Asking Democrat voters to better understand President-elect Donald Trump is like asking a hiker to stop and reflect why he is being chased by a bear that wants to eat his face, a humorist argued Friday.
USA Today columnist Rex Huppke drew this comparison Friday in a satirical takedown of Democrats’ self-blaming response to Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day.
“So, I’m standing in the forest and there’s
this bear barreling toward me and I’m pretty sure it wants to eat my face,” Huppke wrote. “Clearly, the most important thing I can do right now is listen to the bear and try to understand why it feels the way it does, right?”
Huppke is not convinced.
Huppke’s parable links to an NBC News report in which Trump critics say his victory left them fearful for their families and a Politico report in which Democrats opine they should have done better reaching out to middle-class voters.
“The reason we didn’t win, ultimately, is we didn’t listen enough to people on the ground,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) reportedly said.
In Huppke’s comparison, this comment becomes, “That bear that wants to eat your face is misunderstood, and
you need to engage with it and figure out what YOU did wrong to make that bear angry.”
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“But the thing is, it’s the bear that wants to eat my face, not the other way around,” he replied. “And I’m pretty sure no matter how much I understand about the bear, it’s still going to want to eat my face.”
The humorist continues to cast Trump as a face-eating bear in a number of satirical scenarios with a familiar ring.
Huppke details the bear’s fans “cheering the idea of locking other beings in pens” and being scared away by a “nice older man” whom he notes no one told the bear to understand.
“Nobody was asking the bear to understand me, or people like me, or even the old man who scared him off,” Huppke wrote. “In fact, the next time the bear attempts to understand me or any being that thinks differently will be the first time.”
Huppke expressed surprise and a little frustration that the bear was treated by others as though he did not want to eat faces.
“All I hear, once again – from the edge-of-the-forest chorus – is that I should do everything in my power to accommodate the bear and understand why it’s dead set on eating my damn face,” he wrote. “No, thank you.”
But he vowed not to do what one might expect when faced with a rampaging bear that wants to eat a person’s face.
“You never run away from a bear,” Hupple concluded. “When confronted with a bear, be noisy and don’t show fear.”