Last Night

Trump wins!  The Republicans and Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for that headline.

The Republicans have had eight years to get ready for this and they blew it.  Their A-team of Rubio, Cruz, Perry, Santorum, and Bush were unable to stop a TV personality, a huckster, from taking the Republican nomination away from them but also the White House.  You were all so dumb, you couldn't bring yourselves to pull the nominee to the side and help smooth the edges off of him.  Despite your absolute travesty of abandoning your nominee, you managed a technical victory.  I hope you know what to do now that someone from the Republican party is in the White House.  You also better start grooming some better candidates for many of your party would have turned away had the Democrats been smart enough to nominate any one other than HRC.

The Democrats had eight years to get ready for this and they blew it.  Eight years ago, the Democrats correctly read that Americans were tired of being at war.  America was tired of the Bush-Cheney hawkish worldview and wanted something different.  Eight years ago, a no-name Senator from Illinois who had zero foreign policy experience was able to snatch the the Democratic nomination from that de facto heir, Hillary Clinton.  Eight years ago, then Senator Obama's slogan of "Hope and Change" resonated on both sides and helped him cinch both the Democratic nomination but also the White House.

So what the hell did the Democrats think trotting out Hillary eight year later, with eight more years of baggage, was going to do?  Especially with a populace that has become extremely disenfranchised with Mr. Obama?

More so than when she was running against President Obama, the sins of Hillary's (and Bill's) past came back to haunt her.  No, not the stuff that has Democrats in full denial about such as Bill's female victims.  No, not Hillary's mishandling of classified materials nor her incompetence during Benghazi.  No, what happened was the working class remembered two very important details from the Clinton years.

First, workers remembered that the Clintons were responsible from NAFTA which sent jobs overseas and turned Detroit into a real life version of the fictional Detroit from "Robocop".  The media completely missed when Trump picked up on this and promised to bring jobs back.  The media turned his comments into anti-immigration but by so doing, completely missed how this one speech resounded with the entire state of Michigan and the rest of working class Americans.

The other point that people remembered about the Clinton administration is more obscure but is why more blacks were secretly turning to Trump than the Democrat strategists could accept.  Former President Clinton pushed through legislation for getting tough on crime and mandatory sentencing.  Both of these actions by the Clinton administration has resulted in the huge increase in prison population with a disproportionate part of that population being black.

While publicly despising Trump and supporting the Democratic nominee, black people in private had no use for Hillary.  And here is the part Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her ilk need to be really held accountable for…by dismissing the blacks angst surrounding Clinton, you all but guaranteed a Trump victory.

Had the Democrats allowed Bernie Sanders to take the nomination, I am certain we would be having a different conversation today.  But instead, everyone in the Democratic party believed that voting in the first female President would overcome her own weaknesses as an unlikable, bland and boring candidate.

One other point before I move on to what I see facing the future President Trump (I still can't used to typing those two words).  Over the weekend, many of the Democratic faithful were still in full delusion mode and happily celebrated when FBI Director Comey announced that there were no findings in the 650K emails to warrant furthering investigation.  You morons, that was absolutely the final nail in Hillary's coffin.  She had been tracking since she got the nomination as being extremely unlikable, now she was also above the law? Fuhgeddabout!

Now on to Mr. Trump who I hope is ready for what he claims he wants.  The future President Trump is coming into office after the foreign policy fiasco of Obama/Clinton/Kerry that has created a far more belligerent Russia, a far more aggressive China, an increasingly difficult to defeat terrorist group known as ISIS, and a Europe that is on the verge of war.  All of the bombast and showmanship that got him elected isn't going to be what turns this around.  He needs to assemble a top notch foreign policy and national security team of something other than the cronies who followed him around during the campaign.

The Trump supporters are all clamoring for the wall to be built.  Of course they don't want to understand the immense cost of building and maintaining such a structure.  Disappointing to me is that many of my military buddies are in favor of this static defense, seeming to forget that throughout history walls are made to be breeched, blown-up, climbed over or dug under.  If the wall is built, we will have to commit huge amounts of manpower and resources just to keep it in place.

The first 120 days of the Trump administration will be unlike anything we've seen before in the history of the United States.  Worse, every country in the world is watching now with bemused horror as the US political machine has been exposed as a fraud, full of corruption and self-serving individuals.  What country is ever going to listen to the US demanding that it adopts the American form of democracy?

One parting note, especially to my liberal Democrat friends (but take heed my conservative Republican friends).  Many of you are posting on Facebook and other social media how ashamed you are of America right now or expressing your disgust at the sexist, racist, intolerant, ignorant masses that elected Mr. Trump.  I've got news for you, those people have always been there but you delude yourself into thinking everyone thinks like you do.  My challenge to you is, what are you going to do about it?  See if we keep running off to our idealistic little corners and to cry or celebrate, we are missing that fact that there are a whole bunch of people that don't agree with us but who are still Americans.

I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary.  I'm not a Trump fan but if we allow the results from last night to continue to divide us, far worse things are going to happen than any of us can imagine.