OPINION:
You could call it the tale of two election reflections, two competing points of view, two American perceptions of out-of-focus reality. Two important liberal voices “looked back” this week at the November election to try to figure out how and why Donald Trump, whom “everybody” despised and “nobody” wanted to win, actually did.
Less in anger than in searching for insights, we get glimpses of two radically different points of view in a radically divided America. The Washington Post follows Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser, in a discussion with Yale Law School students over why he thinks Hillary lost, and what he thinks most contributed to the losing. The man who might have been Hillary’s secretary of state calls the campaign experience his personal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
New Yorker magazine flits out of its urbane comfort zone to flyover country, and lands in Colorado to see “How Trump is Transforming Rural America.” Peter Hessler discovers a viewpoint as outrageous to New Yorker readers as what Yalies believe is to those who danced Inauguration Night away in Mesa County, Colo., at the Republican Women’s DeploraBall.
By far the more colorful and less predictable perceptions emerge from deep in the heart of Trumpland, in Grand Junction, Colo. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in Colorado by a modest margin and won the state, but Donald Trump won twice as many counties, including Grand Junction, where unemployment, drug addiction, crime and suicide rates are high.
Here you hear how women became activists shortly after the leak of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape, which captured the candidate talking dirty 11 years earlier about a certain part of the female anatomy. When this news broke two days before his second debate with Hillary, most of the pundits, consultants and other wise men thought it was the end of his campaign. But the Donald was not dead. Neither were his followers.
Women in Grand Junction gathered with other Trump fans to plot a “Women for Trump” rally, and more than a hundred of them showed up, impressive in the circumstances. They didn’t like the candidate’s lewd vulgarity, and they liked even less how the mainstream media kept repeating it. But nothing infuriated these women like Hillary’s remark that half of the Trump voters were racists, bigots, sexists and other undesirables that she put in a “basket of deplorables.”
“What she said was,” says Matt Patterson, a Columbia University graduate who was born in Grand Junction and who now lives in Washington and attended the Women’s DeploraBall in his hometown, “’if you don’t vote for me, you’re morally unworthy to talk to, to take seriously’.” It was just the kind of condescending attitude toward conservative thinking he found at Columbia, where students believed that “only liberal views are legitimate.”
For many women it was fierce reinforcement of their perception of the Democratic candidate: Hillary wanted to be the first female in the Oval Office as a woman who detested women who didn’t see the world as she did.
Many liberal women thrive on vulgar language, reveling in “slut walks” and “pussy hats,” and many conservative women revel in being identified as Hillary’s “deplorables.” They cheer President Trump’s blunt counterpunching, which they see, despite his occasional outbursts of coarseness and ribaldry, as defending their own righteous dignity.
They are the people who Jake Sullivan at Yale must have had in the back (if not the front) of his mind when he concluded that Hillary’s losing was a rejection of an elite that had lost touch with the people she presumed to serve. He asked the Yale Law School students, how does the culture resolve the growing division and get to issues of dignity and alienation and identity? “How do we even ask the question without becoming the disconnected, condescending elite that we are talking about?” Hillary’s “prescription-heavy speeches” missed the point, and her cold programmatic solutions had nothing to say about the pain of others.
That was her husband’s forte, not hers. Her campaign was a “job interview,” to show off how she was Ms. Fixit. Jake Sullivan regrets she did not push a message pulsing with empathy, but most of us know that to do that would have required a different candidate. Donald Trump grasped early that globalism lacks soul, and spoke of his concern for the down, the out and the overlooked.
The New Yorker finds the Trump supporters in Grand Junction “more interesting and more decent than the man who inspires them.” One of them, Matt Patterson, the Columbia University graduate, still roots doggedly for the president and his agenda. “The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed,” he says. “Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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