Sorting hat by @BloggersRUs

Sorting hat

by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Friday's jobs numbers were particularly good for a president running for reelection. Nonfarm payrolls surged by 266,000 in November, running far ahead of expectations, and a 50-year low in unemployment.

But who can trust them? Not Donald J. Trump. During the Obama administration, he and other Obama opponents regularly claimed the unemployment numbers released were grossly and deliberately understated for political purposes. MSNBC's Chris Hayes Friday night reminded viewers (using video) that at various points during Obama's presidency Trump claimed the real unemployment rate was 25 percent, 30 percent, 35 — as high as 42 percent. Nearly half the country was unemployed, Trump implied, far more than at the height of the Great Depression.

In December 2016, Hayes added, 67 percent of Trumpers believed the unemployment rate went up under Barack Obama. It did not.

Commenting on this disconnect from reality, Hayes observed:

It's phenomenally dangerous. But the most dangerous part is that President Donald Trump is as much a symptom of this as he is the cause. I mean, the man is first and foremost a Fox News viewer. That's his central identity. That's what's going on in the brain.

There is an entire ecosystem built around the alternate reality that is untethered from fact. The same one that tells them that the jobs numbers are made up. That same ecosystem is now telling people that the Deep State is out to get Donald Trump; that Ukraine actually meddled in the election, not Russia; that there are imaginary servers somewhere in a vault in Kiev that will blow the whole thing open.

And all this is being told to hide what really happened. And those people and that ecosystem that is almost hermetically sealed off from this touch to reality has a purchase on 40 percent of the country. And in the real world in which the rest of the country resides, the jobs numbers are the jobs numbers. And Russia sabotage our election, not Ukraine.

But Trumpworld has completely, in some cases, cut themselves off from these facts and knowledge of them. That is the danger of having this guy as president. It's the danger of the ecosystem that produced him. and it's the danger of this political moment, because this is where we are.

But there is more.

David Frum writes at The Atlantic that it is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration that he seems to attract criminals to him. Beginning with the first members of Congress to endorse him, Frum observes, plus those in his orbit already convicted of federal crimes. Frum concludes, "The attraction of such people—and so many like them—to Donald Trump tells us something important about who Trump is: a man who appeals to crooks because they recognize him as one of their own."

Hayes' speech Friday night echoed events in another alternate reality: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There is that OMG moment in Captain America: The Winter Soldier when fans realize S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated. Later, Steve Rogers announces that to friends and allies who have not "turned."

In our reality, his speech might have sounded something like this: "... I think it's time you know the truth. The Republican Party is not what we thought it was. It has been taken over by HYDRA. Donald Trump is their leader."

In the alternate reality of Harry Potter, the sorting hat has placed them in Slytherin. But their own desires contributed to that choice.

It is certainly not true of every voter wearing a scarlet "R." At a Democratic event weeks ago, I overheard a recent "convert" tell another about the relief he felt waking up in the morning as a Democrat. The stress of being a Republican in this political environment had been tremendous. I remember the tears in the eyes of a former Republican woman 1) at the warm welcome she received when she changed parties, and 2) that local Democrats didn't spend all their time badmouthing opponents. "You actually want to do something" positive, she said.

There are others out there who are leaving the Party of Trump for the real world. They gravitated in their youth to a different party with a different set of values and principles they thought the party actually believed in. Their families were Republican. They started in college. But over time, the truth sank in. The Republican Party was not what they thought it was.

Welcome them when you meet them.