The Last Man Standing After Decades of Boomer Liberals is... Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s Spinal Tap Tour of NATO/ Britain (with backing vocals from Russian president Vladimir Putin) was about as tumultuous as you’d expect. After Trump made NATO his backing band, he allowed Putin to plug into his sense of grievance over the Mueller probe. The U.S. president conflated his “collusion” outrage with Putin’s annoyance at getting caught out hacking the DNC computers.

Not a shrewd play. For a man whose election as president was supposed to vindicate him in the NYC power structure, the continuing attempt to deny his election is an obsession. Monday it got the better of him.

The result from the usual suspects in the U.S. media/ culture/ foreign policy was vitriol on the “11” scale of Spinal Tap’s famous amp. Because they’d already set the knob to deafening on everything from Trump’s hair to his border policy, it was hard to tell just how much more seriously the public was supposed to take this tsunami of “treason” and “high crimes”.

Here’s CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who shot to fame giggling like a schoolboy at Kathy Griffin’s bile, going all “more in sorrow than anger” on the Trump/ Putin show. 

Proof that this gaffe was really serious was presented in the Republican worthies who castigated the president in the aftermath. Even Newt Gingrich, who can be reliably expected to defend Trump on anything short of murder, was apoplectic about not blaming Putin for meddling. 

Forgotten in the storm were equally cringe-worthy moments from the previous administration's attempts to cozy up to Putin. It was a race to hyperbole by the people who count in DC.

Tuesday, Trump fashioned a desultory correction with all the enthusiasm of a man getting a high colonic. The question now becomes— as it always is with Trump— how much does the scorn of the DC machine resonate with the voters? (Especially for GOP Swampers— whose own cupboard is bare without Trump— does lining up against him work in November?) 

More to the point, does any of this matter for someone elected on revulsion at the whole Washington scene,? So far, it’s been Trump’s badge of honour. Nothing in the DC storm this week appears to change that. If John Brennan’s world thinks this a game changer, the stock markets gave him a reality check— rising the three days after Putin.

The inability to push the needle remains the great conundrum for Obama World as it strives to rid itself of this dread priest of populism. Or, as Gen-X columnist Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) observed on Twitter: “Deeply ironic now to revisit the generational triumphalism of late-Sixties liberal Baby Boomers - which was ubiquitous in the popular culture of the day - knowing now that the Boomers' closing act on the national stage would be President Donald Trump.

“Everywhere you went in movies, TV, music, etc in the late Sixties, young people were celebrating how much better their generation's ideas were, and that they'd outlast the older generations. And they did. And now their last man standing is the ultimate Old Man Yells At Cloud.”

Indeed, the urgency of the aging anti-Trump media/ culture is predicated on preserving their legacy before they fade in Social Security obsolescence. They must save the precious  theatre of vanity and manners that started in 1960s Flower Power and ended in the Obama re-education camps on colleges and in the media.

With Obama’s potent blend of liberal guilt/ cultural embarrassment, Boomers thought they’d finally achieved their perfect state of enlightenment. From his bespoke suits to his climate-control pandering, he was the One imagined so many years before in the Grant Park riots and civil-rights marches. The Progressive incarnate. For them, Do Your Own Thing had become Do Your Own Thing As Long As It’s The Same Thing. 

So confident were they in their rapture that the Boomer liberals assumed his legacy could be carried on by a grifter named Hillary Clinton, perhaps the worst presidential candidate since George McGovern. Then, on Nov. 8/ 2016, they learned that their lecturing and posturing had instead pissed off their fellow Americans who then inflicted their worst nightmare upon them: Donald J. Trump.

One in three Obama voters considered his legacy and voted for Trump. Consider that. Because Boomer liberals led by their current octogenarian leadership have not.

The response of Boomers, as usual, has been to double down on their perfect selves, pushing their message ever further left (see this 28-year-old socialist congresswoman now being celebrated by Dems ). Or launching their “clever” ad hominems on late-night TV against the New York developer.  

With the light fading on the Jane Fonda generation,  McLaughlin summed up their privilege in a Jim Morrison lyric:

“ 'May take a week/ And it may take longer/ They got the guns/ But we got the numbers/ Gonna win, yeah/ We're takin' over’

Yep, you did take over. With a billionaire Archie Bunker.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on his website is Not The Public Broadcaster . He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand will be available this fall from ECW Press