Trump has picked Mike Pence. Two old white men can now bond in their hatred of everything that isn’t them.
It’s amazing to me that all the Trump backers have this penchant for grasping non-reality. I watch Trump speak and I see an egomaniacal sociopath who admits no faults, sees no points of view other than his own, understands dishonesty only as it applies to others and ignores any factual evidence on any subject that doesn’t agree with his agenda.
His supporters are exposed to the same Trump that the rest of us see but they seem to only absorb the concept that he is going to help them get out of the morass of their failed lives. Trump screams that he is going to make America great again, and they believe him despite the evidence that he has failed at everything except putting his name on buildings he no longer owns.
Yes, Trump is a forceful guy. All bullies are, until someone pushes back. But he uses this forcefulness instead of using his head. This truck incident in Nice has him raving about declaring was on ISIS but the more the authorities in France find out about the guy who drove the truck the less it seems related to ISIS. Sure ISIUS has taken credit but they take credit every time some kid steals an ice cream cone. The guy was an unstable petty criminal. It may turn out that he is a terrorist or it may turn out that he’s just a nut. Either way, Trump, if he were president, would already have carpet-bombed Syria without actually understanding why. It is the reaction of the spoiled and immature child, to want to lash out at anyone in the vicinity when something goes wrong, just as Bush did when he invaded Iraq looking for WMD’s that didn’t exist. Or was it oil he was looking for? Regardless, we didn’t get either.
Trump sounds like he is looking for a war to fight. But is he? Or is he just making the kind of noise bullies normally make to get attention. This coward who ducked the draft with the help of his father’s money keeps talking about declaring war, but does he actually have the guts to send other people’s kids to get killed in some foreign land? Is he dumb enough to do it for no good reason?
When Egypt air went down he started rattling sabers. Now he’s rattling napalm. So far neither the plane nor Nice has been attributed to ISIS but Trump doesn’t care. He knows that an angry warlike attitude will get him votes from the dumb. I call them dumb because it’s precisely their kids that will be going someplace in which we have no national interest, just to get killed.
And now it seems that Pence, always considered one of the less intelligent conservatives, has picked up the cudgel. Watched him talking this morning about Trump protecting this country and Hillary just continuing Obama’s failed policies. I know politicians lie in speeches, always have and always will, but there should be some element of factual basis even beneath the biggest lies. When Pence speaks of this administration’s failed foreign and economic policies what is he talking about? Is he referring to the factual truth that Obama has spent almost eight years trying to put back together the world that Bush and Cheney blew apart or is he referring to the economic fact that Obama has spent those same years pulling America out of the depression that Bush/Cheney drove it into?
Trump and Pence and all the other loser GOP bull shitters can create any alternate reality they want, but when it comes down to the real world, this country would be pushing third world status if we had not elected a Democrat to the White House in 2008 and kept one there in 2012. The Republicans can make all the noise hey want about how we have to make America great again, but the real reality, the one that people have to live with, not the one they fantasize about, is that right now, this is he greatest nation on the planet and the GOP had nothing to do with getting it there. We are where we are despite the failures of the GOP to function as national leaders from 2000 to 2008 or the worse failure of them to function as a loyal opposition since.
Leslie Stahal interviewed both Trump and Pence on 60 Minutes this week and it became abundantly clear that Pence is just along for the ride. Trump had to pick a VP so he did, strictly for ceremonial purposes. Despite the fact tat he has some of the least intelligent positions espoused by Homo erectus, Pence seems to be a nice enough guy, who is firmly imbedded in the worst evidences of the Christian Right. Economically he is seriously conservative, backing all the policies that have made the Republican Party an economic disaster for the working people of this country, going all the way back to Lincoln.
Socially, his Christian policies are so reductive as to be borderline unconstitutional. This is a man who has allowed his religious beliefs to inform his political responsibility, creating a 21st century Cotton Mather. So what we are looking at in this team is a drooling, ego driven, sociopath, leading around an uptight religious fugitive from The Crucible.
Stahal asked many questions of the pair. Not too many were answered, none glibly. She had a tough time getting any answers out of Pence, mainly because, as long as a camera is rolling, Trump can’t control his instincts long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise. He kept interrupting Pence, who rarely got a chance to finish an answer.
All one had to do was watch this interview and one immediately had the answer to why Trump had not picked Christie or Gingrich as his running mate. They both take up way too much space. They are both volatile speakers who demand their own airtime and have their own opinions, something that Trump, apparently, cannot abide, not even when they agree with his.
Under this arrangement, Pence will disappear gracefully into the background and Trump will be free to continue his bombastic, ego gratifying, campaign of self- aggrandizement. Those that are waiting for Trump to develop some plan of governance only have to have watched as Stahal asked Trump about his phony declaration of war on ISIS.
Would he send in troops? Well, he doesn’t seem to know or understand what that would entail. He mumbles something about NATO and how they haven’t been doing their share. But what about us, what would we do? It seems that we would be very forceful; but how does that differ from what Obama, who he calls ineffectual, is doing? Well, he doesn’t seem to have an answer to that one or to how you declare war on something that isn’t a country. How do you know when you’ve won? Like al Qaeda, they just vanish into the shadows and keep fighting.
The fact is that Trump has no answers to give, only noise to make. Pence is an inconvenience, dictated by the format of government that demands a President have a Vice-President in the eventuality that he cannot continue in office. They are supposed to form a team to move the goals of the nation forward. But Trump isn’t a team player. He is so ego driven that it is unimaginable for him to accept the possibility of anyone but himself having anything like a good idea.
When asked by Stahal if he would be able to advise Trump on his ill-advised name calling, Pence tried to answer but Trump, jumped him, saying that he would certainly listen to Mike but that he would never apologize for anything he has said or done. Of course not! An apology would take strength of character, something that Trump, the bully, mistakes for weakness. Trump doesn’t have character. He is a character and that is his tragic flaw. He is a creation of the cheap entertainment epitomized by Reality TV. A spoiled rich kid who coasted on his old man’s shirt tails through a business rife with dishonesty and then went on to fail at almost everything else in the business world that he has touched.
Trump stands in front of huge crowds and extolls the virtues of a philosophy that dictates cheating in business deals and taking advantage of tax breaks; shipping jobs overseas to make a bigger profit at the expense of American workers, conning naive strivers with phony get rich quick schemes and all the while, bragging about what he is doing. He thinks that his way of life and business are good because he is rich. He thinks it’s the way we all should act towards each other. He thinks that we all need a petty con man and grifter in the White House. He is dead wrong. It behooves this nation to prove that.