Would you like to know why Trump REALLY won? Cool. Donald Trump got elected because the electoral college is outdated and worthless. He got elected because of voter suppression. He got elected because of the fear and the racism of some white voters—whether that racism is out in the open, or kept in a closet in the suburbs somewhere. He got elected because his opponent had a poor election strategy. He got elected because of the great ocean patch of horseshit news that floats into every corner of the Internet, and the willingness of bad actors (Fox News, Infowars, Russia) to add to that patch. And he got elected because of the platforms of people like Frank Bruni, who continually preach adherence to norms and believe any deviation from them is a losing strategy.

Enough with “idiot” and “moron” (unless you’re directly quoting an administration official). They’re schoolyard and splenetic. Enough with Hitler, too. Has Trump shown fascistic tendencies? Yes. Is he the second coming of the Third Reich? No. Nor are the spineless Republicans who have enabled him Nazi collaborators, not on the evidence of what has and hasn’t happened so far.

“Enough with Hitler, too.” Yeah geez, guys! I mean, you guys watch Trump shake hands with a genocidal dictator, then you watch people get shot by police, and see kids consigned to prisons, and witness people ripped from their families by ICE, and you go WAY overboard! The eight crucial swing voters in Ohio aren’t gonna like that very much! You better shape up!

There are many people to blame for Trump, but celebrities who vocally oppose him are probably the last people you should target. That fabled high road that Bruni is preaching? Well, he can rest assured that the Democratic Party also has an enormous hard-on for it. Chuck Schumer has openly praised Trump and courted him. A bunch of Democrats voted for a toxic bank-deregulation vote and have confirmed nearly every crooked nominee that Trump pulled out of the sewer to further rip off the American people. They’ve also pretty much dropped cries for gun control. They’re being MORE than civil, and the result is Republicans running roughshod over our most vulnerable citizens.

Wanna know how Trump wins re-election? This is how. It’s the same goddamn reason he won in 2016. He’ll win again because both the establishment media and the Democratic kingmakers are thin-skinned dipshits who will blame literally ANYONE for Trump but themselves. They will also recognize the Republican Party as legitimate and deserving of its power, when it has long since been exposed as a wholly criminal enterprise that needs to be destroyed. I guess that’s strong language, but strong language is needed when the supposed guardians of democracy are willing to yuk it up with Sarah Sanders at a dinner and concoct 900 synonyms for the word lie, all in the name of politesse.

This is how you end up with rich puds like Howard Schultz and Mark Zuckerberg thinking they are the cure for what ails the Democrats when they are more of the same poison. And this is how you end up with liberals left utterly stranded by the party that claims to represent them: a party that cheerfully ignores its own constituents in need and instead leaves its electoral hopes at the mercy of the fickle whims of swing-state voters who exist mostly in the imagination of a Russert family member. It’s a terrible strategy, one that has already resulted in good Democrats losing and bad Democrats winning. But dare to point that out and you get accused of fucking it all up.

If Donald Trump proved anything—and that’s being generous—it’s that America is not a very nice place, nor has it ever been. All of these entreaties for decorum are in service of a delusion that is profitable only to those already in power. You have already seen the damage wrought by this kind of appeasement. There are children in prisons and thousands dead in Puerto Rico already, and Trump is just getting started. You have only begun to see the real human atrocities caused by both the Republican Party and Trump, and they will continue so long as smarm hucksters like Frank Bruni think a proper FUCK YOU to all of this is somehow out of line. That’s how Trump won, and that’s how he’ll keep coasting by.