Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I know that Donald Trump is a bad person. I will not vote for him. And yet, during the second presidential debate, I couldn’t help but enjoy watching him punish Hillary. Does that make me a bad person, too?
Ashamed Of My Guilty Pleasures
Yes. Or no. On the other hand, maybe. I’m no longer certain of anything. Since after watching a year-and-a-half of this national depantsing that we call Road to the White House 2016, my morality meter no longer functions as it once did. It’s become like police radar after a bad electrical storm—it needs to be recalibrated.
As during the worst of the ethically challenged Bill Clinton years, things that once seemed shockingly reprehensible now feel utterly routine. Vowing to imprison your across-the-aisle counterpart if elected? It’s a tad Robert Mugabe, but sure, why not? (Our legal system is the envy of the world. Use it or lose it!) Claiming, as the RNC’s Sean Spicer did to our own John McCormack in the post-debate spin room, that he doesn’t know if Trump grabbing women “by the p—sy” constitutes sexual assault, since Spicer is “not a lawyer”? Hey Sean, I get it. I studied journalism, not law, precisely so that I didn’t have to tackle this kind of knotty technical dilemma. One would need to have serious juristic chops and expertise on the darkest human behaviors—like Clinton lawyer David Kendall—to begin splitting that atom.
Agreeing with Howard Stern that your daughter, who you’ve said you wouldn’t mind dating if you weren’t her dad, is a “piece of ass?” In olden days, when we were still burdened by standards of decency and a sense of decorum, I might’ve considered that suspect parenting. But in this age of broken homes, shouldn’t we be grateful for strong familial bonds, however they are forged? I don’t have a daughter, just two sons, like Trump’s own sons, Fredo and Shemp, as some have called them. But if I did, I’d likely want her to have every advantage: a loving home, a quality education, and a good, sturdy ass. And it’s not like I’d worry about said ass getting grabbed if I brought her through the receiving line at Mr. Trump’s White House Christmas party. No, as established in his Access Hollywood audio, Trump’s preoccupied with grabbing other things.
And yet, even as I’m keenly aware of all of Mr. Trump’s shortcomings, and would write in Lin-Manuel Miranda before voting for Trump (I’d rather kill myself than see Hamilton), I too, enjoyed watching him humiliate Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have now been lodged in our consciousness for so long (a quarter of a century), that I don’t even remember a world without them. Hold on, I just did. It was called “a happier world.” In fact, it’s been so long that I can’t recall precisely why I detest them. Wait again – it’s all coming back. It’s because they’re soulless, amoral, politically calculating, ravenously greedy people who lie every other time they open their mouths. They’re so dishonest, that in a recent NBC survey, only 12 percent of Hillary’s own party deemed her honest and trustworthy. Even on that rarest of occasions when they tell the truth (Bill recently admitting that Obamacare is “the craziest thing in the world”) they’ll walk it back with lies, as if insecure artisans worried that they’ll lose their competitive edge if they don’t stay practiced at their lying craft. So while refusing to support Trump, a discredit to his entire Orange race, I too, take great pleasure in watching him confront Hillary with her fictions, even if while doing so, he often spouts fictions of his own (birds of a feather…). It’s good, clean fun, watching him not only talk about the women Bill Clinton has victimized (including Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, both of whom were Clinton supporters, the latter of whom alleges Clinton raped her), but to seat them in the debate audience, just to amp up the discomfort. Points to the Donald for dramatic showmanship, and for his perverse sense of justice, though he might need to meet justice of his own on the same sort of count, or possibly an even worse one. All of this unfolded as we watched the split-screen reaction shot of Hillary struggling to keep her eyes un-bugged even as she, uber-feminist though she pretends to be, has disparaged those women as recently as this past August.
It is likewise fun to watch Trump pick the wings off of Hillary’s schizophrenic views on everything from trade, to energy policy, to open borders, to boosting Islamic immigration multiple-fold. Even if you don’t care for Trump, he is a useful idiot (emphasis on the latter) when it comes to one kamikaze mission: locating and exploiting the eternal falseness of Hillary Clinton as both a person and “a public servant”, as she’s fond of calling herself while raking in six-figure paydays for an hour’s worth of work speaking to Goldman Sachs about the economy that they both helped ruin. Hillary is a fraud. Trump is a fraud, too. But as they say, it takes one to know one. And Trump knows his own kind. We must give him his due.
Where does this leave us? I’ll tell you where: in the 1980s. That’s when the Iran-Iraq War was raging full tilt. I didn’t have a favorite in that war. I wanted them both to lose. What I found myself rooting for, then, was for mutual mass injury. Did that make me a good person, necessarily? No. But I’m not ashamed of that position. I’ve never been a math whiz. But back in junior high, I awoke from my pre-algebra nap long enough to learn that two negatives, multiplied, equal a positive.
So maybe, if I’m putting my most optimistic hat on, that’s what we are looking at here. Both sides of this Hobson’s choice could lead the country to ruin. But at least they each paint clear, accurate pictures of each other. So the electorate doesn’t have to be in for as rude a shock, whatever the eventual outcome. Aside from the shock that they let things deteriorate this far in the first place. And that is on the electorate, not Hillary or the Donald. One of the few things we can’t blame the latter for.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
