down,” a rural pastor told Terruso.

Trump may have broken all the rules, but will he break the rule in modern America that presidents who’ve been elected once tend to win a second time? — which is what happened seven out of nine tries since World War II. Trump’s political success in 2016 and possibly again in 2020 — with more than 40% of people supporting him no matter how many devastating books are written — is not based on America’s headlines but its national psyche, which is severely damaged. That’s why I’m so numb to whatever latest gross thing Trump has said, yet in a state of utter panic over the American voters and how their misinformation may decide our election.

In the short term, I hate to sound so cynical but there’s next to nothing that can be said in the next 50 days that will change the Trump-fried brains of voters in Norvelt or thousands of other communities like it. That doesn’t mean Biden cannot be elected — there’s a good chance he can — but it will take uncommon unity among the 55% of Americans who don’t like Trump, a massive focus on getting those voters to the polls and making sure their votes are counted, and a well-planned response for a scenario in which the president loses but tries to claim victory anyway.

The rest of us, which thankfully are a majority, have to man that wall and stand firm against the onslaught. We have decades of work ahead of us, but that work starts with electing Joe Biden and stopping Donald Trump, and even then the demonic hold that he has over his deth cult will take years to weaken, let alone to break.

There will be another Trump, with more animal cunning, with even less shame, without the baggage and the ego and the exploitable faults. And the next time, America will not escape their grasp, and we will be done.

Unless we are ready now, at this moment in history.