I am ashamed to say I have family and friends who voted for Donald Trump. Why am I embarrassed? Because they are still family and friends of mine and I genuinely feel sorry for them.
Donald Trump’s supporters who continue to apologize or make excuses for him fall into only two categories. The question is, which one do you reside in now.
The first category is merely those who believe in white nationalism and white supremacy. Those people yearn for a time when their white skin was an immediate path to privilege when competing for anything with all those others, those people of color. They do not attempt to hide their correct belief that the founding fathers created this country a particular gender and racial hierarchy. Liberalisation is a threat to them because it created equity based on merit instead of a backward, immoral, irrational, and nonscientific race-based delineation.
The second category is those that are in denial, those that are willfully ignorant. How can anyone of color or any religion but some brand of Christianity support Donald Trump? The President telegraphed who he was for decades. It was the most unhidden secret. Many American, including friends and family, chose to apply some facade of undeserved genuineness. They chose party over morality. They decided their innate sexism was preferable to voting for a woman. They disregarded the hurt that would come to many of those they purport to love for their willful ignorance.
Day after day the embarrassment that is our president speaks. The president’s latest comments referring to some non-majority white countries as shitholes and yearning for immigrants from the blue-eyed white blonds from the likes of Norway did not surprise me. But will those black people and other people of color make him pay for his latest assault on them and their families? Unfortunately for many, the answer is yet unknown.
The President paraded a group of black apologist on stage with him for a disingenuous Martin Luther King speech to address the 50th anniversary of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Sadly, many times in the history of the United States, the oppressed and malign are used for their continued oppression and maligning.
So what are we to do? Keep talking to family and friends. You won’t get to all, but you will reach some. You may even convince enough to make the difference in several precincts and districts. That change alone can swing elections.
The Republican Party has been complicit with Donald Trump. There is radio silence from the leadership. But remember, all they want is Donald Trump’s right hand to continue the pilfer of the American people.
As such, 2018 must be explosive. Progressives must win from city councils, county commissioners, to state houses and senates to the big enchilada, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
It will be hard, but forgive those that have put the country in the dire straights that we are in now. Don’t bother rubbing it in. If we are to repair the decimation that the Republican Party and some Corporatist Democrats have rendered on the American populace, our time is better spent uniting and reversing the evil.
Please check out the Politics Done Right show where I covered this in the second part of the program.