Not long after the November election, San Diego County Republicans gathered in a hotel conference room in Fashion Valley. Their purpose that evening was to celebrate and reflect on their party’s victories, most notably the office of the president of the United States.
Throughout the evening one particularly enthusiastic and giddy man strutting about the room stopped, leaned back and whooped as though he were professional wrestler vanquishing his nemesis.
“Woooooo! Yeah, baby!”
The chairman of the local GOP, Tony Krvaric, affectionately greeted his fellow “deplorables,” a term Hillary Clinton used to describe a segment of her opponent’s supporters.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up,” she said during a fundraiser last fall.
As if to prove how wrong Clinton was for characterizing Republicans that way, Krvaric had a smattering of women, minorities and LGBTQ offer testimonials explaining why they were Republicans and why, in some cases, they voted for Clinton’s opponent.
Some cited a desire for change, noting that the then president-elect was not a career politician, a label and categorization used by the lazy to describe someone who has spent a majority of their adult working life in elected public office.
Some described a need to see this country’s economy refocus its efforts on reviving manufacturing jobs at home rather than having them shipped overseas where taxes and the cost of labor were lower.
And still others wanted the United States to flex its muscle in the Middle East and/or Mexico, regions they believed threatened this country’s security in the form of terrorism and illegal immigration.
On the whole, the apparent theme of their remarks was to demonstrate they were not homophobic, racist, misogynistic Islamaphobes. How could they be if in fact they were women, transgender or black?
Assuming the speakers and a majority of the people who voted for the Republican nominee are not any of the -ists or -ics that Clinton mentioned, the fact remains that they supported a person whose rhetoric espoused those attitudes and beliefs.
Beginning today this country for the next four years will be lead by a man who expressed disdain and contempt for women, Muslims, Latinos — virtually anyone who is not a white male. His speeches appealed to and emboldened the racists and homophobes among us and now their defacto leader is ours too.
Now, as I did then, I find little reason to celebrate or whoop and holler.
