I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I can remember. That is, my feelings about how I should look at and treat those who voted for Li’l Duce.
The night he was elected the first time, back in 2016, I wrote on FB, “America, you disgust me.”
That hasn’t changed. There are some 75 million voters in this holy land who’ve consistently demonstrated they don’t give the slightest damn that their candidate once mocked a disabled person.
If your kid did that while talking about a disabled classmate, you’d whack him one. A grown man did it and has been elected President of the United States of America twice.
I’ve detested Donald Trump since the mid-1980s when he was first making waves as the playboy real estate magnate of New York City. The magazines Vanity Fair, New York, and Spy covered him like a blanket back then, portraying him as a psychologically damaged clown — which he is. In fact, back then I used to say if I were king I’d decree that every single human being has to scrub his or her own toilet. It’d be the ultimate and just imposition of humility on those who make “little people” do those kinds of things for them. Every time I said it, I had Donald Trump in mind.
When he became a presidential candidate, I thought his campaign would be comic relief during the endless 2016 election cycle. Then came the dark night of November 8th and 9th nearly a decade ago.
Yeah. I’m still disgusted.
I’ve struggled to think and do the right things vis à vis the MAGA cult and the few tens of millions more who weren’t similarly deluded or outright racist/misogynist/transphobic/white supremacist/xenophobic/just plain lunkheaded but voted for him because prices were high, or they wanted to see “change,” or whatever bullshit reasoning they gaseously expelled from the wrong orifice.
The cultists, I quickly concluded, were beyond me. No way could I ever understand or hope to engage them. I remember that street corner preacher who used to rant about the abomination of homosexuality up and down State Street in Chicago’s Loop, waving his Bible and using a mic and portable amp. No one ever thought to stop and say, My good man, what say we have ourselves a lively debate on the topic?
What would be the use?
Same with the MAGA cult.
But how about those few tens of millions who felt the American system is broken and that’s why they pulled the lever for Caligu-Lite? Perhaps I could — perhaps I should — try to reason with them. Perhaps we all should. After all, I think the American system is broken, too. We’ve got common ground.
Yet, every time Li’l Duce pulls off one of his Führer-esque stunts — and they seem to be pouring down on us like a summer thunderstorm now — I find that nice-guy, bipartisan, kumbaya approach to Trump voters harder and harder to pretend to. Those voters’ll tell me I’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, that comparing him to Hitler is the primary symptom thereof, but, for pity’s sake, the dude’s got Hitler’s playbook down, people.
It’s a struggle, I tell you.
