linnposts.com

I think the dictionary could define the word enigma simply as, “the 2016 presidential election.” Everything about it “is difficult to understand or explain.”

I have found myself shaking my head in disbelief more times than I can count, not least because the capacity of Hillary haters to turn accusations into facts is nothing short of astonishing, equaled only by their willful determination not to allow anything Trump says or has done to influence their support.

What has kept me at least partially sane is finally being able to put this election in political context.

Donald Trump didn’t just appear out of thin air. Instead, he is the product of the union between the Republican Party and the radical right.

The roots of this union go back at least to the 1990s with the emergence of the likes of Ann Coulter, Russ Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the founding of Fix News in 1996.

The airwaves were soon filled with an all out assault on President Bill Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and even their 12 year old daughter, Chelsea.

Bill’s unsavory behavior gave them all they needed for their attacks to have credibility. But the more they talked, the wilder their claims became. Not only was he an adulterer, he was a murderer, and Hillary was his co-conspirator.

After Bill’s term as president was over, the radical right turned on the rest of the Democrats, labeling all things liberal as unpatriotic, too soft to fight terrorists, always “blaming America first” whenever our nation got into trouble somewhere in the world, and posing a threat to our country’s future by promoting a welfare state that rewarded laziness and punished hard work.

These attacks gained immediate support among Americans looking for someone to blame for the loss of white power, for women flooding the workforce and some of them taking executive jobs men once held, for the decline of American military dominance in the world, for an economy that no longer worked for them, for the persistence of a woman’s right to choose, and for a nascent and growing acceptance of gay marriage.

It was during this time that the radical right took the Republican Party as its shotgun bride, using the threat of a primary challenge against any Senator or Representative who resisted the marriage as the enforcer.

Officiating were misguided evangelical clergy who were counting on Republicans legislating their moral beliefs into law, and turning our democracy into their version of a theocracy.

It all seemed very promising until the 2008 Great Recession economic disaster caused by reckless tax cuts and two unfunded wars. Suddenly the radical right anti-government rhetoric didn’t sound so appealing as Washington became the only hope for preventing the country from falling off a cliff.

That economic crisis led to the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president, but that was the last straw for the radical right.

A black man in the White House was just too much. He had to be de-legitimized, and the “birther” movement was born.

Within a year the majority of Republicans – including evangelicals – were saying in survey after survey that they didn’t believe the President was a real American.

In short, they were saying he was black and shouldn’t be in the White House.

When their racism was called out, they cried foul and insisted liberals were “playing the race card.”

Meanwhile, unable to defeat Obama fair and square, congressional Republicans, now owned by the radical right, adopted a “no compromise” strategy.

If President Obama was for it, they were against it, period.

It was their politicized version of the “birther” movement. De-legitimize the president by refusing to work with him.

Never mind that the country’s future was at stake. Republicans were determined not let this first black president succeed or the country might end up with another one.

So here we are almost eight years later and the only honest way to describe how Republicans have treated President Obama is shameful, made even worse by support from evangelicals quick to use morality as an excuse for politicizing their faith.

It has been such a racist, mean-spirited, un-American, and un-godly approach to doing their job as to be shockingly appalling.

And it is the reason why a man as unprincipled, unhinged, immoral, and narcissistic as Donald Trump could win their nomination for president of the United States.

He has unashamedly exploited the racism, sexism, nationalism, and economic classism that now infects the Republican Party from top to bottom.

If it is true that Donald Trump is speaking for Americans who feel forgotten, then he is speaking for people who should be forgotten. They represent the worst qualities human beings can have.

They certainly don’t deserve to be heard. They deserve to be condemned. They are mean and nasty because they resent losing the privileges they once enjoyed because they were white or moneyed or both.

These people want to elect Trump because they believe he is one of them. He is because they made him.

But they know having a woman as president after putting up with a black man for eight years will put the final nail in their white and male and pseudo Christian coffin and they are fighting like hell to keep it from happening.

It is up to the rest of us to must make sure they lose that fight.