Learning To Live In a World Where Trump Is Winning

Trump’s appeal is ineffable. Common sense rebels against it. Seeking to understand it does violence to our sense of reality.

The closest I’ve seen anyone come to capturing the feeling came from a British comedian whose name I can’t recall. He described the experience of finding Donald Trump really was in the White House as being as though you went into hospital for surgery and, on entering the operating theater, found a friendly-looking Golden Retriever in scrubs where the surgeon should have been. 

You jump off your gurney, appalled, huff out and demand to see the hospital administrator.

“I’m sorry,” you say, “but I’m afraid you’ll see a dog has been assigned to perform my surgery.” 

The hospital administrator looks at you quizzically and says “ok, but has the dog done anything specifically wrong?”

…

As a young reporter in Venezuela, the hardest part for me was to accept that, to Chávez’s supporters, what they were voting against was just as objectionable as Chávez was to me. More objectionable. Where I saw a flawed-but-functioning democratic regime that at least guaranteed basic rights and liberties, they saw an elite stitch-up to rob them of their birthright. Try to explain to them that without those rights and liberties there’d be nothing to protect them, and all you’d achieve was to convince them that you, too, were part of that elite conspiracy.

Quico Toro, Learning To Live In a World Where Trump Is Winning