Act of mass petulance: spare us the shallow arbiters of morality

Sure, everyone has a right to protest. But this wasn’t about anything President Donald Trump has done: he was only installed on Friday.

These protesters were stomping their feet at the outcome of the election. Everyone hates losing and elections are important but there are always losers.

Smashed windows and burned cars on Friday, chanting crowds and ranting pop stars on the weekend, but Trump is still President.

We’ve had silly debates about comparative crowd sizes (parade envy?) and fake news stories about a bust of Martin Luther King being moved from the White House (it wasn’t) and, yes, some of this nonsense has been fuelled by the President himself.

But such media sideshows, aimed at mocking Trump, tend to fuel his support outside the Beltway. They amplify his core message — the theme of his inauguration address — that an outsider has moved in to shake up the Washington political and media establishment.

There wasn’t one clear policy or action the weekend protesters were rallying against. They are united against the Trump presidency — the vibe of the thing.

Fair enough — they all have the right — but the time to stir up opposition to Trump was in the lead-up to the election. A mass movement of people marching to polling booths in Democrat states won by the Republican nominee would have made a difference.

Not enough of them were enthused about Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, who was, at best, pedestrian, offering only more of the same.

So the political imperative for the protests was belated, on the one hand: the election is done. And it was premature, on the other: Trump hasn’t done anything yet.

There was, of course, the feminist element — these were women’s marches. Clinton lost the election to a man who, on any objective level, lacked the political experience or character traits to make him an ideal candidate.

The fact Trump was able to win was an indictment on Clinton herself and her campaign. She chose to run in large part on identity — vote for me because I am a woman — and this didn’t work with enough women, let alone men. Yet she is offered up as the martyr.

(Many Trump critics point to the popular vote — winning that has never been the aim of the US presidential contest. So campaigns are tuned to winning individual states rather than a national majority. Who knows what the result would have been with different campaigns aimed at winning the popular vote. It is disingenuous and weak to try and change the terms of the contest after losing it.)

In the past Trump has said and done many things that most of us would regard as crass and sexist. Even during the campaign some of his references to Clinton were, to use a word, deplorable.

Yet if feminists want to rail against injustices to women, there are far more pressing issues around the globe than oafishness in the Oval Office; especially when you recall that Clinton defended her own husband when he was exposed for exploiting and harassing women from that same presidential office.

Whether it is female genital mutilation, forced marriages, rights to education and work, domestic violence and even the right to show faces in public, there is no shortage of outrageous subjugation of women around the world, with elements of it replicated even in Western democracies such as the US.

Protest against that.

Now we have Hollywood actors who live behind secure walls in multi-million-dollar mansions decrying increased fortification of the US border. And the stars of shallow, violent and amoral movies offer themselves as public arbiters of political morality. Spare us.

This is no defence of Trump — he has, after all, been a birther. But the protesters claim moral superiority. They claim higher aspirations.

If Trump grates with you — wait for him to do something in office and then criticise it.

Better still, if you are a US citizen, mobilise next time to
vote for a better candidate in order to defeat him.

That’s how democracy works.