Donald Trump and the revenge of the deplorables

So now we know what happens when you sneer at voters as ‘garbage’. When you view them as ‘deplorables’. When you treat them as the dim stooges of demagoguery, the playthings of powerful men. When you brand them ‘low information’ and chortle in your coffee houses about how Donald Trump is ‘preying’ on their ‘hazy understanding’ of political affairs. What happens is that they don’t vote for you.

The past 24 hours in the United States have been nothing short of extraordinary. This is the revenge of the deplorables, to borrow the slur Hillary Clinton used in 2016, the first time Trump rose to power. Half of Trump’s supporters belong to a ‘basket of deplorables’, she infamously said. They’re ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’, she sniffed. Voters rose up against those elitist defamations in 2016, and they rose up against them again yesterday.