P.J. O’Rourke - How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

How the Hell
Did This
Happen?

ALSO BY P. J. OROURKE

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A Reader

How the Hell
Did This
Happen?

The US Election of 2016

P. J. ORourke

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright P.J. ORourke, 2017

The moral right of P.J. ORourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Caricatures created by DonkeyHotey (donkeyhotey.com) were adapted from these Creative Commons and public domain images: Donald Trump, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Bernie Sanders, Nick Solari/Flickr; John Kasich, Wikimedia; Ben Carson, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Hillary Clinton, East Asia and Pacic Media/Flickr and Department of State; Jeb Bush, The World Affairs Council/Flickr; Carly Fiorina, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Ted Cruz, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Chris Christie, FEMA; Marco Rubio, Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 621 7

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 522 7

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 951 5

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Morgan Entrekin

My editor, my publisher, and, best of all, my friend

A pity they both cant lose.

comment on the Iran-Iraq War
attributed to Henry Kissinger

CONTENTS

The Campaign Begins

The Abominable Showman

The Horror! The Horror!

A Huck So Unlike Finn

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

So Much for That

The Last Damn Republican Presidential Candidate Debate Ill Ever Watch

Say It Aint So, Joe

A Better Way to Choose a President, Part I

The Walking Dead

Time to Pull the Plug on Ben Carsons Campaign

In Memoriam

Our Higgledy-Piggledy Primary System and How It Higgles Our Pigs

A Halfhearted Case for Marco Rubio

The Case Against Marco Rubio

Cruz Control

Fashion Notes

What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part I

What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part II

Paying for What We Cant Stand

Another Attempt at Paying for What We Cant Stand

What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part III

Letter to Myself in 1968

A Better Way to Choose a President, Part II

The Last Damn National Political Convention Ill Ever Watch

The Democratic National Political Convention

I Endorse Hillary

The Nowhere Leadership Is Headed To

The Campaign Trail of Sneers

The Revolt Against the Elites

AUTHORS NOTE

I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.

There isnt, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, May you live in interesting times. The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And lets not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own.

What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.

The inevitable, inexorable, predestined Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, was an embodiment of liberal orthodoxy as it has been handed down from on high for eighty-four years, since FDRs election in 1932.

Clinton was an ancient monument of liberalism. If Washington were Pharaonic Egyptand sometimes it isHillary would be the Sphinx. With the exception that she never shuts up. And shes hardly immobile. For the past quarter of a century shes been everywhere we looked.

So there was the monumental Hillary out in the American electoral desert surrounded by a Republican horde of... of whatever small, feckless, puny fauna Egypt has. Ive Googled the matter. Yes, there it is exactlyGiza gerbils.

These were the forces of the resurgent American conservatism that began its rise with the election of Ronald Reagan and then quit rising and started to droop into simplistic Tea Party obstructionism.

However, the outcome of the battle was not a foregone conclusion. Even a gerbil might be able to outsmart something with a head full of rocks.

And the Obama Administration, which was supposed to be the Great Pyramid of Cheops, had turned out to be a somewhat aimless enterprise. Not that it didnt take aim at a lot of things, letting feeble, sanctimonious darts fly in every direction that right-minded people could think of. But only one arrow sank homea perhaps well-meaning but ridiculously complex and dubiously viable healthcare reform. And the president had just barely managed to avoid standing fully in the way of an overdue economic recovery.

If Hillary won, liberalism would become a permanent feature of the American landscape, like the Rocky Mountains but more expensive to ascend.

If a Republican won, conservatism would flow freely again, a mighty Mississippi of entrepreneurial initiative and individual responsibility with a lot of muddy corruption at the bottom.