Bullshitter-in-Chief
by Tom Sullivan
Until a week ago, this saying was familiar to Chicago Cubs fans: "They wouldn't be the Cubs if they didn't break our hearts." Then the lovable losers won the World Series. Early Wednesday morning, not-so-lovable Donald Trump won the presidency. Propelled by a nation discontented with all the losing he told them they'd experienced at the hands of suspicious foreigners and political sharks, Trump now has to deliver all that winning he promised supporters they would get sick and tired of. Charlie Pierce wonders how long it will take him to break his supporters' hearts:
He will break their hearts, sooner or later. He likely will not build a big, beautiful wall for which Mexico pays. He will sign a budget that makes their lives harder. Their nephew with cerebral palsy will lose his Medicaid funding, or a fracking company will ruin their water or cause the ground under their homes to shake, or their father will get called up and die in some attempt to "destroy" ISIS, or someone in their family will call the local pharmacy and discover that a pre-existing condition makes a considerable difference again.As Mr. Spock once observed, after a time "having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting." Kansans, including Republicans, have found that to be true of Gov. Sam Brownback's magic bean theory about tax exemptions for business owners producing economic unicorns. Jobs have disappeared and budget holes are chronic. Democrats Tuesday picked up seats in both houses of the state legislature. “There’s very likely to be an anti-Brownback majority in the Legislature,” according to Bob Beatty, a political scientist as Washburn University. Now Donald Trump has to make good on even more grandiose promises.
How will they react, all those people who made up just enough of a margin in just enough states to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office? Will they actually blame him, or will they realize at some level that to blame him is to blame themselves? History indicates that they will offload that anger and dread onto the usual targets. But, this time, they might not. And woe betide the president who is president when that finally happens.