No Unity With Those Who Voted Trump

Via Digby, Paul Waldman:

Please, don’t tell us liberals that when we criticize Trump we’re doing terrible damage to the convivial spirit that would otherwise prevail were we not so rude. We’ve heard that baloney before, and it’s pretty rich coming from people who spent the last eight years saying that Barack Obama was a foreign socialist tyrant carrying out a secret plan to destroy America.
So spare us your hypocritical talk of unity, because your champion sure doesn’t believe it. We’ve seen it clearly since the election: once he goes off his teleprompter, we get not even the pretense of unity from Donald Trump. Quite the contrary; he communicates again and again that he has nothing but contempt for those who don’t pay him proper tribute. After a campaign that was built on hatred and resentment from its very first moment, he couldn’t bring himself to reach out to the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for him, mounting a “thank you tour” only of states he won (think what you would have said if Hillary Clinton had been the victor and done that) and lashing out on Twitter like a cranky toddler at anyone who criticized him.
Being elected to the presidency wasn’t enough to grant him an iota of generosity or magnanimity. He may be the most powerful person on earth, but he’s still a tiny, petty, insecure, vengeful man whose only measure of any human being’s worth is whether they’ve praised him recently.

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But no, we’re not just going to “move on” and forget about the fact that a hostile foreign power may have actively aided this president’s election. We want a full investigation so we can understand what happened and why — and whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And we aren’t going to forget that FBI director Jim Comey, knowing that there was an intensive investigation underway into Russian efforts on Trump’s behalf, chose to publicly announce, 11 days before the election, that Hillary Clinton’s emails were being investigated, most likely throwing the election to Trump. We can’t change that now, but we aren’t going to forget it, and no one else should either.

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 You don’t like it when we get angry? Deal with it. We’re angry now, and we’ll stay angry. We’ll be angry when this president and this Congress try to take health coverage from tens of millions and health security from hundreds of millions. We’ll be angry when they try to cut off women’s access to health care, and cut taxes for the wealthy, and slash the safety net. We’ll be angry when they gut environmental regulations, and promote discrimination, and attack voting rights, and remove restraints on Wall Street misbehavior.


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And if these next years turn out the way we fear, understand this: We will never allow you to forget what you have countenanced and joined with. The stain of 2016 and everything that is about to follow is on you. You fell behind this man and assented to everything he is. Your hands will never be clean.
And we will fight. We may not win most of the time — with control of the White House and Congress, there is a great deal Republicans will be able to do no matter how much the Democrats or the public object. But we will fight, precisely because we love our country and care about its future. We liberals know well that you like to think that you alone are the “real” Americans and you alone have the country’s true interests at heart. But we stopped submitting to that calumny some time ago.
So I say to my conservative friends: You want liberals to pipe down and get behind our new president? Too damn bad.