Of Barricades And Walls

E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes about what America needs to remember before false narratives are written by Republicans and their media accomplices:

Let’s be clear: The United States of America is not Donald Trump’s country. 

When all the returns are in, Hillary Clinton will emerge with a popular vote lead of some 1.5 million to 2 million votes, according to estimates by both Nate Cohn of the New York Times and Henry Olsen, a conservative voting analyst whose pre-election predictions were close to the actual results. 

Given what Trump has said in the past about the electoral college, we know what he would say if the roles were reversed. 

To point out Clinton’s popular-vote advantage is not a form of liberal denial. It’s a way of beginning to build a barricade against right-wing triumphalism — and of reminding immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos and, yes, our daughters that most Americans stood with them on Election Day. 

It is also not true that the emerging political coalition that elected President Obama died on Nov. 8. That alliance maintained its national advantage, as the popular vote shows, and came within a whisker in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan of delivering the election to Clinton despite an onslaught of partisan congressional investigations, Russian meddling and the last-minute political intervention of the FBI. (our emphasis)

This is all the more important to note with the rising right- wing violence and intimidation since the election.  Another reason for vigilance concerns the staffing of the Rump transition team and administration:

President-elect Donald Trump's decision to appoint Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist in the White House has drawn a sharp rebuke from political strategists who see in Bannon a controversial figure too closely associated with the “alt-right” movement, which white nationalists have embraced.  [snip]

The announcement has produced intense hand-wringing in Washington and sharp denunciations from political observers and strategists critical of Breitbart News's close association with the alt-right, a fringe conservative movement saturated with racially insensitive rhetoric and elements of outright white nationalism. 

If the despicable Bannon weren't enough, there's this slug:

Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and a leading architect of draconian anti-immigrant and voter suppression laws around the nation, will reportedly be serving on Donald Trump’s presidential transition team as an immigration adviser. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Trump “has vowed to cancel President Obama’s promise to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, and start deporting as many as two million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.” 

According to the Journal, the transition team “includes a unit dedicated to figuring out how to build Mr. Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.” Back in April, Kobach took credit for Trump’s plan to blackmail Mexico into paying for a border wall by impounding remittances that immigrants send home to their families. A few months later, he was responsible for getting the wall into the Republican Party platform. 

So far, with these appointments and his pledge to begin the "immediate" deportation of up to 3 million immigrants, neo- fascist shitstain Donald "Rump" Trump is on his way to fulfilling the wet dreams of every low- information knuckle dragger that voted for him. Now is not the time to give up or despair, but rather fight this ugliness with all our energies.

BONUS:  A Republican strategist's take --

The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office. Be very vigilant America.

— John Weaver (@JWGOP) November 13, 2016

Actually, there's a representative soon to be in the Oval Office itself.