The Rapid Death of American Cringe

There’s been an element of American society which is pretty cringe-inducing to the rest of the country: Vulgar, racist, faux-patriotic, proudly uninformed. What Obama described as the people who take pride in being ignorant, or Hillary’s ‘deplorables’. A significant portion of Trump’s base. And yet, the past two years have seen a rapid escalation of the destruction of their world.

Two years ago, a fella I’m going to stereotypically call ‘Bubba’, could pull into a store and get an NRA discount on his purchase while browsing a copy of the National Enquirer in line, calling the guy in front of him a ‘fag’ and then leaving for his rally at a Confederate monument.

But if there’s a (small) silver lining to the Trump administration, it is that such a scene is increasingly unlikely.

The Confederate statues are coming down in record numbers all over the country.

The NRA is on the ropes – weaker than it has been for ages, filing for bankruptcy with dropping enrollment.

The National Enquirer, after the latest felony-level scandal, may finally be disappearing from your supermarket checkout aisles.

The number of states that ban “gay conversion therapy” has gone from 5 to 15 since Trump took office. The largest demonstration in American history was the Women’s March.

The abominable practices that have been swept under the rug for too long – sexual harassment and continued racism like blackface – are being dealt with in the open with real repercussions.

The “lying media” is doing great (NYT has doubled readership in two years), as, meanwhile, in Fox world, Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes are finally gone, and InfoWars has been broken. MSNBC beat Fox News for the first time in viewership in 17 years.

Things are bad for Bubba. He’s worse off than he was before this Presidency.

America’s cringe avatar, Donald Trump, is seeing all of his scams be shut down, from his University to his “charitable” Foundation. The gross, unseemly part of our nation – the Michael Cohen grease slicks and Manafort mafioso wannabes – are getting their comeuppance.

Maybe, when all is said and done, and Trump is merely a nightmare of our memories, we can at least take some solace in the fact that he accelerated the decline and death of American cringe. It would be a small balm to the otherwise disgraceful and damaging legacy he has scorched into our nation’s historical record.