28 January 2017

“We knew what we were voting for when we cast our ballots for Trump. Obama wasn’t a bad president, but the entire system is broken and needed a wrecking ball taken to it. Trump is our wrecking ball. Tear it down so that we can build it back up.” ~Random Trump supporter from a discussion online.

It was actually a calm discussion that wasn't peppered with vitriol; someone asked others to explain why they voted for Trump, knowing the things he said and did prior to the election, and people answered.

The thread that wound through most of the answers: they knew he was the worst choice, but that's what they wanted. They wanted to blow the process apart, and use his nearly guaranteed horrific job performance as a way to take a wrecking ball to everything.

I get that, I really do. People are tired of the status quo, of rich white men having control of the minutia of our lives. Tired of not having a voice. Tired of the bickering and political in-fighting, and the absolute stalemate of working representatives. People wanted change, and they didn’t see it happening by electing someone who is part of that elitist cadre.

Here’s the thing, though. When you take a wrecking ball to something, that thing doesn’t always get rebuilt. Often what you’re left with is a vacant lot that sits empty for years, because there’s nothing to replace it with. Sometimes you wind up with a pile of rubble that never moves and becomes infested with vermin, because there’s no one to haul away the detritus.

Without having concrete building plans in place, taking a wrecking ball to anything is simply an exercise in destruction.

Taking a wrecking ball to the Presidency of the United States is like tearing down a mansion because the bathroom is in ill repair. You might rebuild, but what goes up isn’t necessarily another beautiful mansion. It might just be two single-wide mobile homes built from corrugated sheet metal set down without a foundation.

But electing Trump as president in order to take a wrecking ball to the entire process of a functioning government goes beyond that. It’s destroying the beautiful family home set in the center of urban blight, and leaving all the decay around it.

The house was not the problem; the problem was with the neighborhood.

So a large number of people voted for Trump thinking they were effecting change, understanding it was going to rip apart the government that leads the free world. The problem is that they also voted back in the people who were largely responsible for how broken things have become. That wrecking ball should have been aimed at the House and the Senate, and ripped away from long-term and career politicians the power they crave for themselves.

Yes, you’re getting what you wanted: the President is going to chew up and then spit out every single thing that doesn’t benefit him directly. Your want of tearing down the office is happening, but the result probably won’t be what you were hoping for. When he’s done, when he has that catastrophic meltdown that most of us can see coming—even many of his supporters—there might not be anything left to build upon.