The people who vote for Donald Trump are people who feel forgotten but have hitched their wagon to a man who has little to no concern for their welfare. The only common thing they share is the fear that the face and future of America is changing and spinning out of their control. Race, religion, gender identity, same sex marriage, education. America today looks different than America of 1955 or ’62, and Trump voters are not happy about this and looking to their man to stem the tide. Trump has sensed their discontent and plays upon it well. His rallies are side shows of rambling rhetoric, lies, distortions, mockeries, character assassinations, anything that he knows will stir those juices of hatred, bigotry, frustration, and deep resentment.
His voters are predominantly white, Christian evangelical, straight, rural, and non college educated. Trump cares little for them but has them believing he was on their side and would go to bat for them. It’s tough going upriver with just a canoe and a paddle and that how their lives feel. Trump seemingly speaks their language as he constantly skewers coastal elites, which includes all Democrats in his mind, with his rants about woke culture.
In 2020, Trump amazingly won three times more counties countrywide than Biden who still won the election. Why? Biden’s counties had far more economic clout than Trump’s. That should alarm us all as we creep closer to November, 2024. Nothing much has changed since 2020, at least perception wise, with Trump actually leading Biden in national polls at present. This despite Trump’s facing several serious criminal indictments. Thing is our Constitution didn’t anticipate a presidential candidate being an indicted defendant in a criminal proceeding so they didn’t bother including a clause covering this possibility.
So this brings us to the present possibility of a criminal, convicted of defrauding the American people, being elected president of the United States. Now I have spent a career treating people with serious depression, which I know causes them to generally make bad decisions. So Trump, a narcissistic sociopath and liar could be the leader of a country voted in by predominantly manic depressive people in total denial of their condition. Couple that with our current crises of climate change with carbon emissions increasingly choking us into submission, the advent of authoritarian right wing extremist politicians worldwide, extensive poverty and oppression leading to a crisis in immigration, the mass extinction of glaciers, bees, and birds, insane terrorist wars headed by Russia’s attempt at genocide in Ukraine, an increasingly totalitarian China, and forget about an asteroid wiping out civilization, it’s more likely to be an inside job.
There are efforts afoot to solve these problems, but Trump categorically is against all of them, having succeeded in convincing his followers that he can just turn the clock back to a time when white Christian men ran a very efficient country. A time I guess back to about 1850 or so.
So we, and the rest of the world, are potentially in quite a pickle it seems, to coin a phrase. I could end this screed right here and leave you all hanging from the skin of your teeth. And it is tempting since I haven’t the vaguest idea how to solve this approaching trauma. But solve it we must if we are to survive as a species. Yet, we have solved major problems before using our advanced brains to make decisions leading more to our benefit than our demise. The proof lies in the fact that we are still here, though our prognosis is not favorable. In the past, scientists, engineers, politicians, educators, doctors, even writers, artists, and musicians put their collective heads together and helped our species carry on.
There were individuals who tried to block those efforts like Hitler, Stalin, Putin. And now there is Donald Trump. Are we to allow yet another madman get in the way of our ability to advance our species to the next level of evolution?
That is entirely up to all of us, and our ability to acknowledge that we are a nation of laws, of democratic ideals, and of equality and justice for all. So yes, I will stop here. Besides, it is my bedtime and time to clear my mind of such miasma so I can sleep.
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And that reminds me, I haven’t plugged my book in quite a while. Beating Insomnia: A No-Nonsense Way to Natural Sleep, available at Amazon. It will show you how to improve your sleep without medication. For we’ll need good sleep to cope with what is coming.
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