In my last blog post I wrote about Trump promising to run the government as a business. A reader (my only one?), asked why people would want someone who had a history of bankruptcy running any business, let alone running the federal government as a business. That’s a good question, which I have actually asked in the past. I guess the answer is that people didn’t really elect Trump to run the government as a business, they elected him to “Make America Great Again”. Their vision of the “great America” was not LBJ’s “Great Society” but was an earlier, more restrictive view of America. For almost the first 200 years of the United States it was governed by SWM (straight WASP males). Ok, maybe there was a closeted gay president at some point, but that wasn’t taught in my American History courses. I’m old enough to remember the concerns that the Pope would run our government if we elected a Catholic president. The Catholic was elected and the Pope didn’t run our country, although the president didn’t get to live out his whole term so who knows what might have transpired.
I think Trump’s election was a result of some people wanting to go back to the “good old days” when SWM’s ran the country. We had just gone through 8 years of our first African-American president and the alternative to Trump was a woman. I’m not condoning this backlash (whitelash?) but that is what I have observed.
Other’s comments are welcome.