As of this week Gallup lists Donald Trump’s approval rating at 37 percent. That is fascinating, and you have to wonder how that number could fathomably be anywhere above one percent. One percent would make sense, because there’s always That One Guy. You know the guy. Couldn’t pass algebra, drives a forklift or bartends at a seedy bar,desperately craves the wherewithal to discuss politics yet is either too lazy or incapable of actually familiarizing himself with current events, so he becomes the Trump Guy so he can get some attention. He has a daughter he doesn’t see. She was living in Ocala last he heard . He’s the guy who liked Limp Bizkit. The guy who tries to get you to switch insurance companies because he gets a referral fee for each of his friends.
He’s a fucking moron. He’s That One Guy.
Apparently our country is full of That One Guy now. Even if you’re a Republican, you’re really going to proclaim that you have a “favorable opinion” of Donald Trump with a straight face?
What’s mesmerizing about this is that most people, particularly the type of people who “like” Donald Trump, don’t base their opinion on any concrete policy decision or political action. Quite the contrary, you could inform the average Trump supporter that Trump just convinced congress to form a Commission investigating the War Against Tailgating and they’d just nod with knitted eyebrows and say “it’s about time.”
People who view Trump favorably do so based on his rhetoric, which is mostly putrid. Anti-immigrant, anti-healthcare, destroy the environment in the name of profit, monopolize the internet, anti-science, anti-civil rights, pro-torture, anti-abortion, pro-gun, and everything the media says being a lie except for Fox News.
So, let’s say you’re a religious guy who doesn’t believe in abortion and likes collection dozens of guns and has a strong desire to see all abortions be made illegal and is under the false assumption that Democrats want to take away your guns and has kind of a weird hangup about Mexicans.
You still have a favorable opinion of Donald Trump?
Really?
Have you seen Donald Trump? The way that he talks, like an insecure ten year old with limited vocabulary? The way he is so transparently uninformed and full of shit, like he’s just making stuff up as he goes along? The way he is so excruciatingly arrogant? And elitist? How is it that you believe Donald Trump cares about you? Have you seen his hair? Do any of your friends at the bar with the laminated composite wooden panels on the wall have hair like that?
What do you see yourself as having in common with Donald Trump? Was your father a real estate mogul who gifted you millions of dollars and allowed you to take over his business? Do you spend a lot of time in Manhattan eating fifty dollar steaks and hanging out with broken Soviet Bloc models? Do you have any siblings or children who converted to Orthodox Judaism so that they marry hedge fund guys who happened to be of that persuasion? Do you know anyone who has never had to worry about how they’re going to make rent this month? Or how they’re going to afford to get a new transmission on their truck? Or how they’re going to pay that speeding ticket and also their credit card bill?
Do you know that Trump was a registered Democrat for eight years starting in 2001?
The Republican Party has a fairly despicable recent history. For a while there they were pretty virulently anti homosexual. They started a few wars for sport and profit. Openly campaigned for voter suppression laws. Nominated a Chief Supreme Court Justice who is openly anti civil rights. Increasingly conspired with Wall Street to fuck over the American public. Started scapegoating immigrants.
It’s all pretty bad.
This last election even many lifelong Republicans just said they’d had enough. This wasn’t their party anymore. This was a spectacle and a joke.
These somewhat reasonable people had an imaginary line, and they’d been pushing it back further and further for years. From Paul Ryan’s assault on working class people to the hard-to-stomach xenophobia, as Citizens United turned the entire party into a corporate whore house, it was becoming increasingly difficult to rationalize identifying with a party whose nominee was a reality TV guy and whose supporters kept posting troubling memes on Facebook, and then there was the Russia thing.
It has become increasingly apparent that Trump, due to his dealings with Deutsche Bank, was acting as an agent of Russia to discredit Hillary Clinton during the election in exchange for financial favors from Vladamir Putin (if you’re a Trump supporter, he is a Russian dictator.) There’s a lot of proof of this, namely that several members of his transition team and now cabinet took secret meetings with Russian operatives and lied about it to the FBI. Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, if you’re a Trump supporter these names are probably not familiar to you, but if you have time to play fantasy football and watch the entire season of House Hunters surely you can google them in between vape breaks and wiping the Taco Bell stains off of your sectional.
Trump attempted to pressure then FBI Director James Comey into ignoring this evidence. People who follow government or have even seen an episode of West Wing found this troubling, and a special council was appointed by the Department of Justice to see if there are “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
Since there obviously are, many Republicans are now panicking and predictably calling for a purge of the FBI and for Robert Mueller to be fired.
It’s another instance of pushing that line farther and farther back. If this happens, and I think it unfortunately will, at this point you will basically be allied with a far right totalitarian regime which has gone fully rogue, whose last grasp at retaining power is to say that any fact detrimental to them is just not true, and is a conspiracy against them, in the face of all evidence.
Republicans in office will bite their tongues, because they are spineless and care about nothing but staying in office and continuing to do what they do, which is scare dumb people and defrauding the American public.
I have a question: When this happens, at what point can you, as a Trump supporter, admit that the line has gone too far? That it went too far a long time ago?
Must we wait until Trump institutes martial law or fires a missile into PyongYang as a matter of distraction? Until his administration jails journalists investigating his dealings with Russia? Until he passes a law making himself impervious to prosecution? Until he grants The Trump Organization a government contract to build a trillion dollar wall along the southern border?
How far will this have to go until you admit there’s a problem?
GET YOUR AWESOME “It’s Mueller Time” T-shirt today by clicking this link. You will look awesome and be supporting MattRalston.net
