Norm Macdonald, in addition to being the best Weekend Update anchor ever, is also a keen student of human nature. Last year he summed up the results of the 2016 presidential election with this koan-like observation: “People hated Hillary Clinton so much that they voted for someone they hated more than Hillary Clinton in order to rub it in.” I really think that sums up our current moment. A lot of people, myself included, underestimated just how tired of Hillary everyone was. After a quarter-century of listening to that awful old criminal’s angry, scolding voice, America finally said enough was enough. We still can’t seem to get rid of her, and even if she had retired from public life by now, they’d probably keep bringing her up on Fox News. But at least we don’t have to do what she says. Her only qualifications for public office were her genitals and the fact that she didn’t divorce Bill Clinton, no matter how many times he cheated on her, and it wasn’t enough. Her decades of lies and duplicity and power-hungry striving brought her just short of the finish line. That’s a continuing source of relief, even for a cuck RINO #NeverTrump traitor like me.
A lot of people on the left wanted Trump to get the nomination, for the same reason I didn’t want him to get the nomination. It was a serious miscalculation on the part of people like Matthew Yglesias at Vox (“Why I’m More Worried About Marco Rubio Than Donald Trump”) and Jonathan Chait at New York magazine (“Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination”). And of course, there was this magic moment from everyone’s second-least-favorite Englishman, John Oliver:
He was wrong. So was I. The main difference is, I can live with it.
Which brings me to Amy Chozick’s upcoming book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. (A clumsy, cumbersome title for a clumsy, cumbersome subject.) Chozick was and is a Clinton cheerleader, but I’d like to thank her for serving my delicious, satisfying breakfast of schadenfreude this morning.
As Gideon Resnick’s review of the book in the Daily Beast notes, the Clinton campaign was delighted at the rise of the man who ended up beating her:
From early on, the Clinton camp saw Trump as an enemy to encourage, Chozick writes…
“An agenda for an upcoming campaign meeting sent by [Campaign Manager] Robby Mook’s office asked, ‘How do we maximize Trump?’” Chozick writes, describing a time when the GOP primary was still crowded…
[Chozick writes] “…when the main GOP debate came on, everyone pushed their pizza crust aside and stared transfixed at the TV set… [Campaign Manager] Robby [Mook] salivated when the debate came back on and Trump started to speak. ‘Shhhhh,’ Robby said, practically pressing his nose up to the TV. ‘I’ve gahtz to get me some Trump.’”
All Mook needed was a MAGA hat and a Pepe t-shirt. If that doesn’t make you smile… too bad!
Now, the same people who begged the GOP to nominate Trump are howling at the GOP for “normalizing” Trump. The Dems backed a candidate who was so awful that she lost to that guy, and they just can’t seem to accept that they did this to themselves.
That’s why, almost 18 months later, they’re still trying to get a do-over. That’s why they’re so obsessed with conspiracy theories about Russia, and who Trump slept with, and anything else that keeps them from taking a look inside themselves.
How could they be wrong? How could they have screwed it all up? They’re the good guys!
I leave you with this observation from Seth Mandel at the NY Post:
Incredible to me that someone who was handed a Senate seat and then for no reason at all made secstate and then had the path to a nomination bulldozed for her and then got the exact opponent she pushed for…still talks like this. Gross. pic.twitter.com/Zy27DP2SJs
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 20, 2018
America didn’t let her be president. The filthy rabble wouldn’t do what they were told. They defied the people who claimed to know how to run their lives better than they did.
Sound familiar?
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