If there is a silver lining inside the acid-cloud of Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory, it’s that Americans have been afforded an unusually vivid picture of the Republican Party’s stance on that most highly charged of campaign themes: ”values.” Mr. Trump and his fans, after all, decried Hillary Clinton’s personal ethics and her values (or, in their eyes, her lack of them) throughout his campaign.
Of course, earlier contests in our nation’s history — the 1828 mud-wrestling match between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, for example — featured ad hominem attacks on candidates’ morals just as vicious as those that defined the 2016 election. But some in the Trump camp outdid their crap-slinging 19th-century forebears, advocating violence — or slyly hinting at violence — against the Democratic nominee. Al Baldasaro, a Trump adviser and stridently anti-nipple GOP politician from New Hampshire, even argued that Secretary Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason” over the 2012 attacks on U.S. targets in Benghazi.
It is only fitting, then, that we cast a cold eye on the words and deeds of the president-elect, if only to gauge the type of character that the GOP will likely rally around in the future, and to examine the values that now appear to drive the Party of Lincoln.
Judging by Trump’s support, those values include, but are not limited to:
Mendacity: While her detractors have long stamped their feet and torn their hair about what they see as Hillary Clinton’s unceasing dishonesty, Donald Trump’s willingness to lie again and again — or, perhaps more accurately, his inability to tell the truth — borders on the majestic.
During his campaign Mr. Trump lied, and kept lying even in the face of documented, countervailing facts, about the national murder rate; about seeing people ”dancing in the streets” of New Jersey on 9/11; about Hillary Clinton launching the execrable birther movement; about China inventing the global warming “hoax.” Trump has lied — or, at best, has been willfully slippery — about his own charitable giving; about his support for the Iraq war; and even about whether or not he called George W. Bush a liar. (He did.) The list of his asinine whoppers goes on and on and on.
Even many of Ms. Clinton’s staunchest defenders acknowledge that she has been known to bend, and occasionally seriously wrench, the truth. In that sense, she resembles most other people on planet Earth, and virtually every politician who ever drew breath. Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems to lie as a matter of course. Disinformation is his default setting.
For today’s GOP, the truth, like history, is not a verifiable reality. It is a fantasia written by victors — even when the principal victor is, for all intents and purposes, functionally semi-literate, i.e., a man who can read, but won’t.
Fiscal Irresponsibility: As a party incessantly touting its own fiscal conservatism — a conservatism that usually takes the form of tax breaks for the super-rich and a mercenary adherence to the long-exploded tenets of “supply side” economics — it’s striking that the GOP has elected a man with a personal and professional record of such breathtaking capriciousness.
There was, of course, the roughly $1 billion that Mr. Trump famously lost in a single year, his Annus mirabilis of 1995. Then there are the lawsuits brought against him by contractors and others after Mr. Trump’s many bankruptcies; Trump often skated, and left less-opportunistic suckers holding the empty bag. There was the Trump Shuttle fiasco, the New Jersey Generals USFL debacle, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks and even the Trump board game, which Mother Jones memorably pegged as “a great game if you don’t have very many friends.”
For Republicans, this litany of failure is not cause for alarm, but bizarro evidence of Donald Trump’s “business savvy.” Also, black is white, down is up, and Trump’s tax plan is a surefire national debt-killer.
White “Supremacy”: So much has been written and said about the embrace of Mr. Trump and his values by right-wing zealots and assorted extremists that it’s hardly worthwhile rehashing that shameful trend here. But when a presidential campaign laces racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric and symbolism tightly enough into its message that it manages to gladden the likes of the Klan, white nationalists and other ethno-tribalist creeps across the U.S. — well, it’s obvious that the concept of “inclusion” has been stricken from the GOP’s list of goals for the foreseeable future, and probably forever.
Misogyny and Sexual Depravity: Can a man ”cherish” women even as more than a half-dozen credible accusers (thus far) have claimed he sexually harassed and assaulted them? Can a man be trusted to fight for equal protections for women and still glibly blame everyone but the attackers themselves for the U.S. military’s rape epidemic? Can a grown man see women and girls as worthy of respect when he strides into a dressing room during a teen beauty pageant as if he owned not only the pageant, but the contestants themselves?
In a Trump galaxy, the answer to those questions is obviously “Yes.” (Or, in Trumpese, “Totally!”)
For the rest of us, the election of a man with Mr. Trump’s long history of disgusting behavior towards women effectively belies much of the noise made by the GOP in recent years about valuing the lives and aspirations of women and girls.
From a religious perspective, meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s support among self-identified ”values voters” strikes many of us who voted for Secretary Clinton as … odd. Perhaps right-wing evangelicals and other guardians of the nation’s morals see a twice-divorced, pussy-grabbing casino owner who routinely calls women “pigs” and “dogs” (when he’s not aggressively hitting on married acquaintances) as the model for a new, idealized Family Man. Hey, good to know!
Xenophobia: Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters enjoy literally and figuratively waving the Bible — like a foam-finger No. 1 that doubles as a divine cudgel — but even non-believers acknowledge that the book has some fascinating things to say about immigrants and foreigners. For example, Leviticus tells us that “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself …”
A cursory look through both the Old and New testaments (and the Koran, for that matter) reveals numerous exhortations to treat the refugee, the immigrant, the stranger, and the dispossessed with compassion, generosity and, yes, love.
America is its immigrants. People come to the U.S. seeking the freedom to speak, work and worship as they please. That is America’s glory: not our military’s greatness (although it is great), not our economy’s might (although it is mighty), but our largeness of heart as a nation. And yet nothing seems to give Mr. Trump more pleasure than bellowing his cockamamie plans to keep largely brown-skinned immigrants out of the country, while vowing to deport millions of people already living and working here — splintering entire families, if need be. WWJD, y’all?
In the end, for those of us who proudly voted for Secretary Clinton (hell, many of us even managed to vote legally), it’s difficult to fathom how anyone in the Republican Party can dispassionately consider Mr. Trump’s words and actions throughout his adult life and somehow conclude: “Here is a man I trust. Here is a man I want my children and grandchildren to emulate. Here is a man who shares my values.”
Over the next four years, all of us will get to see Mr. Trump’s values up close, on very public display. And to that prospect, this non-traditional values voter can only say: God help us, every one.
Before You Go
