This Country Will Get The Leader It Deserves

The election showed us the real America (again).

Evan El-Amin

My brother-in-law leaves his keys in the ignition at night. “Who in the world would want to steal my car?” I tell him, “Someone who doesn’t have one? Someone who would chop it up and sell the parts for cash?”

He laughs.

This is my family in a nutshell. It tells you a lot about America. It doesn’t matter what our politics are. A lot of us just can’t imagine anything bad ever happening. Half my family can’t be bothered to think about current events at all. They don’t even recycle. Some of them still don’t even understand why we wear masks. They don’t understand why we bring air purifiers and tests with us on trips.

They think we have anxiety.

Many of my friends and coworkers have been acting the same way over the last few years. They talk a lot about this or that value they hold. Time and again, when it really matters, they throw their hands up and walk away. It’s easy to talk about doing the right thing. It’s hard to actually do it.

And many of them won’t.

Not with anything.

The bottom line here is that millions of people spent the last several months in a panic about Trump stealing the election. Now we can’t believe what we’re seeing. He doesn’t even have to try.

He just wins.

So you think you were fighting fascism…

This part will sting, but you need to read it.

Millions of liberals have spent the last four years thinking they were fighting fascism. I’ve got a message for them. If they weren’t wearing masks in public, especially for the vulnerable, they weren’t fighting fascism. If they weren’t advocating for clean air and vaccine availability for children, they weren’t fighting fascism. If they were cheering for greenwashed technologies and bashing “doomers,” they weren’t fighting fascism. If they weren’t putting pressure on their leaders to do better, they weren’t fighting fascism. If they were defending their politicians and making excuses for them at every turn, talking down to their critics, stifling dissent, throwing tantrums at their own base, cheering the endorsements of war criminals and prototype fascists like the Cheneys, and spewing nonsense about vibes, they weren’t fighting fascism. If they were ignoring genocide, they weren’t fighting fascism.

They were a willing puppet.

If you’ve been wearing a mask diligently, then you were fighting fascism. If you were speaking out about public health, you were fighting fascism. If you were vehemently criticizing your leaders and demanding they do better, then you were fighting fascism. If you held your politicians accountable and called them on their lies, their mistakes, and their misdirections, then you were fighting fascism. If you pointed out that it was wrong to hug fossil fuel projects regardless of who was doing it, you were fighting fascism. If you tried to make your actions match your words, you were fighting fascism. If you held your tongue and refrained from judging people for their voting decisions, then you were fighting fascism.

You completed the assignment.

It just wasn’t enough.

America, the land of instant streaming.

A second Trump victory makes no sense, until you think about what America’s really like. We’re not the land of the free, or the home of the brave. We’re the land of fast-food chains and 24-hour Walmarts.

We’re the land of Starbucks and Amazon Prime.

We’re the land of instant streaming.

When you put it that way, it doesn’t matter who wins. Millions of Americans are perfectly fine working all day and binge-watching their favorite shows all night. They love making fun of Trump and his over the top, showboat personality. They find his abusive tweets wildly entertaining.

Americans love shopping. They love eating out. They love parties. They love vacations. They love buying stuff online.

That’s how they see freedom.

They’ll never give it up.

Deep down, the affluent think nothing Trump does will ever have any true bearing on their lives one way or the other. They will always be able to get what they want and what they need, regardless of their political affiliation. For them, elections are like a television show, and they cast a reality star. It’s worth remembering that way back in 2016, CNN was planning to give Trump his own show.

They were going to platform him.

For views…

The real winner in all this is clear. It’s Donald Trump, and everyone who thinks like him. Even if he loses the election, even if he goes to jail, he won. He figured out what America really wants.

He delivers it on demand, 24–7.

We needed an administration that cared.

There will be endless excuses for why Trump won.

They don’t matter.

If we were really going to beat Trump, we needed an administration that tried. We didn’t get that. Granted, the courts blocked a lot of this administration’s efforts. They didn’t enjoy a clear supermajority. Anytime they got close, just enough Democrats would flip sides and vote against our interests.

Funny how that works…

Yes, it was hard. You know what? This administration could’ve said more. Nobody forced them to stop wearing masks or talking about clean air. Nobody forced them to bungle or ignore subsequent public health risks. Nobody forced them to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on wars while sending mixed, inconsistent, out-of-touch messages about inflation. Nobody forced them to start booting up coal and natural gas plants, even nuclear plants…

This administration could’ve at least gotten the messaging right. They could’ve said and done things to make us believe they cared.

They didn’t.

Trump wins for a simple reason.

Mainstream Democrats have had nearly ten years to understand why Trump appeals to so many Americans. They still don’t get it.

They see themselves in him.

Most Americans don’t want to admit this, but we’ve seen it on flagrant display over the last four years, even among liberals:

They’re selfish.

Most Americans are vain, narcissistic, egotistical, illogical, petty, and anti-science. They rant about misinformation and then go on to spread their own. They rant about conspiracy theories, but only the ones they don’t like. They scream and shout about free speech and civil rights, but only when it benefits them. I used to think only Republicans did this, but so do many Democrats.

Americans want cheap stuff. Fascism wasn’t the key issue for many Americans. It was the cost of living. It was rent. It was groceries. Can you blame them? Democrats didn’t mount an effective messaging campaign about the real reasons for the high prices. It was corporate greed. It was a collapsing ecosystem. Aside from a couple of tweets and a very brief news cycle, maybe a strongly worded letter or two, Democrats didn’t talk about it. They didn’t drive that message home. They tried once or twice, but they quickly pulled back when the media hit them with superficial charges of socialism that could’ve been easily dismantled.

Instead, they backed down.

By contrast, Donald Trump talked about inflation all the time. He didn’t talk about it very well. He didn’t identify the correct reasons. But he offered confidence and certainty in a vacuum, and it prevailed.

Above all, most Americans don’t listen.

They don’t listen at all.

If most Americans listened, we wouldn’t be sleepwalking into yet another pandemic even less prepared than we were last time. We wouldn’t be arguing over the intricate details of FEMA funding in the wake of an historic hurricane that will easily cost five times FEMA’s annual budget. We wouldn’t be sending tens of billions of dollars overseas to fund futile wars and genocides.

Trump takes America’s sins and washes them clean. He is the ultimate guy who DGAF about anything but himself. He gives everyone permission to do whatever they want, and they love him for it.

Survey after survey has shown that a growing number of Americans don’t care if we live under fascism. They just want their own brand of it that works for them. Screw everyone else. So, the tired and tedious warnings about fascism fell on deaf ears. You can’t beat Trump by forwarding a large number of his policies, including tariffs, and then getting angry when someone points it out. You can’t offer a watered-down version of Trump to Americans and say it’s not fascism.

They want the OG.

We deserve Trump again.

Look, I voted.

I made “the practical decision” and gave my reluctant, deeply conflicted vote to the candidate who at least wasn’t promising to remove fluoride from our water and yank vaccines off the market. If I couldn’t choose a decent human being for office, I could at least choose a basic level of self-preservation.

For every voter like me, several decided enough was enough. They had every right and reason to do what they did. They weren’t the reason for this.

The reason lies with all those who laughed at them, ridiculed them, shamed them, infected them with diseases, abandoned them, forgot about them, then came back to lecture them about responsibility while patting themselves on the back for their “brilliant campaign strategy” of evoking weirdness as a political weapon. It was doomed to fail. Even people like me who voted tried to warn everyone that this wouldn’t work.

The real reason lies with all those who remained silent as cities and states voted to ban masks and turned the police on peaceful protestors, then had the audacity to say they supported freedom and choice.

The reason lies with all those who spent the last three years saying “it’s just a cold” when hundreds of scientific papers said otherwise, and some of us devoted our entire lives to spoonfeeding that research to them, only to be called a fearmonger and a “crazy person.” The reason lies with those who watched as tens of millions of adults and millions of children developed chronic illness along with extensive brain and organ damage, so they could “get back to normal.” The reason lies with all those who fanned out over all those worthless celebrity endorsements, ignoring their private jets and massive climate crimes.

And look, it failed.

These “brilliant campaign strategies” didn’t work. They were never going to work. We knew they wouldn’t work. We tried to warn them.

They didn’t listen.

I wrote the first version of this article four years ago. Back then, I thought my brother-in-law’s complacency about his car keys represented the average Republican voter. Now I know better. It represents a number of liberals too. After all, what we’ve seen is an administration and a core of diehard supporters refuse to take action on almost every single one of our greatest challenges and most immediate threats, obsessing over vibes and feelings at the expense of…

Everything.

Many angry readers will demand solutions.

Well:

In the aftermath, it’s obvious why so many people voted for Trump. You don’t need a political science degree. Trump offers confidence and certainty no matter what. It appeals to American vanity. Every single act of pandering and catering that Democrats thought would win over Trump voters or “moderates” only made them look that much more weak and pathetic.

If Democrats wanted to win, all they had to do was stick confidently with the inconvenient truths and do the right thing.

That’s the solution.

The solution is you do the right thing, even if it makes you uncomfortable, even if it looks unpopular, even if it’s hard or makes you tired or gets you into trouble. You do the right thing. You do as much of the right thing as you can. If you can’t, you’d better have a damn good explanation and a plan to fix it. You’d better have an apology and a little humility in your step. For what it’s worth, nobody forced anyone to spend the last four years pretending everything was okay.

That was a choice.