Shania, No!

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Shania Twain, healer of broken hearts, has gone and shattered mine.

In an interview with the Guardian this week, the Canadian country music star and creator of my favorite running song admitted she supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election. “I would have voted for him because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest,” she said. Man! I Feel Like A [Bitterly Disappointed] Woman.

Twain’s not a citizen of the United States, and was therefore unable to fill in a bubble for the man who uses his platform as our nation’s Tweeter-in-Chief to taunt Chuck Todd with the nickname “Sleepy Eyes.” Still, apparently that’s the kind of discourse she’s looking for from a leader. “Do you want straight or polite?” she said. “Not that you shouldn’t be able to have both. If I were voting, I just don’t want bullshit. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?”

Twain, whose industry tends to lean conservative to begin with, wasn’t alone in thinking Trump was the more honest candidate during the election. Indeed, only days before he was elected Dear Leader, an ABC poll found 46 percent of voters thought Trump was honest, as compared with 38 percent of voters who felt that way about Hillary Clinton. I suppose Trump was pretty honest about how much he hates women, people of color, the poor, people from other countries, people in other countries, and Rosie O’Donnell, and enough people found that kind of honesty refreshing. Now, we’re stuck with it making policy decisions. Wonderful.

Then again, Trump’s celebrated honesty does not appear to extend to, say, his business dealings, his campaign’s relationship with Russia, or, I don’t know, most facts, not that any of that matters when you’ve got a President who’s down to talk trash about Mexicans like any good straight-shooting patriot!

There’s a lot more to the Guardian interview than the Trump tidbit. Twain reveals, for instance, that she was sexually abused by her father, and digs into how devastated she was when her parents were killed in a car crash when she was young, and opened up about her heartbreak after she split with her Robert “Mutt” Lange. Twain is, after all, not just a sum of her political parts. But this oft-repeated refrain—that Trump’s racism, misogyny, and xenophobia is invigorating because it’s honest—is as exhausting as it is erroneous. Trump’s as dishonest as any crooked politician, and he’s made bigotry and ignorance an asset, because, you know, at least he’s being super real.

Anyway, now I need some new stuff to run to. Any recommendations?

 
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