It was Secretary Clinton who, during the campaign, controversially but memorably asserted that “[t]o just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables,'” Hillary Clinton said at a New York fundraiser on Sept. 9. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”
This August, conservative Jennifer Rubin considered Clinton’s assertion, in a post entitled About the ‘deplorables’…,
….there is no non-deplorable rationale for continuing to defend this president, his rhetoric and his moral obtuseness. No one is asked to confess error in voting for him (although some self-scrutiny would be appreciated). Nevertheless, continuing to deny he is unfit for office and to make excuses for his verbiage makes one complicit in his racial divisiveness and his determination to provide aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
Some delude themselves by thinking that Trump can show “greater moral clarity” (!) (as the Republican Jewish Coalition preposterously did) or that staying in the administration prevents damage to the country (as Gary Cohn, John F. Kelly and others apparently do) or that the 2016 voters’ verdict cannot be upset with no regard for subsequent events (as Republican lawmakers insist). Let’s be blunt, these are rationalizations for continued support for an unfit, racist president. It does in fact make one deplorable.
Indeed. What’s left of Trump’s support is deplorable, and those who continue to look away are enablers of the deplorable.
Trump is manifestly unfit & those who actively continue to support him are the defenders of unfitness. In another, meaningful way, the national, state, and local politicians who are publicly silent in the face of Trump’s daily abuses manifest a profound unfitness all their own.
For them, it’s a wager, perhaps: that in time, the rest of us will forgive or forget.
No: the future will write the history of the present, and will record Trump, his remaining supporters, and those officeholders who stayed silent, each in his or her own way, as deplorable.