“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. Answer: Spitting, fuming apoplexy. Hannity et. al would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.”
Now imagine what their reaction would be -- and what would be the reaction of evangelicals who make the unimaginably ludicrous excuse that Trump isn’t running for pastor, he’s running for president -- if Obama were caught out, on video and audio recordings, saying incredibly coarse and demeaning things about women and advocating, or possibly even admitting to, sexual assault. One cringes at the thought of the public crucifixion that would follow. And yet we hear Trump's cowardly enablers acknowledging this latest chapter of the freak show that is the Trump campaign, but arguing that we should forgive and forget; as if this were some isolated aberration where their guy merely went off the rails a little bit, as opposed to what it actually is: The latest in a long and depressing string of ideas and statements that range from the ugly to the nonsensical and which add up to a degenerate, narcissistic, uninformed blowhard who should not be allowed anywhere near our White House.
The cowardly enablers are many but the reference here is specifically to Christie, Giuliani, Ryan, and now Pence, all of whom, to save and advance their own political prospects, have consistently offered up loud and ridiculous-on-their-face excuses for Trump’s pratfalls; or like the pathetic Ryan, acknowledge the abject horrendousness of the various incidents but kiss them off by expressing the forlorn hope that Trump will do better later. This, instead of doing what they’d be doing if they had any spine and were less willing to sell out the country for their own political fortunes: Withdraw their support and tell the guy to take a hike.
It is as if they are saying the following: “Here’s a guy who refuses to show his tax returns but apparently didn’t pay any federal taxes for many years; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the redemption of their U.S. savings bonds; imagines that he saw thousands of people on TV celebrating 9/11; characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; made weirdo phone calls bragging about himself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about his offspring; favors starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; calls for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes that illegal immigrants are pouring over the borders to vote in the November elction; believes American soldiers should kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists; ran a fake “university”; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years; ridiculed the disability of a newspaper reporter; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes him in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired his foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; mplied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster; believes the American electoral process is rigged; counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating, and bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and trying to seduce married women…
…and he's the guy we want to be president of the United States!”
No rational person would vote for a person like that. But support for Trump has never been about rationality. It has always been about middle-finger, take-this-job-and-shove-it, you’re-not-the-boss-of-me, you-think-you’re-so-smart resentment. His hard-core supporters simply don't care what he says or what he stands for, as long as he seems to be sticking it to the various forces they believe are out to get them; even though, as Senator Paul Sarbanes once said about Ronald Reagan, a working man voting for him is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. The same can certainly now be said about a woman, working or not.
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