Suckers and Losers

The Atlantic story on Donald Trump and his disparagement of our Military would be shocking if it was written about any other president.  With Trump it’s just one more un-presidential move, just one more sub-human flap by a creature completely without intelligence, judgment or any sense of honor, duty or empathy.

But with Trump there’s another element and it involves those who continue to follow this orange ape that has continually proven by his own words and actions, that he isn’t qualified to clean toilets let alone be president. The question is, why do they continue to follow him? What is it that allows them to ignore any sense of decency, patriotism or shame that should drive them away from this insult to humanity?

I’ve been looking into this question for quite some time now and it appears to have more answers than I had anticipated. The main group that follows this thing that walks like a man is made up of the under educated white working class. This is a group that has been cheated and lied to by an almost uninterrupted line of politicians that goes all the way back to Harry Truman. In 2016 they gave up on politicians and elected a candidate with no political background, one who promised to fulfill all their worst desires and then proceeded to fulfill none. Now, when they are in a position to undo the harm they have done, they seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to admit that yet again they have made the wrong choice and yes, they are willing to go down with the ship and take America down with them. These are the people who are too dumb to understand the problem and too hardheaded to see a solution.

The second largest group is made up of those who understand and empathize with Trump’s obvious position of nothing having any value unless it produces a financial reward. This is part of the reason why he feels as he does about the military. He simply cannot understand why anyone would risk their life for the meager salaries we pay our fighters and that is why he considers heroes who gave their lives for their country to be suckers and losers. This is partly a group that is made up of second-generation money, like Trump himself. These are the rich, spoiled and entitled who have been raised to believe that there is little or no value to anything that doesn’t have a price tag on it. A large percentage of them seem to make their money in industries where money is the only product, where nothing is made and sold but money.  They have little understanding and less interest in how the rest of the world survives. They, like the McCloskey’s, will stand behind the walls of their gated communities with their automatic weapons, completely unaware and uninterested in the problems that Trump is causing in the rest of the world. As long as their yachts, their vacation homes and their stock market portfolios are safe they will stick with Trump to the very end.

There is another group that skims the periphery of the last group but always surprises me by their inclusion; and that is the significant number of doctors that voted for Trump in 2016 and will again in November. We always think of the medical profession as dedicated men and woman who give their all for those of us in danger and for the most part that’s true. It was vividly illustrated during the pandemic by the numbers of medical people that left the comfort and safety of their own practices and traveled to the most dangerous areas of infection to help those who were being overwhelmed by the coronavirus.

Unfortunately there is also a percentage of doctors that are in it for nothing but the money and this group has been evident by their opposition to any kind of viable, single payer healthcare. That means that Trump is their hero and that his opposition to universal healthcare is the only aspect of his presidency that they care about. Despite their recognition of all Trump’s other failures, they will vote their wallets above all else.

Still another group is those that comprise the super rich, whose family fortunes are built on the production of some substance that will harm the earth and the people on it even while it is making the family enormously rich. This bunch is made up of those who produce things like oil, coal, gas, weapons, tobacco, sugar, illegal and sometimes-legal drugs and even things like diamonds. This group spends billions on keeping their dangerous and often-deadly products on the market despite the negative effects they have on the planet and now they want the payback.

It should be understood that all these groups except the first give away large sums of money to all kinds of deserving causes but the fact that they rarely do it anonymously is an indication that they allocate even their charitable giving for self-aggrandizing purposes.  When someone puts their name on a building at Lincoln Center they may be helping the arts but they are really establishing a brand.

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In 1974 Ronald Reagan lowered the income tax on millionaires from 70% to 28%. Then he established an income tax on Social Security to make up for the lost income, thereby defining the Republican concept of fiscal conservatism.

In the 1980’s George HW Bush with the help of Ollie North created the Iran Contra scandal, which led to the creation of drug empires all over Central and South America, with which we are still dealing.

In 2003 George W Bush with the mentoring of Dick Cheney, started a war in Iraq for no reason and then in 2008 through his limiting of corporate regulation he crashed the economy, leading to the worst depression since 1929.

In 2016 Donald Trump was elected and immediately tried to build a wall to keep out immigrants who were no longer coming to this country. That failed, so he started ripping immigrant babies from their jailed mothers. Then he imposed tariffs on China that led to the bankruptcy of half the farmers in America. His love letters to Kim Jong Un have resulted in North Korea having the nuclear capability to strike America and now he has ignored the COVID-19 pandemic long enough for it to cause over 185,000 deaths in this country, which has led to the crash of the Obama created economy that Trump inherited and as a final touch, he has insulted our entire military.

Maybe it would be a good idea if we didn’t elect any more Republicans for a while.

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It’s bad enough that Donald Trump is vain, egotistical and brute stupid but it’s even worse that his aides haven’t figured out a way to disguise this from the public. Last weekend Kellyanne Conway got on the tube and admitted what Trump had been alluding to all along, that the Retrumplicans loved the violent demonstrations because that made little old ladies in Akron panic and vote for Trump. Almost on her heels Mark Meadows was dumb enough to admit what Trump has been saying for months; that he only thinks of certain GOP states as his America. We all know that the president is supposed to understand or at least give lip service to being the president of all America.

Now suppose we extend that concept of “Trump’s America.” Trump wins another Electoral College election. Not even in fantasy- land will he ever get close to a majority of the votes. I know it’s as depressing a thought as could be imagined, but just suppose. Does that mean that since Trump only wants to be president of the states that vote for him, it would be okay for Biden to be president of the states that voted for him? That would be an interesting breakdown when all the northeast, all the West Coast, some of the Midwest and a couple of other states, as they did in Trump’s last win, now go for Biden. That would leave Biden with about 184 million of the population, all the financial services, entertainment business, computer technology, most of the manufacturing and about 3/4ths of the money. But that’s okay. Donald would still have all the out of work coal miners, the farmers that had been bankrupted by his tariffs, the manufacturing workers that have been replaced by robots and a bunch of irate Florida Cubanos who were still pissed at Castro for throwing that crook Batista out of Cuba.

I know we shouldn’t even think about dividing America but some of us just get tired of carrying all those stupid, useless, MAGA clowns on our backs while all they do is rant about blacks and immigrants taking their jobs, while they collect welfare and guzzle beer.