The problem of Trump
I just don’t know where to start. I wanted to begin with gratitude that tour guiding has introduced me to people who voted for Donald Trump and are fundamentally good people. They helped me see that not everyone who supported him was lacking in moral fiber. But honestly? That feeling is getting harder and harder to maintain. I haven’t checked if they can still stomach him because I’m terrified of what they might say.
Because few things are as obvious in life as the fact that Donald Trump is fundamentally an immoral person. Deeply emotionally unstable. And undeniably of feeble intelligence in all the ways that actually matter. I don’t say that as an insult, I say that as an assessment.
We didn’t always have to explain that bigotry is not an opinion
He seems unable to find ways to condemn the bigotry of the Charlottesville marchers. I have the opposite issue. There are just too many ways to discuss how repulsive they are. You already know this, but if it’s as therapeutic for you to see basic reason written down as it is for me to write it, here we are.
Bigotry is just stupid. Unintelligent. Lacking in mental capacity. Grown in a dung heap of unadulterated ignorance and willful blindness.
“Jews will not replace us!” the idiots in Charlottesville chanted. What the hell are they talking about? No, Jews will not replace you (though we’d be better off if they did) because Jews, as all people, are just trying to live their lives. If they knew any Jews, they’d know that.
The same on down the line. “Mexicans are rapists!” can only be heard without mockery by someone who not only doesn’t know any Mexicans, but who lacks the ability to hold a coherent thought in their head. If they could, then they would see how utterly brainless a statement it is.
Same on down the line of his flagrant hypocrisies and stunning lack of comprehension of how government works, diplomacy works, economies work, humans work, handshakes work, how just about anything works except rapacious and immoral business practices based on exploitation and bullying people with less status.
I need to stop and breathe or I will fill google’s storage capacity with examples of how profoundly lacking in moral and intellectual competency our president is. Because I have a closer problem.
Next week I leave for Europe for my Autumn season guiding tours. I still hold my ethos of appreciation for differing viewpoints, and my dedication to respecting the opinions of others.
But supporting Donald Trump does not look like an opinion. It looks like a fundamental failure of human decency and intelligence. I’m not sure how to handle that. It is deeply important to me that everyone feel comfortable and welcome on my tour, deeply important, but if someone supports Trump, despite all this…. I just don’t know where to start.
Thank you for this sane assessment. I will be interested to know if you guide any people who used to support Trump and now find they can’t. Surely they are out there somewhere?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Indeed, those are perhaps the people who give me the most hope. Well, no, those of us who knew from the start do that, but people who are mature enough to realize he was not what they thought and accept it demonstrate one of the higher and more challenging aspects of our species. We don’t like admitting we were wrong. And it gets us into all sorts of trouble.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was going to link that Times piece (it’s due to run in the print version of the NYT in the Week in Review section on Sunday), but you made it unnecessary for me to do so. I read it when it was initially published online and I repeatedly found myself shaking my head: even after absorbing the rationale for why it took until now for Mr. Krein to finally reach his “last straw” position following Tuesday’s spectacle of an informal press conference, I can’t say that I understand it. I don’t think I’ll EVER understand it: how could it have possibly taken this long to realize that Donald Trump is who he repeatedly demonstrated himself to be? (Better late than never, I suppose but….geez…)
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was thinking of that article when I made my comment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Here’s hoping we see many more articles like this.
LikeLike
Honestly…what worries me far more than Donald Trump–and Trump scares me plenty, I assure you–is the fact that a substantial segment of the American electorate (roughly 1/5 of it) still STRONGLY supports him.
Trump himself will be gone sooner (hopefully) or later, whether it be by act of Congress, implementation of the 25th Amendment, the ballot box, a criminal prosecution or something else; but that 20% of the population…?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am reminded that a 1946 survey of Japan revealed that about a quarter of the population thought that the country should have continued fighting. This for people who had endured the utter devastation that the United States had wrought, and who had now had experience to show that the Occupation was not the series of unending appalling atrocities that wartime propaganda had lead them to expect, and who could see that whatever the Occupation government might do, it would at least try to keep Japan recognizably Japanese. And still a quarter of the people thought that war was better.
So that’s stuck with me as the lower bound on how impossibly, irresolutely crazy the population is. If you can’t get more than three-quarters of the population to agree on “don’t fight the Pacific War” you can’t get more than three-quarters of the population to agree on anything.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve kept coming back to this example in the months since. Oddly enough, accepting that a substantial portion of the population is just bat-shit out of common sense has actually helped me move on, and try to love them anyway.
LikeLike