How Long Will Trump Supporters Buy Into His Lies?

There were a lot of bad reasons to vote for Donald Trump in this past election:

“I hate Hillary.”

“I hate immigrants”

“I hate minorities.”

“Trump is a successful businessman.”

“Trump understands me.”

“Trump tells it like it is.”

“Trump is a leader.”

As dizzyingly divorced from reality as these beliefs are, you can look at Trump, listen to Trump, and understand how these noxious notions were reinforced. But what about the campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again?” That isn’t on the list. Ah, but it is, if you know how to interpret it.

Trump’s campaign slogan has a very different meaning to Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters. If you were a fan of The Donald, you understood the real message behind “Make America Great Again”: Get rid of immigrants, crush minorities, continue treating women as second-class citizens and trash the constitution and government red tape. That, to many voters, is how you make America great again.

It didn’t matter to Trump’s fans that he offered no concrete plans to stimulate the economy, create jobs, improve conditions in rural America, strengthen public education, make higher education more accessible…or do anything to improve the lives of the people who voted for him. Why that didn’t happen shows just how emotionally bound certain segments of the population are to the idea that they are victims of some grand liberal conspiracy. And Trump, the (supposed) billionaire, managed to exploit Ma and Pa Red State’s feelings of victimization and convince them he was going to put them back at the top of the ladder again.

It’s impossible to know how many Trump supporters have come to their senses since the election, but the number will undoubtedly grow as their healthcare options dwindle, the unemployment rate increases, water and air pollution worsen, and the trajectory of economic health in Midwestern and southern states continues to plummet. Obama can’t be the scapegoat forever. 

The one question is, how long can Trump and company sustain the lie that he’s working to better the lives of the people that voted for him? How long will they swallow it?

When America Looks In The Mirror, It Sees The Face of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is without question a despicable human being. The latest revelations of his demeaning rhetoric towards women are being rightly condemned by just about everyone across the political spectrum. Yet this is only one in a long line of horrible comments by Trump objectifying women, and only now are many of his staunchest supporters speaking out against him.

The bar has been lowered so far for The Donald, that it was only when his fans had to actually dig into the ground to push it below the surface that any complaints were raised. Conservatives and evangelical Christians are just fine with sexism, misogyny and suppression as long as you use the right terms and phrases. “Grabbing them by the pussy” is not correct form and thus, objectionable. When you get down to it, it is really only semantics that separate the rest of the conservative pack from Trump, and no one should forget that.

Ask yourself, how can someone who believes that a wife should be subservient to the husband criticize the substance of what Trump said? How can a person who insists a woman should not have control over her own body call out Trump for his comments? The bluster and indignation from the right is as phony as a Trump apology and the only real concern on the part of the Republican Party is that their candidate can’t stop handing Hillary more ammunition.

Can anyone imagine what would happen if Trump’s hot mic comments were uttered by Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? Yet as of today, Trump is still the Republican presidential nominee. Our institutions are failing us, our “leaders” are not leaders at all, but tools of the one percent, and our democracy is dying. Donald Trump is the abomination born of nationalistic greed and hubris, the spawn of anti-democratic chauvinism and American exceptionalism. Conservatives pretending to be aghast at his remarks are his long-time enablers now swimming in a cesspool of hypocrisy. Far from an aberration, Trump is the true face of America in 2016, the candidate we deserve.

Dawn or Dusk in America?

I wish I felt more optimistic as I watch the dawn of a new year unfold. Unfortunately, as the “Whew” factor many of us felt after Obama won reelection fades, we’re faced once again with the overarching reality of our present condition — rather than a “dawn,” we’re watching the sun setting on a once great democracy.

A short quote from an upcoming interview with Matt Damon in Playboy brought me back to reality. He says, “It’s easier now more than ever in my life to feel the fix is in, the game is rigged and no matter how hard you work to change things, it just doesn’t matter.” Not an earthshattering insight, but it nonetheless drives home the fundamental state of our nation. Corporate interests — Wall Street, the Fortune 500, defense contractors, gas and oil companies — drive national policy through their many tentacles wrapped around Washington, D.C., and their primary interest is not with the welfare of American citizens or even with the health of our economy, but with profit.

Like others, I was caught up in the moment of Obama’s recent victory, thinking that the good guys had won and they were gonna ride into town, clean out the riff-raff and save democracy, but I came down from that acid trip pretty quickly. The “fiscal cliff” lunacy looms over us, but that’s only one symptom of a serious illness that has infected the body politic in America. Our government is a corporate subsidiary. Forget the quotes of Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln. The only quote that continues to carry any weight, and the one quote that should be chiseled into the monuments and porticos of D.C. is from Charles Erwin Wilson, Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower and CEO of General Motors in the 1950s, who said, “What’s good for GE is good for America.” This is the mindset that is dragging this country down to its knees.

Change? It’s not in the cards, at least, not in the near future. What kind of a country have we become when the Occupy Movement, last year’s minor blip of protest against the current political machine, was treated as a domestic terrorist group by the FBI? In today’s world, simply protesting the status quo can get you lumped together with those organizations that would blow up planes or perpetrate suicide attacks. Our phone conversations and Internet usage are monitored, our movements tracked, our privacy stolen.

Americans are complacent and deluded, and it will take a much larger shock to the system than even the 2008 financial crisis to shake them out of their trance. If nothing significant changes in Washington, D.C., and there’s no reason to believe it will, that catastrophe will happen. The only questions is; will it be too late?