Waste no more time on Clinton

During the days leading up to choosing HER, HIM, someone else, or nobody, I’d have serious this-can’t-be-real thoughts. They persist. Friends and family are experiencing the same.

We talk. We talk about the shock we feel. We thought SHE would win, although we didn’t want HER to win, yet we didn’t want HIM to win, either.

Who is Trump, anyway? He’s denied climate change, receives Al Gore on December 5 at Trump Tower to discuss climate change, receives Leonardo DiCaprio on December 7 to discuss climate change, renewable, clean energy and job creation, and just hours before meeting with DiCaprio, nominates Scott Pruitt, a climate science skeptic, as the EPA administrator.

On the campaign trail, Trump reached out to black voters, suggesting they vote for him. He asked, “What do you have to lose?” Indeed. Yet he’s selected Jeff Sessions (who lost a judgeship years ago because of racist comments) as his attorney general and the controversial Steve Bannon as his WH strategist. Is Bannon a white supremacist, an opportunist who panders to racists in order to promote his own interests, or both?

Trump’s audience with Carly Fiorina is revealing. While campaigning, the two rivals exchanged insults. Trump’s invectives targeted Fiorina’s appearance, “”Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” This is icky, cringe worthy, but there Fiorina was at Trump Tower, meeting with the president elect to discuss a position in his cabinet. Is Trump toying, fucking with the suck ups, after pulling off a fingernail, a wing, delighting in their groveling? Here’s Fiorina after kneeling at the Church of Trump:

First I want to say, he has really cool stuff in his office. All of these athletes have given him all this incredible memorabilia. I was particularly taken by Shaq O’Neal’s shoe, which is huge. I guess it takes a champion to know a champion.

How could voters, duped repeatedly by politicians, cheer Trump’s “make America great again” and place a smidge of faith in the uber-wealthy American psycho?

Because he appealed to raw emotion.

Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” There you have it. “ . . . I alone can fix it.” Trump could’ve told them he walks on water and they’d believe it, because the suffering needed a savior. Trump emerged at precisely the right time with promises of healing. Healing not the Deplorables but the Desperates.

How will they, the Desperates, react on grasping the truth—that they’ve been had by a super predator? (Check these campaign slogans and review the history of con artistry.)

We can’t blame the Desperates for the rise of a figure who some say is a fascist . . . without also looking inward. Each of us bears responsibility, each one that either did nothing or not enough to advance justice, each who defended HRC or said, “It’s time for a woman,” despite the brutal record of that particular woman, despite the lives she destroyed while enriching herself through the Clinton Foundation and paid speeches to Goldman Sachs executives, the same uber-wealthy orchestrators, among others, of the 2008 crash that ended the hopes and dreams of people throughout the world.

Clinton’s defeat should be hailed and then pronounced kaput. Time to place the Clintons on a metaphorical ice floe. We can waste no more time on HER when our attention needs narrowing to the perils of a Trump tenure.

Even though I am scared shitless of Donald Trump, I don’t regret withholding my vote. What I’ve thought since the election is that HRC was a little less frightening than Trump for one reason only. She was the familiar, more predicable evil.

Missy Comley Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com.