And now his campaign manager has been arrested for battery, for grabbing a reporter’s arm so hard he left bruises (“Why Trump’s Campaign Manager was Arrested for Battery”, David A. Graham, The Atlantic online, 3/29/2016) . There is a video that clearly shows him grabbing her.
But, of course, Trump blames the reporter for all of this, first stating that she (the reporter is female) made up the whole thing, then finally concluding that his campaign manager was protecting him! He then asked, “Can I sue her?” (“Trump Turns Blame on Reporter in Battery Case”, Eli Stokols, Hadas Gold, & Nick Gass, Politico website, 3/29/2016).
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone is supporting this guy at all.
So, I asked some random folks while I was out and about the other day.
This is what I am hearing in public from mainstream Republican voters – the ones who were lauding Trump just a few weeks ago:
“I don’t think Donald Trump knows what he’s doing, but I hate Hillary, so…I’m not going to vote.”
Good. Don’t vote. That always helps the Democrats.
When asked why they changed from supporting Trump to not supporting him, a few of them they say “he’s too extreme”. Thank goodness some of them see that.
But more of them say, “He can’t do what he says. He can’t build a wall, he can’t deport Muslims.”
In other words, Trump can’t implement the hateful and dangerous programs that these people support. Like ol’ reactionary John, they lash out and then are astounded when no one – not even Trump – actually comes to help them.
I keep waiting for the Trump supporters to catch on to how much he actually makes fun of them. For example, when (for the millionth time) Trump shouted, “Throw them out” – in regards to protesters – he followed that with “USA, USA, USA!”
He said that in a very low-tone, Neanderthal voice, as if mocking the audience.
There was a very smart-alecky tone to that. As if he was thinking, “I’ll get these yahoos to just start shouting “USA!” because they’ll do anything I say.”
I marvel that people don’t catch on to that. Trump has nothing but contempt for everyone…everyone who isn’t Donald Trump. And his supporters can’t see that because they are so blinded by their own hatred of African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, progressives, and everyone who doesn’t look/think like them.
Earlier I mentioned that some in the Republican Party are trying to “defeat Trump.” It’s possible they will be able to do that, but they take no responsibility for “Trumpism” (or “Trumpenstein”, as one of my friends calls it).
They created him. The GOP has been spewing hatred – albeit in a “coded” manner – for years. You can go back to 1964 and Goldwater’s campaign to see that.
Now their party is in danger of fracturing. I’m not sure if that will happen but I do know that, in 1964, Goldwater was not only soundly defeated, but many Republicans were unseated in the House and Senate.
That is what I hope will happen. Because now the lines are drawn, as they were regarding Civil Rights and the Vietnam War – it’s clear who is on what side. There’s no going back.
We simply cannot allow someone to be elected who is, basically, a right-wing nationalist. A cursory look at nationalistic movements throughout history should be enough to explain why.
Nationalism breeds fascism. And anyone who cannot see that Trump’s idea of the presidency is closer to a dictatorship than anything else…well, if I were those people I would seriously question what kind of government I really want, and why.
They need to read a book or two on WWII, and perhaps one on the Constitution.
Could they make the connections? I honestly don’t know. I can’t wrap my head around how incredibly blind and ignorant Trump supporters are. They seem to want a president who is going to sign executive order after executive order banning everything and everybody they don’t like.
Without any push-back whatsoever.
They are not, fortunately, a majority of Americans. I keep that in my mind at all times. It just seems as if there are a lot of them because they get so much press.
The recent big wins by Bernie Sanders lately provides a lot of hope for this country, thankfully. I marvel at the success of a candidate who is basically running on a socialist platform ala Socialist Workers Party when I was a teenager (they ran Linda Jenness in 1972); hey, it only took a little over 40 years for the rest of the country to wise up.
I never thought I would see the day such a progressive would be doing so well at election time. Unfortunately, the “other side” is just about as reactionary and backwards as I have ever seen it, harking back (again) the 1970s and Spiro Agnew.
Deja vu all over again.
I don’t have any weird news because, well, I think the presidential campaigns the Republicans are running are just about as weird as it gets. And I haven’t been following any straight-up weird news sources for awhile.
Recommendations? For the best political coverage, I recommend the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. She’s intelligent, and she has interesting guests. She doesn’t snark, talk over people, or push any agenda on people. She’s one of the few political/social commentary journalists who does not cause me to yell at my TV.
Be good. Be kind. Vote!
Victoria's Viewpoint 
Unfortunately, if you are brutally honest with yourself, Herr Trump is not a mystery. He is representative of what we have become as a nation.
We used to flatter ourselves with the myth that we stood for fair play, backed the underdog, rooted for the little guy.
Nowadays, nothing could be further from the truth. Face it, as a culture, we love bullies. It painfully obvious every where you look. In sports, for example, no one wants to see a great competition. We want to obliterate the other team, or at the very least humiliate them.
The way people drive now, is based on intimidation. Put on your turn signal to change lanes and that’s like waving a red flag at a bull. It means you want someone to cut you off.
When you are in a parking lot headed back to your car, how many times does someone follow you to take your spot? Although there may be several open spots nearby, they sit there, very impatient and righteously indignant because you’re not moving fast enough. God forbid they should have to walk another five yards.
As an aside, on more than one occasion when that has happened to me, I take my time pulling out my keys and opening the door. And when I do, I toss whatever I’m carrying into the car, close and lock it again, and walk off.
Are these people’s lives so pointless and devoid of any meaning that they have to intimidate someone else to feel good about themselves?
People in this country are not interested in “fairness” or doing the right thing. They want to win… By any means necessary. Nothing is off the table.
When Ted Cruz talks about making the desert “glow”, this from a guy who never put on a uniform for one day, he has no idea how supremely stupid, and incredibly short-sighted that is.
When Herr Trump talked about killing family members of Isis, he essentially declared open season on military families.
Tough talk., hot air. Or as they say in Texas, “Big hat, no cattle.”
But people eat it up. They love tough talk, but can they follow through?
The example is always is of the 300 pound guy that thinks if he shaves his head and grows a goatee, all that fat he’s been carrying for the last 15 years is suddenly magically transformed into rippling muscle, so he can talk tough all day long.
Trump’s and to a degree, Cruz’s campaign have been based on intimidation of the other candidates and a lot of tough talk that is imbecilic at best, insanely dangerous at it’s worst.
And the bullying and intimidation doesn’t stop there. Trumpenstein himself is passively encouraging his followers to “do something” if he isn’t awarded the nomination if he’s “close”. Not only that, but one of his longtime supporters is actually planning a so-called ‘day-of-rage” at the convention if Fearless Leader is not annointed ( wait… Annointed, sorry, that’s Cruz.). If things don’t go their way, he and his lackeys will be giving out the names, hotels, and room numbers of the delegates, and urges his people to “visit” them. Banana Republic bullshit at it’s best.
The rise of Trumpenstein is really not a mystery if you think about it. He’s just a reflection of what we’ve become.
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Great comment, as usual!
Isn’t it awful that bullying is something to be admired? And that it’s hard to hear other voices when the bullies are screaming constantly?
“Day of rage” – honestly, these folks hate the left so much, but are not above using their warped interpretation of how/what we protest for their own ends. Republicans are all about “the rules”, yet they can’t stomach the fact that they still need 1,237 delegates to get the nomination! So their response will be to terrorize delegates.
Trump and Cruz are thugs, straight-up. But the good news is they’ve managed to galvanize the left, so there will be loads of push-back for their bullshit.
Like I often say, someone raised their children right. Heh. Now if someone will give me a ride to Ohio….
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Hi Victoria, your blog was fabulous, true and correct. Thank You!!!
Was Trump telling it “like it is” when he was constructing racist fantasies about the president’s citizenship? Is he telling it “like it is” when he pretends to love the Bible and Ronald Reagan, checking all the boxes to qualify as a generic conservative? Is he telling it “like it is” when he calls immigrants “rapists” and criminals, despite evidence suggesting the exact opposite ?
No, he’s telling it how conservatives would “like it to be” — and he gets away with it the way they would like to.
He’s promising an America defined by white identity that forces all others to bow down. For a movement that has been fed subtle promises of such a world for decades, these outlandish declarations feel like truth, when they are nothing but a dangerous fantasy.
2. They’re opposing peace with the same dishonesty that led us into war.
The American politicians and pundits opposing the nuclear deal reached with Iran by the United States—along with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China—nearly all have two things in common: They supported the Iraq war, and they opposed negotiating with Iran in the first place.
All of the arguments that the right is making against the agreement — from the inflated 24 day inspection canard and the fiction that Iran will inspect itself to the nonsensical promise of a better deal — are easily debunked. And those arguments all lack the suggestion of any secret classified information of the kind that supposedly justified the Iraq invasion.
“The opponents of the Iran nuclear deal are doing fairly well in the media-pundit-sphere,” “But they’ve had an extremely difficult time making substantive arguments against the deal because according to almost all technical experts, it is about as tight and comprehensive and total a surveillance regime as we’ve ever seen. Ever.”
So the casual promise made by several Republican candidates to trash a deal achieved with our closest allies on day one should instantly disqualify them from occupying the White House.
3. They’re paralyzed by irrational promises.
Senator Ted Cruz demanded a government shutdown before Obamacare’s exchanges opened because, he said, if millions of Americans gained coverage, the law would never be repealed. Cruz failed, and while 15 million Americans now have insurance thanks to the law, he’s still demanding repeal.
Cruz’s primary opponents Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio recognize that running on the promise of stripping something valuable from a block of voters larger than that which will likely decide the election isn’t so smart. So they’ve released their own plans with the exact flaws that they revile in Obamacare.
“Is a party that brutalized Obamacare for taking insurance away from people who were happy with what they had really going to become the party that takes insurance away from millions of people who are happy with what they have?” . “Is a party that attacked Obamacare for raising premiums on people really going to raise premiums for millions?”
Klein says no. But how does the next Republican president, after nearly a decade of pandering to the hope of full repeal, sanctify Obamacare without dividing the party?
4. They’ve abandoned all pretense of serving anyone but the rich.
Nearly every Republican candidate for president is vowing to raise the retirement age.
“For the record, these proposals would be really bad public policy — a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who depend on Social Security, often have jobs that involve manual labor, and have not, in fact, seen a big rise in life expectancy,”
Cuts to the public retirement guarantee are especially harmful to women — who live longer, are more likely to leave the workforce to care for family members, and inevitably are more dependent on Social Security.
The program continually polls as one of the most popular, if not the most popular thing that government does. So why would Republicans embrace drastic cuts in benefits for the poor rather than slight tax increases for the rich? The reasons are obvious.
“By a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded. But by an even wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut,” Krugman wrote. “And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates?”
After a decade of the complete failure of conservative policies and unprecedented wealth inequality, the right cannot escape its urge to make the rich richer, no matter the costs.
5. They refuse to learn from failure.
In six years, we’ve seen unprecedented advances in fairness for the sick, the LGBTQ community, and those who’ve come to our country or been brought here to pursue a better life. The deficit is now manageable and health care cost predictions have shrunk, despite (or more likely due to) the historic expansion of coverage. We’ve made leaps in green energy, the regulation of Wall Street, and favoring diplomacy over war in resolving conflict. And in every arena in which we’ve made progress, Republicans promise a complete reversal of that progress.
Conservatives see in Donald Trump the realization of their worst fears: Someone who can capitalize on a base to which they’ve fed delusions for decades, and expose their promises and policies for the divisive frauds that they truly are.
Whether he succeeds or fails, he’s already helped to reveal that conservatism has become less a movement — and more a cry for help.
Dan
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Thanks for reading my blog, Dan, and for commenting. I appreciate your input, as usual!
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