When Worlds Collide - Trump's disinformation meets Trump's delusion

       

       This is what happens when you put the most scientifically-ignorant, dishonest, self-centered child-like person at the head of what was once the most powerful and scientifically-advanced country in the world. 
       Thanks to Donald Trump's incompetence, even his sycophants are reduced to spouting gibberish at each other. 

Shame On You For Shaming Trump Supporters

On a recent shopping trip, while waiting in the check-out line, I happened to overhear a ten-minute conversation between two older white males who voted for Trump, and their view of the world and of the man they wanted in office says a lot about these Trump supporters. Fox News had also recently aired a series of interviews their reporters had conducted at restaurants and other gatherings in the Southwest U.S. where they specifically spoke with people who identified themselves as Trump supporters, and they echoed almost exactly what these two shoppers were complaining about. 
        What these people think is that any assault on Trump is an effort to make them feel bad about voting for him. And they can’t stand it. They focus the whole thing on themselves; the hell with the country, the presidency, and the Constitution. All they hear about is the bad stuff Trump does and it’s not fair to hold them accountable. They want people to let “Trump be Trump” but stop reporting all the negative stuff that happens as a result of that. It wasn’t Trump’s programs that bothered them; it’s that those news organizations and people who don’t support Trump talk about them. And it revealed the core of what upset them.

Trump supporters are tired of being shamed.

        So what if Trump is not a role model, if he’s vulgar, if he’s crass, if he cheats on his beautiful wife, if he can only express himself with the vocabulary of a sixth grader, if he threw his support to Putin over his own intelligence agents, if he’s an amoral dummy. Stop shaming them because they chose him.

See, all that callousness, that racism, that sexism and xenophobia Trump expresses is not reflected in his supporters, they say. So turn down the volume and the indignation over Trump’s raising the White House US flag back to full staff as a final dishonor to Senator John McCain before his burial. Trump had that presidential right and could legally do it, so stop fussing about it. McCain was already dead, anyway.

        Stop trying to make them feel guilty over the Trump administration’s terror tactic of grabbing kids from immigrant parents and asylum seekers and throwing the kids in cages inside detention centers. Stop showing those revolting pictures of kids locked inside a cage. Boo-hoo. (Or as Corey Lewandowski said on TV in response to the comment “I read today about a ten-year-old girl with Down syndrome who was taken from her mother and put in a cage,” Zac Petkanas said, to which Lewandowski responded: “Womp womp.” Clearly, Lewandowski didn’t care.) They are sick of being shamed over not giving a damn about innocent children. It's those immigrant parent's fault, who cares about the kids. Remember, all that callousness, racism, sexism and xenophobia Trump expresses is not...NOT… reflected in his supporters…they maintain. 

        And stop shaming them for Trump saying the government did a ‘fantastic job’ during and after Hurricane Maria which killed almost 3000 Americans. It’s not their fault the Trump administration didn’t take the threat to Puerto Rico seriously and that the lack of response from FEMA was because Trump didn’t consider it a high priority because he barely recognized it as U.S. territory. So what if Trump went and played golf while Puerto Ricans were screaming for help? He has a right to relax. His job is hard. Yeah, they remember how Trump said he wouldn’t have time for golf once he got into office, but going back on his word is kind of what they expected from his unorthodox leadership style. “He’s his own man” is how one of them put it. Stop shaming them because Trump acts like a five-year-old and changes his mind like one. They know it. What are they supposed to do? Spank him?

Trump points to who he'll try to screw again

        Stormy Daniels did and she only got $130,000 for it. They aren’t ashamed that Trump paid off an adult film star, and a Playboy Bunny, and maybe a former housekeeper who bore him an illegitimate child, and maybe others, admitted on tape to forcing himself on women and even implying he grabbed them by the genitals, all while married to his third wife. Why should they feel shame for Trump’s infidelity, vulgarity, denial of payments and then confirming them, and hushing it up in order to sway voters to support him as the more ‘moral’ candidate? So what? At least Hillary isn’t president.

They are sick and tired of hearing about Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Mike Flynn, Carter Page…etc. As far as they are concerned, those people have nothing to do with Trump. To hear one person tell it, they are the best people Trump talked about. They’re just being unfairly persecuted because they used to be part of Trump’s campaign or administration. The Democrats were out to get them. Those people were just associates of Trump anyway, and so are thousands of other people. Are they going to arrest everybody?

And don’t get them started about Charlottesville. If people couldn’t see Trump was right, that there were bad people on both sides, then they just weren’t paying attention. Trump called that one correctly. [Translation: Protesting Nazis = Being Nazis.]

        Oh, and stop shaming them because of Trump calling out NFL players who kneel as a quiet protest against the murders of black people by certain cops. You’re just supposed to focus on honoring the flag. Even though the protests are non-violent, the protesters have a First Amendment right, plus kneeling is respectful to the flag (look at what soldiers do honoring fallen comrades), Trump must be right, that the players shouldn’t be allowed to kneel in protest and “get away with it.” The other one felt Trump was, maybe, wrapping himself in the flag to get revenge. It’s that “eye for an eye” thing that Trump considers the most important lesson from the bible. You see, in 1990 when Trump was a part of the United States Football League, he sued the NFL for $1.2 billion…and lost. He was awarded three dollars and 76 cents and a lifetime ban from the NFL.

Now do you understand why he attacks NFL players?

It has nothing to do with patriotism or honoring the military. He’s getting even with being banned from the NFL. Nobody does that to Trump! Stop shaming his supporters for his pettiness. Besides, they’re sick of wealthy NFL players trying to draw attention to something most Trump supporters don’t care about at all...dead African Americans - no matter who killed them. If Trump can make people want to stop going to the games because they don’t want to be subjected to the sight of a person kneeling during the anthem, and maybe even punish all those players by forcing the demise of the NFL, THEN, HURRAY…MORE POWER TO HIM. Trump is getting retribution for that NFL ban by belittling NFL players. So stop shaming his supporters because of what Trump does. It’s what they’d like to do, too, but they aren’t the president. So we have become pawns to a snowflake trying to force standing at attention on everyone in the name of his false patriotism that masks a deep-seated hostility to the organization that banned him...the NFL.

Trump supporters need to explain why they find all these traits in Trump to be desirable. Is it really to hide behind his failings and shortcomings in order to conceal their own? Then shame on them for supporting a bully, a bigot, an adulterer, a traitor, and a man who is teaching our children that dishonesty, arrogance, and narcissism can get you the presidency. So what if it’s turning our democracy into a third-rate reality TV show? Leave Trump's supporters alone. They have a right to be wrong regardless of their choice and to throw their support behind a man unfit to be president!

As I listened to them I wondered when did ignorance become admirable?

        How dare Obama be a decent man? Vote Trump!

What Trump’s supporters don’t seem to get is that the people who elected him, or who knowingly elect anyone they KNEW was a corrupt person, are not victims, but accomplices. Long after Trump is gone, history will remember all his supporters as enablers and cowards who kept quiet and let this travesty go on and on. It’s no longer about whether Trump has any decency, but if his supporters still do.
So own it Trump supporters, YOU are responsible for what Trump does. All these negative stories you hear can be laid directly at your feet because you helped put him in office.

Trumpism - A Blight on America

Germany is a nation in which I have been interested since I was old enough to find it on a map. Because the U.S. had been involved in combating them twice in less than a half a century I was curious about the Germans. What drove them? How was the pitch for war made palpable less than 20 years after the Versailles Treaty was signed? Why were they willing to endanger another generation of Germans? My curiosity even made my xenophobic father heap scorn on me as being a “Kraut in my mind.” He ridiculed my research and interest because he felt I was ignoring our British/Scot/Irish roots and claimed I just wanted to “be German” or “be a Nazi.” I wondered what he was so upset about. I wasn’t making excuses or gushing about them; I just wanted to find out how the Germans were drawn into war so quickly and easily in the 20^th century. That meant I needed to study them.

My curiosity was stimulated because both of my grandfathers fought in World War One against German forces, and one of my uncles in World War Two. My interest was known to other family members. I went to a party at a relative’s house in the mid-1970s, and while there he introduced me to a woman named Geezy whose husband had been a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunner throughout the war. My uncle wanted me to talk with her partly because she grew up in Germany and lived in Berlin during World War Two, but mainly because of her stance. Geezy stated in no uncertain terms she loved Adolf Hitler and still thought he was a great leader. This was 30 years after the end of the war. I was stunned by her admission and probed hoping to find some rationale. She was unapologetic about his crimes against other countries and even against his own people. She didn’t care. If Hitler said it needed to be done, then it was the right thing to do. She was never a member of the Nazi party but she supported the Nazis 100%...even to that day. She said she would still vote for and support Hitler, despite all the revelations about what he did. She was proud of him.

Remembering her blind adulation stills seems eerie. But more disturbingly, it sounds just like today’s Trump supporters. It doesn’t matter what Trump does…they support him unconditionally. How do you reason with that kind of fanatic? Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. He is saying they will support a cold-blooded murderer with no reservations. Trump also boasted that he loved “poorly educated” voters. He wasn't just talking about people who only had a limited education. He meant people who were deliberately ignorant; people who didn’t want to think things through, people that just took marching orders, people who didn’t read or question anything. These are the people we should be very concerned about because they are Trump’s sycophants, his supporters, his loyal base. They look upon Trump as a messiah. How are they any different than Hitler’s SS?

Like the SS, they throw out Nazi salutes to intimidate others. At Trump’s urging, they beat up protesters. Now they are even emboldened to march in nighttime torch-lit parades as though this is Nuremberg or Munich in 1938. It’s frightening because these Trump supporters are living among us like a fifth column by the millions. They believe it is Trump, or nothing else. This Trumpism is a danger to American democracy and its survival.

Germans have been addressing the Nazi Germany image for over 70 years but they will continue with that struggle for the foreseeable future. We in the United States are about to join Germany in our own long, difficult quest to improve our image and try to make amends for what Trumpism is doing to our country and to the world. Fifty to a hundred years from now, we will still be trying to shake off our own “Nazi-like” period. It will be much shorter than the twelve years Hitler inflicted on Germany, but the damage to the world will be the same. It will be a time in our nation’s history known as Trump’s America from 2016 to 2018. I’m no seer stating the end will be in 2018. It’s just that there are so many things roaring right at Trump at this point (undeniable Russian collusion, money-laundering, obstruction of justice, serial sexual assault, violation of the Emoluments Clause, violation of the oath of office…etc.) that I have no doubt one of them will most likely get him out of the White House shortly. Pence, Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, DeVos, Mnuchin, Tillerson, Conway, Miller, Huckleberry Sanders, Rick Perry, Scott Pruitt, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s kids, his son-in-law, and all the other enablers should be dragged out with him and left with broken bones, deep gashes, grievous injuries, missing teeth and hair and tossed in a bloody pile at the base of the Washington Monument. But we still have a ways to go to get there. I am concerned about what will happen to us before Trump is forced out of office. Trump unabashedly pits Americans against each other, claims white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers are good people, signed a tax bill to transfer the nation’s wealth to himself and his ultra-rich buddies, threatens nuclear war, attacks the free press, and lies even when the truth sounds better. His enablers in the Republican Party and his evangelical base cheer him on and urge him to keep it up.

Comparing the U.S. under Trump to Germany under Hitler seems outlandish but almost daily we are introduced to a new Trump outrage that makes us look more and more like a budding totalitarian regime. The world looked on in concern and then horror when Hitler turned Germany into a fascist state and finally launched a war. The world is now watching the U.S. do the same thing under Trump.

No one knows who originally made this quote, but it’s appropriate; for the citizens of Nazi Germany - to the U.S. in 2018…”We’re all in the same game; just different levels. Dealing with the same hell, just different devils.”