Trump Supporters: What's it Going to Take?

This is a good time to ask Trump supporters, who hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when confronted with the litany of blockheaded ideas and outright lies their hero is guilty of, what their reaction would be if, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were found to be in business with Russia, had expressed admiration for former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, and encouraged Russia to spy on America.  Or if they had called the American military a disaster, mocked an American flyer who was a prisoner of war for five years, and belittled the parents of a dead soldier, as Trump has now done to Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Answer: Apoplexy. They would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.

And let’s be crystal clear with regard to whether he is lying about this Russia question. Donald Trump Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.“  Donald Trump Sr. said, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

So, that’s a lie.

Here’s another one: On national television he said, speaking of Putin, “I got to know him very well.” A week or so ago, he said, “I never met Putin.”

So, that’s a lie.

Conservative columnist George Will said this: “Speculation about the nature and scale of Trump’s financial entanglements with Putin and his associates is justified by Trump’s refusal to release his personal and business tax information. Obviously he is hiding something.”

The list of Trump “ideas” that are foolish, uninformed, bigoted, dangerous, and just plain goofy is a long one and gets longer every day.  And now this: Trafficking with an adversary of the United States – an adversary that has nuclear weaponry trained on American cities and that for decades has repudiated America and our way of life -- in a way that would send Trump’s  acolytes into orbit if it were done by a Democrat; and, now disparaging the father and mother of an army officer who was killed in combat.

So the question at long last for Trump believers;  What’s it going to take?

Bernie or Bust

The speech given by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention was much praised and rightly so.  But the three most on-point words spoken during the first day of the event were these:  “You’re being ridiculous.”  As is now well known, they were said by comedian/actor Sarah Silverman to Bernie Sanders obsessives who were being, in fact, ridiculous – and, as is their wont, childish, boorish, and self-indulgent.  Their threat – in keeping with their insufferable self-righteousness and moral superiority -- to hand over their vote to the ignoramus Donald Trump in order to indulge their irrational, over-the-top hatred of Hillary Clinton, is truly astonishing.  A few points for them to consider:

1.Hillary Clinton is the nominee, not Bernie Sanders. That’s over with, and no amount of acting out will change it.

2. The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters – and for that matter, the overwhelming majority of the American people – do not know what the Democratic National Committee is or what it does or why it exists or if it exists, and are not influenced in any way by its internal machinations, including snarky email traffic among its functionaries about Bernie Sanders.  Sanders lost by millions of votes and that had nothing to do with the DNC or any election shenanigans of any kind by anyone else.  It had to do with the will of the voters. Period.  The nomination was not stolen from Sanders.  It was lost by him.

3. The jeering and the booing and the weeping and the long-suffering eyes-to-the-sky gazes betray a remarkably juvenile understanding of how the electoral process is supposed to work in a democracy, and how the two-party system is supposed to work within that process. The idea here is to  select a person whose view of the world is most like ours to run for office against the person whose view of the world is least like ours.   It’s not a team sport where we root-root-root for our side in the service of an uncritical emotional attachment to it and fall desperately in love with its star player.

4. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are politically much more alike than they are different, and they are both vastly different from Trump.  That’s what this election is about.  What it’s not about: Your failure to get every single thing you want, exactly as you want it, or you will stomp out of the room in a fit of pique.  The big picture here is that the Sanders-Clinton side is about inclusiveness and a reverence for the democratic process, and the Trump side is about divisiveness and authoritarianism, even fascism.  Get over yourselves and your petty disappointments and your haughtily judgmental verdicts regarding the sins of Hillary Clinton and get some perspective about who and what she is and is not.

Here is what the history books will say about fascist America: It came about because a group of disgruntled Democrats swung the election to Donald Trump by voting for him to show their anger over the failure of their candidate, Bernie Sanders, to win their party’s nomination.