Thursday

Tonight I got an email from a super successful, extremely pleasant Southerner. He’s a Democrat and was a major Hillary backer. He asked me for some words of comfort about the stunning upset of his candidate, Mrs. Clinton. Here is what I told him, word for word:

During the American Revolution, in about 1777, after the Americans humiliated the British Empire at the Battle of Saratoga, a young nobleman went to Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, considered the wisest man in England. The young nobleman said to Smith, “Dr. Smith, this will be the ruin of the nation.” Adam Smith, a genius such as comes along once in a thousand years, answered, “Young man, there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” By this, he meant that a great nation takes a very great deal of damage to be ruined. “We are nowhere near this point. Our democracy is stronger than ever. More people of more races and economic classes and sexes are involved in the political process than ever before. We are a rich, vibrant, alert, powerful nation. Mr. Trump is obviously wildly inexperienced but he will be surrounded by people with experience. He is a loud, sometimes boorish person, but he is no despot. Above all, he wants to be liked and loved. Not worshipped. Liked and loved. The great novelist and essayist, Tom Wolfe, wrote some years ago that America could never go off the tracks because we were a nation on two tracks, and so we are. Mr. Trump was far from my first choice. But he is a lot smarter than many people thought. He has many checks and balances hemming him in, especially Democrats in the Senate and a powerful media. It will all be fine. More than fine. As Mr. Nixon said in 1974, when he resigned, “Our best days lie ahead.” Love, Ben

Next:

We all have our reasons why Mr. Trump won. Mine have a lot to do with race. This is a nation which gets along remarkably well for a racially heterogeneous people. But there are plenty of troublemakers among whites and blacks. Mrs. Clinton made the mistake of allying herself with too many black troublemakers. She was a spectacle preaching about love trumping hate as she was surrounded by black men and women cursing her opponent with the most vile words and gestures. Some white people are sick and tired of being pushed around by black people who claim a moral superiority merely because of their race.

To see the rap stars surrounding her using the foulest language while Mrs. Clinton talked about how holier-than-thou her side was became a recurrent and repellent atrocity.

News flash of the day: Black people don’t like to be mocked and pushed around and neither do white people — especially by pure trash. Many white people still have some self-respect and Mrs. Clinton forgot that. White people are not guilty of any crime because they are white. This is worth bearing in mind. The racial guilt card worked for Mr. Obama and he wrung a lot of guilty votes this way in 2008 and 2012. It might work in Beverly Hills. It does not work in Wilkes-Barre. Not anymore.

Just for my own bad self, I had not decided whether to vote for Mr. Trump or whether to write in Senator Graham until the night before the election. Then, while I was in a makeup room at a news network, I saw Mrs. Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton on TV sashaying up onto the stage at a rally, as usual surrounded by black stars.

Mrs. Clinton was literally dancing for joy. Mr. Clinton was wearing his patented “paterfamilias, Norman Rockwell, small town father bashful Jimmy Stewart” smile, looking as happy and confident as a lark.

I said to my makeup artist, “This man is shameless. He seduced a college-age girl intern. In the Oval Office, he put a cigar in her vagina. Then he licked it and smelled it and smoked it. Then at a later date he had her give him oral sex while she knelt under the desk and he talked on the phone to a Congressional Committee chairman.

“Then when the intern came forward with the true story, he had his agit-prop machine smear her and call her the most horrible names, threaten her, drive her to near suicide. And even when her allegations were proved to be correct and true, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Clinton continued to bully her and threaten her. And to this day, neither of them has ever apologized to Monica Lewinsky. And there he is onstage preening like a peacock. I will not do anything at all to help that family.”

When I got home that night, I discussed all of this with my wife, a genuine goddess. She’s from a military family and she has never forgiven Hillary for Benghazi. She said to me “You’re right. We have to vote for Trump.”

And so I did.

No one was more surprised than I when Mr. Trump won. But happy surprised, not bad surprised.

Last night, after an incredibly fine meal of Korean BBQ beef, I watched the local news here in L.A. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of students were trying to set LAPD vehicles on fire, blocking a major freeway, the 101, keeping tens of thousands of workers from getting home to their families. This was duplicated in many other university towns across the nation. The kids carried signs saying, “LOVE TRUMPS HATE” and “NOT MY PRESIDENT.”

All of this while screaming horrifying foul language so loudly the news reporters had to turn off their sound equipment. In a way, I understand these kids. I also thought I was morally superior to my elders and to people in Scranton or Houston and tried to end the war in Vietnam by demonstrating in DC and New Haven and New York. But there was one big difference: My father-in-law, the hero, Col. Dale Denman, Jr., back from a year of combat in Vietnam, had urged his daughter and me to demonstrate against what he saw as a hopeless “meat grinder” of a war.

That was a reason to march.

The anti-Trump demonstrators are anti-Constitution, anti-free elections, anti-free speech. They are against everything that’s great about America. They are pretentious little creeps. I understand their wish to go out and have fun and get high and have sex. That’s youth. I get it. But to block the freeways that hard working people need so they, the kids, can show off their pompous, hypocritical, fake claims of moral superiority — that’s nauseating. Hey, kids!!! Some poor devils have to work late and need to get home and get some sleep before they work again tomorrow. Go demonstrate on your campuses and leave the working people alone.

Those people have your number, by the way. Bear it in mind.

I’ll have more tomorrow.

Meanwhile, stay cool.