Harry Reid Has About Had It With This 'President-Elect Donald Trump' Fellow

Sit and spin, OK?

Harry Reid may be heading home to Nevada when the new Congress is sworn in come January (and oh how we will miss Old Handsome Joe Biden greeting everyone! ), but he has a few thoughts to share with you about this fuck-tussle of an election before he hands the Senate minority leadership over to Chuck Schumer, who we hope will be as badass as Harry was in his better moments. To put it simply, Harry doesn't like it. Nossir, he does not like it one bit:

I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear -- especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

In his five decades of government service, Reid says, he's never heard more stories of "Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans" than in the 48 hours following the election. Deleted commenters, this is where you jump in to ask "what about when poor oppressed rancher Cliven Bundy was threatened by armed illegitimate government agents just because he was illegally grazing cattle on land he really wanted to think belonged to him, because Constitution?????" Also, fuck you, deleted commenters. Reid cites the fears of Hispanic families who worry "their families will be torn apart," African-Americans subjected to racist catcalls, and Muslims and LGBT folks afraid to go out in public. Does he flirt with rhetorical excess? Far less so than the president-elect, we'd say:

American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

Nope, that's actually pretty accurate. We will fault Reid a bit for invoking his "one daughter and twelve granddaughters" as people worried about Trump's sexism, which should be every bit as offensive to his four sons and his however many grandsons, but he's on more solid ground once he moves on to the rest of America who aren't Harry Reid's kids, calling on Americans "to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows." Reid is also none too happy about news pieces about the transition and coming inauguration that risk "normalizing" Trump. Yes, he was legitimately elected (if you overlook all the states with voter suppression measures, and we sure would like to know what the Intel agencies know about hacking the state vote websites, because this is Rebecca adding this part in, and we all know she tends toward the Alex Jones side of the spectrum), but we shouldn't pretend this is a normal president or that his agenda -- such as it includes any details -- is normal. And Reid is crystal clear on who bears responsibility for returning the presidency to something that resembles mainstream American norms:

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.

Let's hope Congressional Democrats have the spine to remember that. The majority of Americans are not with Trump, and he does not have a mandate for radical change. Happily, Reid's preferred successor as senator from Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, seems inclined to do feisty and fiery and not-going-to-take-shit every bit as well as Harry Reid, albeit without the seniority and clout. In her victory speech Tuesday night, Cortez Masto briefly mentioned she was honored to be the first Latina elected to the Senate, then got promptly to what matters, declaring that under a Trump presidency, "I’ll tell you this: Our government is built on a system of checks and balances. And I will promise you this: I will be one hell of a check and balance on him."

We're going to miss Harry Reid. And we like the cut of Catherine Cortez Masto's jib. Stay prickly, Nevada Democrats.

[ Sen. Harry Reid / New York ]