Trumpled (Alternative Leading)

[Mav]

It's not a clear choice, that's the problem.

I post on an American sports forum and last election a poster there who was one of the first members of the BLM group shocked the whole forum by saying he couldn't vote for Hillary as she was despicable and that he wasn't voting. Another member asked gun to your head Trump or Clinton and he said Trump.

That just shows we can’t treat subsets of the population as monoliths. There’ll be complexity and surprises. As an example, Muhammad Ali would have been at the head of BLM marches if he’d been around and yet he met with the Ku Klux Klan and accepted awards from them. Anti-Semite Christian Identity believers are strong supporters of Israel (if only because they long for the start of a race war). In this last election, it was noted that young black men were flirting with the idea of voting for Trump as they felt the Democrats were taking the black vote for granted.

Then you have the tendency for far left and far right activists to go to war with the moderates on their wing. The Tea Party and Trumpists have tried to kill off moderates like Flake and Romney while in  Australia the Greens are always on the lookout for the chance to bring the ALP to its knees. When they voted against Kevin Rudd’s ETS scheme, they killed his government and set the stage for a decade of Liberal governments which have done nothing on climate change. Maybe there was an aspect of the Greens letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I think this was just a pathetic political ploy.

I could definitely see why a BLM activist would have been underwhelmed by Hillary. Only in the US would she be seen as left-wing. She’s probably a US version of Johnny Howard or Maggie Thatcher and was a Republican before she met Bill. Her election would have brought progress for women but she probably wouldn’t have gone out of her way for the black community. That was pretty well demonstrated by her safe VP pick: Sen. Tim Kaine, a largely unknown moderate southern white guy. It probably was better for BLM to have an arch-nemesis in Trump who exemplified the racism they were fighting rather than Hillary sweeping the issue under the carpet.

And we have to accept that the constant smears spread by the Republicans probably did make Hillary unelectable for many. We’ve seen that Trump managed to persuade 30% or so of the US population that the election was stolen from him even though there has been absolutely no evidence of it. You look back in wonder that the Republicans were able to paint Hillary as corrupt with a bunch of concocted scandals from Benghazi to her emails to the Clinton Foundation to innuendo she was a serial killer. But bullshite works.