Divide And Conquer

How divided are we? Polls show 80% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans “believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” I’m in the first group. The Republicans I know personally are in the 20% of their side, but they’re actual conservatives, not MAGA Republicans, so it doesn’t really count. They’re inquisitive and well-informed. 

The findings are unsurprising. But here’s the thing: Democrats’ view is reality-based, while Republicans’ is based on deliberate misinformation, plus a bucketful of Q. It’s easy to prove.

This past weekend, for example, Trump claimed to his adoring crowd that Biden’s is a communist regime. Neither he nor his idolaters, we conclude, have a clue what communism is. Well, maybe Trump knows; but he doesn’t care, as long as he can sucker the ovine; for them, it’s because they believe every Trumpofoxian lie they hear and aren’t inclined to check, much less know how. 

Were it true, of course, they’d be right. Truth, though: Further from the, it couldn’t be. Nonetheless, they’re prepared to end America in order to keep Democrats from ending America. Destroy the village to save it, like Vietnam. 

Trump also opined that certain journalists should be summarily incarcerated and, subtle as only he can be, subjected to prison rape till they reveal their sources. Oh, how they laughed and cheered. Are Democrats wrong to find this ominous? 

More: Republican influencers are no longer pretending to hide their antisemitism. After his crazy “death to Jews” remarks, Kanye “Ye of little sanity” West has been featured on Tucker Carlson’s show, as well as those of other right-wing screamers. Trump, too, made despicable threats to Jews around the same time. Need we discuss Margorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert in that regard? Likewise, attacks on Jews and synagogues are increasing alarmingly. If these things have been happening for centuries, it’s only now (“good people on both sides”) that they’ve been given “presidential” imprimatur and fawning airtime on right-wing “news” media. 

And how about this: in Arizona, body-armor-wearing, heavily-armed, night-vision device-using “poll watchers” have been intimidating voters dropping off their ballots. Calling them “mules,” a la the execrable Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked conspiracy-promoting movie. Who doubts those guys believe Democrats will destroy America? Like most Republicans, they’re believers in Trump’s election lies. And they’re but a small sample among many, ready and “trained” to do the same, country-wide.

It harkens to post-Civil War poll-watching behavior in the South when Blacks began voting; and it comes from the same disturbing disposition. Is it unrealistic to think that, if such people and the ones they elect are put in charge, it will end the American experiment? It should bump the 80% to 100. 

Which party’s candidates say they’ll only accept election results if they win? Which one is banning books? Demanding silence on gender issues? Turning women and their doctors into felons, neighbors into informers? Claiming teaching America’s full history is intended to make white children feel guilty? Perpetuating lies about “grooming” children to become gay? Only one side believes Tucker when he calls the other side “a child sacrifice cult,” and makes him the top cable “news” “personality.”

Based on such hyperbolic mendacity, of course Trumpists think Democrats would end America. Of course they’d vote for an unqualified liar like Herschel Walker or a carpetbagging medical quack like Mehmet Oz. And of course Democrats would find such easy and successful indoctrination disquieting.

And what is it about Republicans and their love of America’s obvious enemy, Vlad the Assailer Putin, even in the face of his horrifying war crimes? Kevin McCarthy says when Trumpublicans take over, money for Ukraine will be on the chopping block. Is that a signal to “Russia, if you’re listening” to help R candidates, as they did for Trump, rewarded by getting Ukraine? Where are American values in that? Where is its future?

Do they not threaten to cut Medicare and Social Security? Do they not want more top-heavy tax cuts, even after Trump’s supercharged the deficit, and after the UK’s stunning economic crash when its not-ready-for-Prime Minister did just that, to effusive, pre-crash praise from Republicans? Are they not ignoring the fact that the budget deficit dropped by $1.2 billion this year? Or that the rate of inflation in the US isn’t even in the top ten worldwide? Are they lying about Democrats raising taxes on middle-income workers? 

Oh, but “woke” liberals support tax and voting fairness, women’s rights, healthcare for all, protecting minorities, helping impoverished Americans and desperate asylum-seekers. They deny vaccines are microchipped. Even worse: they care about climate change.

If that’s “woke,” who’d want to remain asleep?

Worth A Thousand Words

If a single picture captures Trump’s America, it’s one showing those duped Trumpists blocking and intimidating early voters in Virginia. It’s all there: ignorance, anger, carefully coordinated indoctrination swallowed whole. Mob mentality. Enthusiastic lawlessness. Fascism adjacent.  

They arrived as if called to prayer. To them, the picture attests, MAGA means renouncing the Constitution, about which they and Trump have never really cared. It confirms how close we are to civil war, as Trump repeatedly declines to agree to peaceful transition if he loses. He’d rather see our country burn. Every American should decry this undisguised intent to overthrow democracy. Why is it only Democrats? 

Recall Trump’s demands at his fakery-fests: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” he ordered the gratefully misinformed mob. And they did. 

Accomplishing what? Preventing the fabricated “thieving and stealing and robbing” that people waiting in line would have been doing if they, the red-hatted submissives, weren’t surveilling them? Were they hoping to scare legitimate voters away, patriotically? Is that their en-greatened America? 

Had they been inside, what do they think they’d have witnessed? Between signing in, casting votes, and leaving, how would voters have enfleshed Trump’s hallucinations? Irrelevant: Trump is mobilizing tens of thousands more poll “watchers” to go forth and threaten.

It’s a nutcase nutshell. A psychopathic “president,” to convince himself and his supporters that if he loses, it’d be from Democrats’ skullduggery, has been spinning a deadly conspiratorial web for months. Echoed by the complicit Attorney General of Trump and colluding media multimillionaires, belief in non-existent treachery is digesting Trumpists’ brains like Naegleria fowleri. 

If it weren’t so pathetic, it’d be laughable. Instead, it’s an intentionally lit fuse, burning with Trump’s lies about climate change, Russia, Covid-19, even Justice Ginsburg; and his nauseating praise, this week, of violence against journalists. He’s brought us to the brink. 

Dealing with Trumpists, liberals are disadvantaged. Being liberal, they still look for occasionally normal behavior and decency from the other side. From adherents, if not leaders. Seeing a “president” lying so blatantly, his Attorney General abdicating responsibility to the law, people so impenetrably manipulated by an American Putin, is confounding. It’s not of their world. 

Take surgery as a metaphor: after a decade in practice, there was no operation I did exactly as taught. Knowledge progresses. I read research publications, attended meetings, and, with experience, developed my own innovations. It’s a non-political example of liberalism. Who’d want doctors who refused to learn beyond the end of formal education? It’s unthinkable. 

Yet it perfectly describes Trumpists: minds gaping wide to deception, hermetic to reevaluating inculcated beliefs. People outside that circle are unused to such intransigence. Countering mindless acceptance of Trump’s mendacity with facts, liberals have found, is a frustrating waste of effort. People accustomed to open-minded discourse lack the tools, if any there are, to awaken closed-minded Trumpists to the danger ahead. Nor are liberals capable of Trumpic amounts of lying. No undamaged humans are. 

Like that photograph, Republicans’ weapons-grade hypocrisy following Justice Ginsberg’s death reveals it, too. All pretense of integrity abandoned, they’re acting in their own and their donors’ interest, not yours. Public opinion, which opposes virtually all their policies, including the timing of RBG’s replacement, is of even less concern to them than greenhouse gases or properly-vetted vaccines.

To pre-conditioned Trumpists, the SCOTUS fight is about abortion. For flip-flopping Republicans, though, as Senator Whitehouse explained this week, it’s about the demands of corporate dark-money paymasters: tipping the law to them rather than their employees; deregulation, no matter the consequences; approving vote-suppression to retain minority control. Promising retribution to senators standing in his way, Trump just admitted, out loud, that for him it’s about creating a Court that will help him steal the election. 

Rehearsing a post-election coup granting unlimited power, he’s already acting the role. Having declared Seattle, Portland, and NYC “anarchist jurisdictions,” to justify punishing mayors he fears, Trump intends to withhold federal funding. Same with denying help to burning western states, which, ironically, contain more Trump voters than the total of several states he won. Not an issue: he considers them “disgusting.”

That picture is everything. Born of the damaged mind of a pernicious “president,” those unthinking Virginians are ready for revolution, the potential first wave of a country-wide uprising. Despicable as violent demonstrations are – and they are -- they’re nothing compared to millions of Trumpofoxified Americans, ready to take it all down, for the lies of a malignant, self-absorbed charlatan.