A few months after the shock 2016 Presidential election which contrary to all polls saw Trump in the White House, English born Canadian novelist Tom Rachman wrote a smart-alecky novella which was to bounce badly on him. He called it “Basket of Deplorables”, this title based on Hilary’s undiplomatic but accurate description of Trump supporters as deplorables.
The novella was in fact a collection of sneering short stories, one advancing the proposition that the real deplorables were the educated middle-class intelligentsia, media commentators and the like who had mocked at Trump and his followers.
The plot revolves around an election night New York dinner party of a large number of media commentators and diverse sophisticated types who’d gathered to watch the voting coming in on television and gloat over Trump’s expected demise.
As the night rolled on and their earlier mocking of Trump slowly turned to horror as the possibility of his victory gradually became a reality, Rachman revelled in their shock.
But here’s where this plot bounced badly on him. Specifically, he had one of his so-called deplorables suggest early in the evening, that once Trump realises he has lost he’s bound to cry fraud. Everyone laughed. The last laugh as it turns out is on Rachman, albeit he had to wait another four years to see that actually occur.
Rachman is a very good wordsmith albeit I don’t enjoy his novels because of their underlying negativity.
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Of course, the Democrats did complain about voting ‘irregularities’ and such like back in 2016 through to 2020…
It was a big call for a prospective US president to admit she thought 25% (half of half) of the US population was deplorable. In her book “what happened” Clinton wrote that her ‘deplorables’ comment was a factor in her loss. Her mistake was to say half of Trump’s supporters were deplorable rather than some or many.