How is it that Trump is embraced?
To the Editor:
“How is it possible, what has lobotomized people who cheer and celebrate the most transparent fraud, the most outrageous liar, the most straitjacket-ready psycho ever visited on the body politic?” Those are the words of Hal Crowther, longtime journalist and essayist.
As I so often am, Crowther will be written off by some people as suffering “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But are we really, or is it more likely that someone simply neglected to make a burnt offering to the god of common sense.
Here is a former president who has slightly less than 100 felony indictments against him. He's the only president in history to ignite a deadly armed assault on his own Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election he knew he'd lost.
What can I say about Donald Trump that has not been said ad nauseam? “His tweets and his lying, the change of stories, the lack of preparation, he has no principles, none. It's the phoniness and this cruelty, Donald is cruel.” Those are the words of the late Maryanne Trump Barry, his older sister. Mary Trump (his niece) refers to Donald Trump as “the world's most dangerous man.”
Also, have we not heard enough from people who worked in the Trump Administration or those closely associated with him: Mark Esper, Rex Tillerson, William Barr, John Kelly, Mark Milley, John Bolton (the list is virtually endless); and the descriptions of Trump relentless: “a phoney, a fraud, a moron, contemptuous of our democratic institutions and the rule of law, an existential threat to democracy, a consummate narcissist” — and the ever-present underlying truth — “unfit to be President of the United States.”
Related Items
LGBT candidates look to build on last year’s successes
Could Trump be a president for all?
School choice isn’t a conspiracy
Border situation is a disaster
If those eyewitnesses cannot convince the average voter of Trump's unfitness, I certainly can't. With the possible exception of his niece and his ghostwriter, all these warnings came from conservatives, Republicans, individuals who would ordinarily be on Trump's side of the political divide.
The things that render Trump unfit for office are conspicuously transparent and absurdly obvious to anyone who is paying even marginal attention. In addition to his criminal activities, he is ridiculous, repulsive, crude, infantile and unquestionably unhinged from reality.
Donald Trump lacks any beliefs beyond self-gratification and self-glorification and I say that as a lifelong conservative and an almost lifelong Republican. How the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and millions of seemingly intelligent men and women got drawn into the orbit of this shameless conman may forever remain the unsolved mystery of the ages.
History teaches us many things and recent history reveals that Germany's Hitler was so thoroughly untruthful that he finally could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth. And so it is with Trump, and with that handicap he has been able to seduce a large spectrum of our populace into his swamp of lies, distortions and half truths.
Consequently, Trump supporters (while many citizens remain deafeningly silent) are raining death threats on judges, prosecutors, states attorneys general and other elected and honest officials (and their families), anyone who tries to impose justice on or hold the former president accountable. This is the real life 21st Century threat of facism and tyranny.
Will the American electorate wake up in time to save us from ourselves, to rebuild and strengthen the foundations upon which America was conceived and established, in time to save our Republic and democratic form of government from this would be dictator. We will know the answer in approximately six months.
David L. Snell
Franklin
