New York Times to America: “How Can We Recover From Donald Trump?”

And then we have the NYT lamenting Trumpism with a now familiar hint of shame and foreboding. It captures a tone US politicos and intellectuals feel in every newsroom and artisan bagel-filled faculty meeting. “America is better than this,” we pretend.

We are not. The tone of this new genre of election-cycle journalism, the Trump Lament, bothers me because it misses a key point: Trump did not invent racism. He is just packaging it in a way white, middle-class people can see . . . not unlike cell phones now capture, for white America, the systemic oppression black Americans experience at the hands of our lauded and praised police force. The difference is that white America now has to look at it on their television screens and Facebook posts of distant relatives. Oh, lament white America! Your poor eyes and refined sensibilities must be strained.

Trump marvelers seem to wring hands over the Donald as an enabler or facilitator of American racism. True, but this journalism trope misses a key point. These sentiments preexisted Trump. Trump’s cynical fanning of the isolationist and racial/national purity fire is a problem, but to lament its expression on the national scene smells wrong. It is like wishing the lesser intellects of America would go back underground . . . would return to the hidden recesses of Southern Illinois dinner tables and the sexual harassment in executive boardrooms.

“Often, Trump marvelers seem to wring hands over the Donald as an enabler or facilitator of American racism. True, but this new trope of election journalism misses a key point. These sentiments preexisted Trump.”

I think we’d do better to view Trump as a litmus test. He is showing us something we need to see rather than dismiss or hope dissipates with the election of a Democrat. When educated, liberal thinkers lament Trump’s rise, we are really just regretting having look at a side of America that is real, has been real and has reality beyond Donald Trump. Sure, Trump has given it a “voice,” but the fire was already there, shooting unarmed black men in the back, shooting down voter protection laws in the South and allowing the lumps of bloated flesh that collectively undulate into Roger Ailes to operate as serial sexual predators.

I think we’d do better to view Trump as a unique lens into hidden worlds of America. It is a reality show that most of us would pretend belongs on trashy network primetime for trashy network viewers. It is a show as much as Trump is a showman. But what we are seeing is real. It is a reality lived by millions of Americans everyday. Those of us in cloistered bubbles of “right thinking” believe we need to do deep readings of Disney’s Pocahontas to find American bigotry. We do not. It is right next to us on the bus, if we care to look . . . or take public transportation.