Garrison Keillor offers a folksy warning to Trump voters, cold comfort for liberals

Garrison Keillor reacts to Donald Trump election

(Image credit: Andy Kropa/Getty Images for Norman Mailer Center)

published 10 November 2016

A lot of older white people in the upper Midwest helped make Donald Trump the next U.S. president on Tuesday, and another older white upper Midwesterner, Garrison Keillor, did not sugarcoat the blow to the Americans who voted for his opponent. "We liberal elitists are wrecks," he wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday. And now that "a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president," millions of Americans exhausted by the long campaign "will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure."

"The Trumpers," on the other hand, "had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting 'Lock her up,'" but now that their guy has won, he's "their problem now."

The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth. Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next....We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses. [Keillor, The Washington Post]

You can read the rest of his folksy essay at The Washington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.