THESE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Another terrible mass school shooting.  This time it happened in Florida, with seventeen high school students killed by a nineteen year old former student with an AR-15 on February 14th.  At first, it looked like this tragedy was going to be treated like other recent high profile mass shooting: progressive politicians would call for more gun control, conservative politicians would say that "now is not the time to have this conversation", and that delay tactic would work so that no actual national gun control legislation could get passed. Eventually, the media would stop covering the shooting and move onto other things, and the country would brace itself for the next one.
But this time may be different.  This time, it appears that there is some genuine outrage that will not go away so easily.  The teenage students of the school are deciding not to mourn silently.  They are speaking out and they are getting organized.  Their outspoken passion and willingness to verbally confront politicians is impossible to ignore.  Will their anger result in some actual gun control legislation being passed?  Well, seeing as how we know have a Republican congress and president, the odds of anything changing in the near future are very low.  But their movement may have a lasting effect on voters in general.
One of the ways that the pro gun National Rifle Association  has held so much influence over the country's lack of gun laws is because most voters do not list gun control as a big issue for them, and those that do consider it an important issue are those voters on the same side as the NRA.  The gun rights people just have more passion on this issue; in 2012 after a similarly horrific shooting in Connecticut, then President Obama was unable to pass a weak expansion of background checks bill through congress, even though it's support was as high as 90% in some polls.  The Republicans who killed the bill knew full well that the voters who put them in office would continue to vote for them even if they agreed with the bill.  Again, passing gun control legislation was just not a major issue to their constituents. 
But that may change: what we could be seeing now from the students in Florida could be the beginning of a generational change on this issue.  Although the scary amount of guns owned in this country is somewhere around three hundred million, part of the reason for that high number is that many gun owners stock pile large amounts of guns.  Most polls show that individual gun ownership is actually going down in this country, with percentages somewhere between 30-40% being the number of gun owning households.  What this means is that you have a younger generation of Americans who are less likely to have guns in their house and are therefore less likely to have the almost romantic love of guns that many older Americans do.  And these young people are seeing the teens in Florida speaking out against NRA backed politicians, which may inspire them to do the same.
The Republican party has been scrambling to try and control this situation, with some going so far as to attack the children themselves as dupes for far left anti-gun groups.  And, somewhat inevitably, some conservative online groups have said that the shooting never happened, and that the outspoken teens are just paid actors! President Trump has been all over the map on this issue, as usual: first, he suggested that he was open to banning bump stocks that make rifles deadlier, and perhaps raising the age for rifle ownership from eighteen to twenty one.  But then he fell back on NRA talking points, saying that teachers should carry guns in the schools; he even went so far as to imply that teachers willing to carry guns could get a raise.  Yes, once again this country is hitting a new low: we have a president who's budget cuts funds to education, and who's party has attacked unionized jobs like teaching for years, but who thinks we should spend tax dollars on arming and training teachers, with the possibility of a little extra cash for those who do! 
The good news is that whileTrump and the Republicans may hold power for now, it appears that the tide of history is turning against them; every poll shows that younger Americans tend to more progressive than other voters on most issues, and the fact that they grew up with an African American as president, something unlikely to their parents and unthinkable to their grand parents, has shaped their opinions in ways unlike any other American generation before them.  Put simply, time is catching up to conservatives in this country, and the party that has had success of a mixture of race baiting, gay bashing and gun loving may soon have to adjust or become irrelevant.   

BUYER'S REMORSE

President Trump, Rob Porter and Reince Priebus

53%.  That's the number I'll never understand.  It's the percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.  Although he lost the female vote overall, due to the overwhelming percentages of non white women voting against him, a clear majority of white women voted for him.  He won them despite the Access Hollywood tape in which we heard him boast of sexually assaulting women, and despite the claims of sixteen different women who accused him of assaulting them in much the same way that he described on that tape.  They voted for him even after he dismissed those accusers of all lying, and went so far as to imply that some of them were too physically unattractive for him to have assaulted in the first place.  With his macho swagger and Archie Bunker like statements,  the spell Trump held over working class white men was understandable, but the mind boggles as to why a  majority of white women went along with them.
Reading interviews with those white female supporters is both elucidating and infuriating: some just shrug off his behavior as him being a  typical man (which really does not reflect well on men in general, does it?), while others only care about his perceived success and wealthiness.   He played an exaggerated, god like version of himself on reality TV for years, why couldn't he bring that same kind of power and success to the White House, they rationalized.  And in that infamous Access Hollywood tape, he inadvertently stumbled on a sad truth: "When you're a celebrity, you can get away with anything." Add to that the overwhelmingly white Evangelical women who will always support him as long as he promotes their anti-choice, anti-LGBT rights agenda, and you start see how he won that majority.

Well, the good news is that Trump finally may be reaching a breaking point with white female voters: in the past year, his overall approval ratings are down across the board with all women, according to a January 11th. New York Times poll, although he still has over 70% approval from Republican women.   Still, the trend for his approval among female voters is definitely downwards.  And those disapproving women are speaking out.  The recent ME TOO movement, in which women that have been sexually assaulted or harassed raise their voices and demand punishment for their abusers, would not, in my opinion, even exist if Hillary Clinton had won.  It appears to have been forged in the anger that so many women in America have felt when a man with a sexual history like Trump's somehow defeated an experienced woman like Clinton.  That movement may well spell disaster for Trump and the party he leads: in a recent interview former White House Chief Advisor Steve Bannon told journalist Joshua Green "Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn't juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch," .  He, of course, thinks this is a bad thing.
In the past year, Trump has lived up to his misogynistic past, issuing another denial of all the assault charges leveled against him, defending Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly as they were forced to resign under harassment charges, endorsing Roy Moore for the Senate even as credible charges of him having sex with underage girls arose, and recently speaking highly of  White House Aide Rob Porter even as Porter resigned under accusations of spousal abuse from both of his ex wives.  In every case, Trump believed the men over the women, often not only defending them but outright praising them.  It's clear that to him that sexually aggressive (or physically aggressive)  men are just acting like the alpha males they should be.  When you get down to it, every time he says he wants to Make America Great Again he's talking about going back to a time when powerful men could treat women anyway they wanted, when sexual harassment was just an accepted part of life for women with little to no recourse.  Sadly, this man with this downright primitive view of women  somehow wound up in the White House.  But I think it's safe to say that this victory of his will mark the beginning of the end for white male supremacy in this country with more and more women (many of them not white) joining the ranks of power ready to oppose him and men like him who want to turn the clock back for women and their right to live unharassed.  Let's just hope he doesn't ruin this country before he leaves office.