Time To Revisit Hillary's Statement About The Deplorable Trumpist Base?

Putin's nasty, vile excuse for an American president-- the clown in the White House-- was jumping around last week, nearly frothing at the mouth about how Republicans in Congress should back him up in opposing the disaster relief bill that finally passed the House Friday (with a huge bipartisan majority). Trump's ugly, life-long and barely disguised bigotry against and racism towards Puerto Ricans has had him lying again and again about his regime's refusal to give hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico ample recovery resources. Trump claims this bill gives Puerto Rico too much money. The bill also disaster relief and rebuilding aid to areas that were impacted by the California wildfires, by flooding in the Midwest and Texas to states-- particularly Florida and red states-- that were hit, like Puerto Rico, by hurricanes.

34 Republicans fretted over Trump's threats to not support their reelection efforts and voted with the Democrats for the bill anyway. Most of the Republicans who voted for it have serious reelection challenges in 2020, particularly Michael McCaul (R-TX), Don Bacon (R-NE), Steve King (R-IA), Will Hurd (R-TX), John Katko (R-NY), Fred Upton (R-MI), Ross Spano (R-FL), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), Peter King (R-NY), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Richard Hudson (R-NC), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Michael Bost (R-IL).

That said, and this being Sunday, I want to point to a relevant essay by evangelical pastor and best-selling author John Pavlovitz, Hillary Was Right Calling Then "Deplorables." It wasn't a good move strategically, but it was certainly accurate. Pavlovitz has a more positive attitude towards Hillary than I do, writing for example, that "Hillary Clinton was right about everything."

• She was right when she warned us that Donald Trump was in bed with Russia.
• She was right when she said our election process was being irreparably compromised.
• She was right when she noted his cruelty, his impulsiveness, and his recklessness.

• She was right when she suggested he was beholden to a murderous foreign dictator.
• She was right when she told us that he was dangerously incapable of self-control on social media.
• She was right when she pointed out the toxic hatred he was cultivating and releasing in people.
• She was right when she noticed the way he was dragging national discourse into the toilet.
• And she was right was when she called his supporters "deplorables."

He's right about all those things. She was right about all those things. But, at the time she made the "deplorables" statement in 2016 she was, wrote Pavlovitz, "unfairly excoriated in the media and by Republicans-- but looking back she was using sober judgement, measured speech, and incredible restraint.

"To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of  deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic-- Islamophobic-- you name it."

They are.

In the wake of the police shootings of black men, the street corner assaults on gay couples, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, the defacing of synagogues, the burning of black churches, the mistreatment of migrant families-- Trump’s supporters daily reveal their phobic hearts and their willingness to ignore vulnerable people’s suffering.

“And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people-- now have 11 million.”

He has.

He continually cries “fake news” about the legitimate Press, while disseminating the wildest of conspiracy theories from extremists media outlets, previously and rightly marginalized because they appealed to only the tiniest lunatic fringe.

“He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.”

He does.

Just look at his Twitter feed at any moment during the past three years, and you’ll find the unhinged, incendiary ramblings of a supremacist, terrorist sympathizer-- whose account under any other circumstance-- would be deactivated for its hate speech, its purposeful targeting of individuals, and its steady invocation to violence.

In 2016, Hillary was being prophetic.

She used the word “deplorable,” to describe people who would soon:

• applaud Muslim travel bans,
• celebrate families separated at the border,
• abide children being placed in cages,

• demonize teenage shooting victims,
• defiantly deny the value of black lives,
• vilify sexual assault survivors,
• bless a predator to the Supreme Court,

• cheer Presidential rally cries of shooting immigrants,
• approve of the suppressing of Special Counsel reports,

• sanction the complete perversion of our Rule of Law.

Deplorable, was being kind. I have many other words for such people, and they’re much stronger and far less diplomatic than that.

Hillary closed her now infamous comments by saying, “Now, some of those folks-- they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”

Well, she was about half right.

These people may not be America, but they represent a good 38 percent of it. That’s far too much of any nation aspiring to greatness. As long as more than a third of our country blesses such malfeasance and tolerates this kind of toxicity in the name of holding power, we’re going to continue to regress into chaos and implosion.

When Hillary Clinton said that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorables, she was in essence claiming them to be filled with contempt for others, motivated by fear, and driven to exclusion. She may have been right in that moment-- but the percentage today is actually much higher.

Anyone still supporting him has deluded themselves into an alternate reality that makes them incapable of compassion or reasonable dialogue. All that they have seen from this President and his cadre of grifters and criminals, hasn’t proven alarming enough to wake them into decency or rouse their humanity alive.

Hillary wasn’t name-calling, she was accurately describing the kind of inhumanity we are now seeing as people’s default setting. Given their support of a man who regularly uses phrases like “Crazy Maxine,” “Pocahontas,” “Pencil Neck”-- or “Crooked Hillary,” their feigned offense at her supposedly offensive language was and is laughably hypocritical anyway.

No, Hillary was telling the truth, as difficult as it is to admit. She was diagnosing a collective sickness that afflicts a terrifying number of Americans. The woman who should currently be helming this nation was right about far too many things, and not enough of us listened.

Hatred, bigotry, supremacy, misogyny, and violent phobia are indeed sickening and  repugnant and reprehensible and yes, deplorable-- or at least they should be.