Halfway through America’s four-year descent into madness, we are finally seeing glimmers of hope.

An informed electorate has awakened and given its judgment, and Donald Trump’s approval ratings seem fixed in the dismal 40 percent range. Nevertheless, after all this time, I still have questions as to how we got here in the first place.

I understand why some old white men support Trump. They see History’s door slamming shut on the Ozzie and Harriet/Leave it to Beaver world in which they have existed for seven or eight decades and they think that The Orange One can keep it cracked open through bluster and bombast. Just a little while longer, by any means, and then after they shuffle off this mortal coil, it really won’t matter if the Brown Horde takes over.

I understand why Right-Wing Talk Radio Guy performs aural sex on Trump every day. It’s his job. He’s playing to the Clampetts…and the Drysdales, and he knows his audience.

I understand why people who worship the almighty dollar support The Putin Wannabe. Trump probably has hundreds of millions of those dollars (for now) and the Money Worshipers don’t really care how (or from whom) it was acquired. The list of unholy alliances between businesspeople and dictators is too long even for the Internet.

I understand why racists and degenerates and abusers of women would vote for Trump. He’s their hero.

However, I’ve never understood why roughly half of all white women who voted in the 2016 election voted for Donald Trump. It makes no sense. Women of color mostly shunned him, but white women, even in the face of all that evidence, voted for him. And today, after two years of vulgarity, buffoonery and chicanery, one out of every three white women still support him.

When talk comes up about the President of the United States being a serial sexual assaulter, a lot of men probably just don’t get it and/or care. Trump doesn’t brag about grabbing attractive men by their penises. And it’s not like he married Taye Diggs and then cheated on him with Johnny Wadd. These are things he did (and does) to women. Which is part of why I just don’t understand why the support was even there in the first place nor why some of it still persists to this day.

At this point, I feel compelled to mention that, having been married for 40 years, one of the truly important things I have learned is that you can’t tell somebody how they should feel. You can argue logic, debate politics and even question the approach someone takes to solving a math problem, but save yourself (and your loved one) a world of discomfort by never telling them how they should feel.

Young guys who want to learn by hard experience, just try saying to your wife, “Wait, that shouldn’t make you angry!” The learning experience will come at you like the visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Bowman enters the Jovian atmosphere. With shrapnel added for effect.

I recently found some small solace in my quest for understanding in a book. The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss is an astonishing account of the fight for woman’s suffrage. We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment and its edge-of-your-seat passage came after an only-in-America showdown in the most unlikely of states.

Eleven states had already allowed women to vote, but the push for a Constitutional Amendment had, not surprisingly, been quite contentious. After the bill had been passed by both houses of Congress and given lukewarm support by President Woodrow Wilson, it went to the states for ratification.

As though written by a Hollywood hack, 35 of the 36 states needed (at the time) for ratification soon signed on, while there were 12 solid nos. It all came down to Tennessee, a backwater locale where many of the residents were still upset that the Yankees had tried to give the Negro the right to vote after the War of Northern Aggression. Needless to say, there were a lot of political shenanigans going on, on both sides, including persistent rumors of the use of prostitution to secure the votes of certain legislators.

A lot of the anti-clamor came from predictable sources. A Presbyterian pastor, from the pulpit, said, “When she takes to the ballot box, you’ve given her a coffin in which to bury her womanhood.” Newspapers and businesses generally came out against it as being something unnatural. Even muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, quite paradoxically, came out against women’s suffrage.

Quite puzzlingly, a significant amount of the opposition to the idea of women voting came from women. Some said that it would be the death knell for the “Southern way of life.” Many felt that women should stay above the fray and leave the dirty and foul work of politics to men. Still others argued in favor of a Biblical subservience to men.

I would never argue that women are ruled more by their feelings than are men. It just shows how little some things have changed in the past century. Until his dying day, Sigmund Freud wondered what women want. Well, here in America, one-third of white women want a bully and admitted sex offender to be in charge of their government.

Go figure.

This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2018.

17 replies on “Danehy”

  1. The fact that 80% of native New Yorkers (those that live on the East side of the Hudson River} voted against this turkey tells you all you need to know about him.

  2. I love it how President Trump loves rent free in Pulitzer Tommy’s head. After all, there’s nothing else in there.
    Let the dislikes begin.

  3. Stereotyping women, and then compounding it with not understanding non stereotypical attitudes, must leave one bewildered and confused. That’s how this reads to me. Lest ye forget that when Bill Clinton was caught cheating (again) the left made the excuse that “it happened in his personal life.” Why the sudden change from defending his actions to attacking another? That leaves the rest of us puzzled.

  4. Back in the 80’s when Geraldine Ferraro got the Deomocrat nomination for VEEP, I mentioned it to the secretary of the office where I worked and her response was, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Women shouldn’t be in politics.” Which goes to show that misogyny doesn’t exist only in men.

  5. There is a Robert Crumb illustration of a seated woman punching herself in the face. The caption reads, “Women voting Republican”. Can’t help but visualizing this in my mind’s eye now when reading about any republican woman.

  6. Bill Clinton committed a sin. Donald Trump brags about committing a felony. To me, anyway, that’s a pretty big difference.

  7. No it’s not Tom. A sin is a sin is a sin. And then Clinton committed perjury. And then Hillary blamed others simply because she is hungry for power.

    It’s starting to sound like you don’t like Mr Trump. Has he some something to you, personally?

  9. I hope Tom updates us again on our descent into ‘madness’ – every two years for the next six years!!! This is madness I can live with!

    TRUMP 2020

  11. Tom Danehy wrote: “Bill Clinton committed a sin. “

    Lying Tom Danehy conveniently avoided:

    Juanita Broderick – Rape – Felony
    Kathleen Willey – Sexual Assault – Felony
    Leslie Millwee – Sexual Assault – Felony

  13. 14 dislikes on a post about Clinton sexual assaults and a rape? So much for #me too. ha ha ha. what a bunch of partisan hacks.

  14. . It was a well written article but I thought he’d go longer and deeper into the whys. As for most of the rest of the comments, . .its so obvious some of you on here are just bandwaggoning antagonistic simple minded trolls. I’m calling you out. Only three people on this thread wrote anything about the article and everybody else wrote about the Clintons or just innefectively insulted anybody who isn’t a drumphf supporter.Do yourselves a favor and go read a lot of books. Some of you might want to start with comprehension manuals.

  15. It’s an interesting flip of the coin to ask why so many white women who voted for Trump did not vote for their partner in gender Hillary Clinton. And when you dig a bit deeper than Tom is capable of, you begin to understand what happened in ’16. Clinton and the gaggle of clowns running in the GOP primaries represented the establishment. Trump and Sanders – the most popular of the candidates – represented a repudiation of the establishment that had left many voters regardless of gender, feeling abandoned and voiceless. Trump’s appeal was not focused on ’50s sitcoms, it was squarely centered on resentment and disgust with politics as usual.

  16. Rick Spanier, agree with you but like Tom, I, too, remain intrigued by the marathon, self-inflicted nose-pinching (or was it?) so many female voters underwent while voting for Mr. T.
    True, Hilary and Bill represented nothing more than Republican-lite and more of the Beltway same-old, same-old. And while Trump’s image-makers projected “populism” despite himself and his background how the hell did he overcome the MSM’s well-publicized charges of misogynism and self-admitted sexual assault proclivities? Are we entering an era of serious feminist backlash, female self-hatred, and out and out cultural masochism–as described for the Teutonic culture in Erich Fromm’s seminal, _Escape from Freedom_? What widespread dysfunction in a culture induces folks to run toward the sado-masochistic embrace of authoritarians and dictators? Is the physical abuse of women that widespread? Sexual abuse? Is emotional violence toward women so endemic in certain strata of our culture that womanly openly embrace _even more_? I cannot tell. I am no sociologist but that this sado-masochistic streak reveals itself in the ballot box sends shivers up and down my spine! Has economic despair driven some folks to seek answers in the empty promises of the Horatio Algier myth and this myth-mongering Manhattan demagogue?
    Does cultural conditioning (as in Pavlov’s dog) run that deep? Drs. Jung and Freud, come back, all is forgiven….
    Be well.

  17. Or…could it have been a repudiation of socialism that Democrats seem hell bent and bringing here from every other failed country? No wonder they want open border immigration for all. They just released numbers that show more than one third of hispanics vote republican. They don’t want socialism, they want a job that develops into a career. Just like most thinking Americans.

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