I spent a good bit of today in D.C. with Trump supporters and it'll take me some time to process it. I am benefitting from coming of age during the domestic civil war over Vietnam. I had a Nixon fan spit in my face in 1968, so I am not buying the notion that the nation has never been so polarized. Those were grim days. Father against son. Young versus old. Political leaders murdered and maimed. A President run out of town on a rail. But I saw better days down the line, and so while I can totally relate to the "I'm Too Old To Be Protesting This Shit" sign I saw today, I know what people can accomplish when they stand up and fight, and I know that these people, while they are as American as any of us, are NOT the majority, just as they weren't the "silent majority," as they claimed, back in the '60s.

They are certainly not the face of America--they are overwhelmingly white and fueled by male anger. Yes, many of them are the working poor who have been robbed blind for decades by corporatist Republicans and Democrats, but they don't speak for all of those folks, either. They haven't even bothered to do their homework on who it is that is engineering the flow of wealth to the robber barons of today. (They just elected one President!) This is a mean-spirited fringe that views the recent, pretty-much-standard-issue centrist Democrat President as a literal agent of Satan. This is an angry tribe with a seemingly endless capacity for blaming every challenge and setback in their lives on imaginary hordes of people of various colors who are stealing their jobs, destroying their religion, taking their guns away, usurping the man's proper place at home and at work, spending their tax dollars on booze and heroin, teaching their children to be godless communists, passing out mountains of booty to everyone in this country but them, and on and on and on. (These memes were all the rage in the Sixties, too.)

This group will be just as horribly double-crossed by Donald Trump as they were by the other politicians who promised them the moon and did nothing for them--even more so, because they believe him more. In an election year in which the entire country was desperate for change, the Democrats nominated a figure who represented the past, the FBI interfered blatantly, and, as always, most of us stayed home, the hard-core Trumpists provided the difference in putting a walking instrument of terror in the White House. They've succeeded in putting something in motion that will require a superhuman effort to roll back, but don't mistake them for the majority of Americans. And don't use their betrayal by politicians to excuse their racism, their misogyny, and their desperate thirst for an American strongman to start giving THEM the free stuff. Looking forward more than I can tell you to spending time with a different slice of the American demographic tomorrow and a much-needed reaffirmation of the true American spirit.