Trump can't rewrite his ugly campaign: Christian Schneider

Before the voting machines had even cooled off last week, The Wall Street Journal asked Donald Trump whether he thought his rhetoric had gone too far during the presidential campaign. “No,” Trump answered. “I won.”

Certainly Trump and his most fervent supporters would like the elections results to serve as a sort of disinfectant, bleaching out his more unforgivable moments. But just because Trump earned the imprimatur of the Electoral College, it doesn’t mean, in retrospect, that he ran an honorable campaign or that he’s an appealing human being. It just means people in the right states could stand him slightly more than Hillary Clinton.

Of course, Trump could go a long way in changing this perception of him during his presidency. But for now, unseeing his debasement of the presidential election process is as impossible as unseeing those nude Trump statues that were planted around America over the past few months; soon, my eyeballs will be filing for divorce.

That doesn’t mean a good bit of revisionist history isn’t taking place. After all, if Trump was really that bad, the public wouldn’t have chosen him to run the country, right? In fact, a Gallup poll now shows 51% of Americans are more confident in Trump since the election, a number that matches both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at the same point before their presidencies began.

It is true that Trump won. (I Googled it, and Breitbart.com confirmed this fact.) But his victory doesn’t mean he’ll be a sensational president any more than Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 proved Romney would have been a terrible one.

Perhaps history is written by the victors, but Donald Trump shouldn’t be allowed to sanitize the damage he inflicted on the electoral process during the campaign. (In Trump’s history book, presumably that chapter would be right after the one that details how Ted Cruz’s father conspired to kill John F. Kennedy and right before the chapter where George W. Bush learns about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.)

In the days since the election, myriad pieces have been written explaining what Trump’s election means. But as in the case of Trump’s sudden and miraculous fitness for office, there are as many more things that Trump’s victory doesn’t mean.

For one, Trump’s victory doesn’t mean everyone who voted for him is racist.  This idea has been put forward by writers such as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, who sidesteps nuance in his piece, “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter.” Bouie argues that voters who vote for a racist are just as culpable as the candidate himself, and just as responsible for the outcome.

While it’s disappointing that Trump’s insensitive racial remarks didn’t matter more to Americans (I wrote dozens of columns arguing that they should), voters either didn’t take Trump seriously or craved change enough to overlook his questionable statements.

But it was many of these “angry white voters” that just four years ago voted for Barack Obama. In Wisconsin, which seemed out of reach for Trump days before the election, Obama had won by 14 percentage points in 2008 and 7 points in 2012. Yet Trump won 22 Wisconsin counties Obama had won just four years prior.

Thus, when these white, rural voters voted for change in Barack Obama, they were everything right with America. But when they voted for change away from Obama with equal fervor, they suddenly became a racist sleeper cell. It appears voters can be “white” and can be “angry,” but they better not be “white and angry.”

Furthermore, Trump’s election also doesn’t mean that Republicans suddenly have a stranglehold on America’s working class. In order to woo the country’s blue-collar voters, Trump used protectionist trade rhetoric anathema to conservatives — he essentially out-Democrated the Democrats on trade.

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There is an opportunity for the GOP on this front — if employment begins to surge, they can take credit. But if Republicans revert back to being the party of “tax breaks for businesses will cure all economic ills,” they will lose the opening the working class has given them.

But perhaps most importantly, the fact that Trump ran a successful campaign does not mean he’s any more qualified to be president than the day before the election. Recall back in 2008, when Republicans mocked Obama’s supporters for suggesting he was qualified to be president because he ran such a great presidential campaign? And how did that turn out?

In fact, one of the great quirks of the American system of government is that we select our president through a process that has almost nothing to do with what he or she will actually be doing in office.  A presidential candidate speaks at rallies, raises money, and prepares for debates. A president creates legislation, negotiates with Congress, wrangles with foreign powers, and decides when to send American troops to battle. It’s almost as if the Chicago Bears started picking who made their team based on their ability to play Madden 2017 on the Playstation 4.

But now the election is over and history will be the ultimate judge of what type of president Trump will be. That is, the history not written by Trump himself. We’re already pretty sure how that one turns out.

Christian Schneider is a member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow him on Twitter @schneider_cm.

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