Thank you, Donald Trump. For what? For a number of things. First and foremost, for finally and completely exposing today’s Republican Party—its highest-ranking leaders, its elected officials all over our country, and, yes, the broad mass of its voters. For all the vile things Republicans have said and done for years now, you broke the dam. You made exactly clear what Republicanism really stands for. Hell, these past 10 days you smashed through the dam like the very animal your party has chosen as its symbol.
Thank you for forcing every Republican running for office this year to decide whether or not to state that they’ll be voting to elect you to the presidency of the United States, a man who is—wholly separate from your awful and/or hateful policy positions, complete lack of the knowledge required to do the job or interest in gaining such knowledge, not to mention a prickly, prissy, absurdly volatile temperament that alone disqualifies you from getting anywhere near the nuclear codes—easily the most disgusting human being to serve as a major party presidential nominee in any of our lifetimes.
Watching Paul Ryan, et. al., do the ‘he’s icky and I don’t want to get anywhere near him and get slime on me….But he should still be our president’ routine—followed by Trump returning fire back at Ryan and ushering in Republican-on-Republican political violence the likes of which no party has ever experienced four weeks from a presidential election—has been fun.
And, although it didn’t get as much attention, I’ve also enjoyed watching GOP members of Congress do a soul-shaming (for anyone actually possessing a soul, that is) 180 on Trump in just the past few days. The most entertaining about-face came from Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Republican Senate leadership no less, who called for Trump to quit the race in favor of Mike Pence after the release of the “grab them by the pussy” tapes last weekend before, only a few days later, declaring that even if Trump doesn’t do so, he and his Christian family values will be voting for him anyway.
Rep. Bradley Byrne of Alabama went from: “It is now clear Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States” to saying he’d consistently been and would remain “a supporter of the Republican ticket from top to bottom.” Why? Because, according to Jonathan Martin of the New York Times, they buckled in the face of “the fury [Trump’s] supporters unleashed at the defectors at rallies and on social media.” In other words, they’re cowards. Beyond these guys, Trump not only defeated his party’s supposed two young, rising stars, he also managed to get Marco Rubio and, especially, Ted Cruz to twist themselves into pretzels by first condemning and then supporting his candidacy.
Additionally, I’m grateful to Trump for showing the rest of America what unbelievable assholes a majority of active Republicans are. To clarify, if you vote in a Republican presidential primary, then you are an active Republican. And a majority of you voted to make Trump your nominee. Not only did that stain the brand of the Republican Party as an institution, it stains you, collectively, as active Republicans, forever. You may not have had proof that he was a criminal who assaults women and brags about it until this week, but you knew more than enough by this spring about Donald Trump to know what kind of man you were nominating.
Finally, I’ll thank Trump for one other thing. Although it took far, far, far too long, there is at least some evidence that the mainstream media has finally learned how dangerous it is to avoid telling the truth about a politician, and how dangerous it is to pursue ‘balance’ by covering equally whatever muck is raised about candidates from both parties. By no means am I certain, or even confident, that journalism has been thoroughly and permanently transformed by what it has learned over the past three months. Years of inertia and covering politics while living in fear of being called ‘liberal’ isn’t easy to turn around. But seeing the New York Times call Trump a liar in a front page headline gives me more hope on that front than I’ve had in some time.
As for the second part of my title, well, that should be a bit more obvious. And, again, let’s leave policy aside for right now.
Fuck you, Donald Trump, for insulting and demeaning just about every group in this country, for fomenting hatred of Muslim-Americans and Mexican-Americans in particular by playing on the fears and anxieties people have about terrorism and about demographic change. Oh, and fuck you for making the members of the aforementioned groups you’ve targeted feel anything less than the 100 percent Americans they are.
Fuck you, Donald Trump, for thinking and, apparently, acting like any woman with whom you come into contact exists for your personal pleasure. And fuck you for suggesting that your fellow males all talk like you do when the women-folk aren’t around. Fuck you for making me watch the disgusting grin on your face when you got actress Arianne Zucker to hug you, after having talked about her like she was a piece of meat. Oh, and Billy Bush? Wherever you are, fuck you, too.
Fuck you, Donald Trump, for degrading our democracy, for making America look like some kind of tin pot dictatorship by not only encouraging millions of your supporters to call for the jailing of your opponent, but by calling for it yourself in front of tens of millions more.
Fuck you also for telling your supporters that, if you lose, it means the election must have been stolen, and specifically stolen by black people. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, when you told your almost all-white crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania that they need to “watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us” and then added “I just hear such reports about Philadelphia”—which is 45 percent black, in case you were wondering. If anyone wasn’t sure, you closed with: “Everybody knows what I’m talking about.”
If there’s a race war in America after Hillary Clinton is elected, it’s 100 percent on you, you race-baiting motherfucker. And on a related note, fuck you, Donald Trump, for questioning the Americanness of our first black president. In every way, with everything he believes, he embodies the best of what America stands for going forward, while you personify the absolute worst of a past we, as a people, struggle and strive every day to put behind us. I should add that this list is by no means exhaustive.
Finally, fuck you for robbing the American people of an election based on actual substance, a debate focused on whether the policies and worldview put into practice over the past eight years works better for the majority of Americans than the conservative approach taken in the eight years that directly preceded them. Fuck you for robbing Hillary Clinton of the opportunity to earn an incontrovertible mandate not merely as the better of the two major party candidates—an absurdly low bar to clear—but as the person whose political vision the American people affirmatively chose. Fuck you for allowing Republicans to say, ‘well, they didn’t choose your policies, Hillary, they only rejected a scumbag.’
Our job after Election Day is to keep hammering home just what Republicans really are. Namely, they are the kind of party and, yes, people who nominated and—even after they had all the evidence—voted for a scumbag to be president.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).
P.S.-Here’s video of me on France 24 (English) International News making some similar comments (although I did refrain from cursing) about Trump, the “Access Hollywood” video, and the people who nominated him.
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