The four-year-long Trump filibuster is over

July 29, 2022 

The four-year long Trump filibuster is over. 

This has to be said, you know? And I'm not insensible to why it happened, electorally, although me and the rest of the liberal New World Order (etc. etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) didn't expect the hissy fit to be quite so all-encompassing enough to win the Electoral College, to be honest. I didn't expect Trump to win but I got why he was popular. 

I mean, let's remove all pretense about it, shall we? We had, for eight years, a black president. A very smart, possibly genius, black president of the USA, with a beautiful wife, great kids, no scandals, and, like, very smart - eloquent, handsome, witty, and his wife too; very smart. His kids: probably geniuses too, the whole nine yards. 

The fact that he was black rubbed a lot of people wrong. I'll admit that. We've got a lot of racism to exorcise from our national culture, but our former president Barack Obama glided, practically floated, over all of that during his eight years in office. No scandals, no footholds for the racists to dig in. There was that thing with his pastor and he put that to rest fast. He was an individual with his own opinions and character, very young, very handsome, and very emblematic of a generation's hopes and aspirations - and he was black, and never the twain shall meet, in the eyes of those racists. The presidency of Barack Obama put a large portion of racist conservative whiteness into deep and abiding crisis, paranoia, and insanity. This is true; unavoidable. It was like Camelot without the assassination (Kennedy's Camelot, to be clear). 

The racists were a vocal part of Trump's base in 2016; this can't be denied. But the bigger "problem" from the conservative reactionary perspective, was that he was so smart, as well as so clean, so uncorrupt, so elegant, did things so effortlessly. People could very nearly find no reason to hate the federal government while he was at the helm of it. And that was the deeper motivation for the backlash that led to the four-year Trump filibuster in response to "no drama Obama". Remember that lack of drama? That was nice. Not so bad. Less of this panicky chatter that makes up our national soundscape now, still. But regardless, the actual backlash against Obama, once the racist vitriol had been spewed and gone away, was that he was so goddamn smart, and made a lot of white men - and admittedly this betrays some of their racial animus too - feel inadequate, lose confidence and feel emasculated. 

Mr. Trump's opponents say he did nothing of consequence and his proponents say he did a mighty fine job, but basically he did an average middling job as President. He put the federal government on autopilot, which is what all Republicans do anyway, and he did the two things he had to deliver for his actual base, which was the billionaires. He passed a big tax cut and he put social conservative judges on the bench. As a Republican, that's all he was ever obliged to do to keep his donors and his base, who are the same people, happy. He spent the rest of his time in office trying to undo the effect that Mr. Obama had had on Republicans, which is way less than responsibility called for him to do, but it's not like Republicans were going to hold his feet to the fire to get him to do anything else, like any work. 

But what Mr. Trump was really trying to undo wasn't really - or should I say wasn't only - the effect on his constituents of Mr. Obama being black; what he was really fighting against was the fact that Mr. Obama was smart, and that the country had gotten used to having a smart and eloquent President. Mr. Trump did his level best to get everyone to stop paying attention to politics and go back to some kind of 80's-type, Reagan-era apolitical body politick, betting that perhaps people hadn't actually "gotten into politics" but were just turned on by having a black president. The biggest fear of Trump and the social conservative/billionaire interest group he represented wasn't that we had had a black President so much as that our black, smart President had inspired interest from the public in smart, multiracial working class politics led by figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There's a strain of American politics and culture that emphasizes that we can have some distance from politics when we want to (mostly through religion and so on), but the fact remains that in history, whenever there has been a lot of work to do, Americans have gotten very political. 

To sum up, it's impossible not to reasonably evaluate the Trump presidency as one long four-year filibuster, not against only Mr. Obama's race, but also against the fact that he was a smart guy, who presided over one of the largest political youth awakenings in American history. Mr. Trump was not only a racist, but more functionally, as a Republican, he tried above all to get as many of these newly-awakened young people to tune out and not care or turn out in the next election - and for those who stayed tuned in, to try to poison their ears with as much bullshit as possible. 

It's a game for which there was no winning. I went to ground, and others tried to weather the bullshit. I cried frustrated tears when Mr. Cavanaugh got put on the bench - that fuckin' shitshow - and then threw up my hands in despair when Ms. Amy Coney Barrett snuck in there under the bell. That and more tax cuts and our international reputation tarnished in ways the State Department is still trying to clean up - what else happened of note? Mostly filibustering about how "not everyone is as smart as Mr. Obama, OK?"

What I really think this four-year-long idle-talk filibuster exposed was the tragedy that a lot of young people politically awakened by Mr. Obama didn't have a lot of meaningful (perhaps even unionized) work yet to get into while waiting for the next election. A lot of them were still in school or like me, just out of school, and not really in the groove yet of meaningful work. This is, and remains what concerns me most about the Trump filibuster years. The presidency of Mr. Trump was shitty performance art, but these young people had to endure it, endure being shouted at, mostly, before they'd gotten really into the workplace. And it's these scars that I hope President Biden can heal to the best of his ability.