ericgrimsrud

Why does a person like Donald Trump get any support from the citizens of the USA? By most of our time-honored standards for human behavior, President Trump has come up decidedly short. He has repeatedly shown himself to be little more than a superficial salesman whose only interest is “making a deal” that is beneficial to himself without a detectable level of concern for the citizens of our country whose interests he promised to serve. Nor has he shown any respect for our time-honored relationships with the other democracies of the world. The people whose interests he has served tend to be those of the criminal element in the USA and the autocratic leaders of other countries, such as the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. The primary goal of Trump and those rouge nations is to weaken the democracies. In addition, President Trump appears to believe that his prospects for retaining the highest office of our country will be facilitated by inflicting as much damage as he can to our core democratic values. Thus, he considers any branch of our government that retains a high regard for the rule of law to constitute a threat to his personal control.   

In an attempt to get more Americans on his side, President Trump has held a mirror up to our faces and tried to show that “we are the same as him”, no better or worse. For example, he has tried to demonstrate that we are every bit as much polluters of the environment as he is.  That is, he has encouraged us to increase our use of fossil fuels – without getting much pushback from the typical American who does, indeed, have a high carbon footprint.  By challenging us in this manner he is attempting to show that the character of our President should not be given the highest priority by the voters because the average American is just as unlikely to be dedicated to actually addressing many of these environmental issues as he is. This nefarious point of view is illustrated in the following example.  

President Trump has apparently been somewhat better supported by the rural portions of the USA than by the urban portions. Therefore, I have made some effort to learn why that is by monitoring reports from the rural sectors.  In doing so, I found that a primary reason for some favorable rural views of Trump is related his unsubstantiated promise that the prices of the farmer’s produce, such as wheat, will be higher under his presidency. Compared to that issue, that of character, to many, seems to be of little importance.  This potential reason for supporting Trump is disturbing in that the highest regard is not reserved for the preservation of our democratic principles. This simple example helps one understand why the supreme panderer of our times, Donald Trump, is able to get so many votes in our American political system even though he has no respect for it or the group he is conning and only wants to manipulate our system for his personal advantage.

Hopefully, by November, all Americans will come to see Donald Trump as the wrecking ball he is, and not the builder he claims to be, and will deny him further access to our democracy.  In short, please do not bet the farm on this guy.