Response to After Nevada

(See Just Above Sunset: After Nevada)

Once again, to all those Republicans who accuse Donald Trump of being a closet liberal, I have to answer, Hey, I'm a liberal! If Trump is such a liberal, how come I'm not thinking of voting for him?

The number-one main reason I'm not voting for him is because I don't like bullies. And, in fact, that Trump is a bully proves he's not a liberal. Liberals not only aren't bullies, they don't even like bullies; conservatives do, because conservatives worship "strength" (or the appearance of it) and despise "weakness" (or the appearance of it), which is why Donald Trump, bottom line, is a conservative who is selling himself to conservative voters.

And what is it about these Trump conservatives?

These aren’t gullible people. They are mutants – test an atomic bomb and you get those – the premise of all those Japanese Godzilla movies. You get monsters, and Donald Trump was the bomb, dropped in Nevada, just like old times.

Okay, there is something to them being mutant monsters, but monsters made in the image of their bomb, Donald Trump. The point being, just as in those Japanese movies about nuclear-created monsters, Trump and his monstrous followers not only can't be killed off by dropping another atomic bomb on them, as in Charles Cooke's "Anti-Trump Manhattan Project", they are all actually made stronger by doing that. 

One major reason Trump supporters like him is that so many other people don't. In fact, Trump supporters have very little use for the people that other people do like -- namby-pamby panty-waists who all talk the language of political correctness, afraid to offend, afraid to stand for anything, afraid to fight, afraid to show strength. Listen again to Sean Illing in Salon:

A majority of Americans appear wholly uninterested in the actual business of government; they don’t understand it and don’t want to. They have vague feelings about undefined issues and they surrender their votes on emotional grounds to whoever approximates their rage. ...

Trump’s wager was simple: Pretend to be stupid and angry because that’s what stupid and angry people like. He’s held up a mirror to the country, shown us how blind and apish we are. He knew how undiscerning the populace would be, how little they cared about details and facts.

Whether or not Illing is right about Trump "pretending" to be stupid, or that a "majority of Americans ... don’t understand ... and don’t want to", that seems to have nailed the Trump gang, except maybe that "stupid" part. I know some Trump supporters and none of them are stupid, but they sense something wrong with the country and they don't know why, but seem to think it can be put right by just electing some tough guy who cuts through the smokescreen put up by government and all these jaded elected officials who run it.

People who like Trump think this country is in a mess. I could tell them in explicit detail, with facts and figures and charts and graphs and lots of testimonials from experts, that this country is not in a mess, but all they'd get from all of that is that I'm one of those people who doesn't understand what a mess this country is in.

Their logic is bullet-proof and bomb-proof because Donald Trump is the standard by which the legitimacy of all anti-Donald-Trump criticism will be judged. If God himself were to expose Donald Trump as a phony, these people would then look down their noses at God and declare Him a loser, since he's obviously one of the losers who got the country into this mess.

What should be done about Trump?

Probably everything, including that Manhattan Project, since the goal is not really to chip away at his supporters (which I would bet is largely hopeless at this point) but to try to talk folks who have not yet given up on America out of defecting to his side.

But to take the longer view, those Republicans and Democrats (and okay, Independents) who take the political health of the republic seriously have to be concerned about what this Trumpzilla phenomenon means to our future.

Maybe the fact that there are so many Americans who "don’t understand it and don’t want to" can no longer be ignored, and maybe these previously-disinterested non-participants now taking an active part in the electoral process could have the disastrous effect of torpedoing the ship of state. If these people now insist on joining us in governance, maybe we need to somehow do a better job of weeding out the willful ignoramuses. After all, do you really believe the Founders would intentionally create a self-governing "dunceocracy", populated by dunces who "don’t understand ... and don’t want to"?

Although, yes, I still hope Trump becomes the GOP nominee.

And yes, I hear all those "be-careful-what-you-wish-for" arguments about how he could somehow become our next president, but because I still believe in the basic intelligence and righteous integrity of the majority of Americans, I am willing to take the chance that either of the two Democrats could beat him.