As many have said before me, the scariest part of Trump’s successes is not the fact that he got as far as he did in the electoral process but rather that even after this election is over, the people that support him will still be here and the ideas they believe in will be too. Regardless of the long struggle to follow after the election, are we really surprised that Trump got where he is? Given the continuous battles fought against oppression throughout history and continuing on today, and the backlash that always results, is it any surprise that once minority groups began standing up for themselves again, the right fought back? Given America's propensity for overlooking and even supporting violence against minority groups, the rise of Trump should have been expected far beyond its actual occurrence.
Take the republican candidate from 2 elections ago, Mitt Romney. Romney shared and still shares many of the same political ideas that Trump does, with the main difference between them being Trump’s extreme vocalization of the right wing ideologies. We’ve seen this so many times with Trump insulting every single minority group in existence and yet only upon the degradation of white women did his remarks have any noticeable backlash from the right wing. It’s almost as if when Trump threatened the figure of the white woman, with his remarks not specifying any given person, that Trump threatened the right wing’s protection of their idealized figure of the white woman as a symbol of innocence, purity, and submission. This is exactly where my pessimism surrounding change in the right comes from. The backlash only ever occurs when republican ideologies are threatened, and even then there’s always a sort of fluidity that allows the right to shift themselves out of taking responsibility.
I fear this sort of fluidity will allow the right to “recover” from Trump in the public’s eye insofar as the right has already started the process of disavowing the actions and beliefs of Trump. Many have said that the Trump signaled the end of the republican party, however, It seems more like Trump is just the beginning, with more and more republicans disavowing him specifically because of his comments about women while excusing the earlier comments. This sort of pick and choose mentality where the right picks issues favorable to them and disavows issues that paint them in a bad light while at the same time holding the left and others to a non-similar standard of taking responsibility for all actions, positive or negative, is again indicative of the fluidity that keeps the right alive.
