By Donald A. Collins | 21 October 2024
Church and State
To any normal person who watched the performance of Donald Trump over the years, even before his Presidency, it must be obvious that his ethical behavior took him to take any action whether legal or illegal to make him a “winner”!
Anyone watching the two-hour September 24th PBS Frontline program comparing the two Presidential candidates saw the often reiterated story of Trump’s convictions both as a felon and as the manager of his family’s corporation!
Most enlightening is the book, Lucky Loser, which got the Pulitzer Prize for its impeccable reporting on his false reputation as a success.
Here are stated examples of his lying during his Presidency but that congenital trait has dominated his behavior all his adult life.
Here’s the link.
"Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner’s book, which builds on their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, is much more than an excavation of the former president’s tax returns."
Donald Trump’s financial failures are stunning. ‘Lucky Loser’ has the receipts. https://t.co/6mb9FafhL0
— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) October 21, 2024
Puzzling to me is the absurdity that anyone can buy anything Trump offers. This mystery is beautifully addressed in a 9/25/24 NY Times option column by Thomas Edsall entitled “The Real Trump Mystery” which begins
How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?
The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.
Trump has made it clear that in a second term he would undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.
John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered one piece of the puzzle, addressing the question, “Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?” Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:
If there’s one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, it’s who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them. Only in this case, I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support. I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support. Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month. Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”
I’m talking about Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has two million listeners a week, and Jones was said in 2011 to have a larger online presence than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
I’m talking about the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million and on whose programs Trump intermittently served as a kind of special guest villain in the manner of a villain on the 1960s “Batman” show.
I’m talking about American Media, the company that owns The National Enquirer, The Star, The Sun and The Weekly World News, run by Trump’s close friend David Pecker; the combined weekly circulation of its publications is well in excess of two million.
Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic Parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake fights they know in their hearts were fixed.
The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.
In “Popular Reactions to Donald Trump’s Indictments and Trials and Their Implications for the 2024 Election,” Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argued that this denial — “motivated ignorance reinforced by right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”
Read the entire column here.
Thomas @Edsall asks the only questions that matter:
“How is it possible that Donald Trump has a chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen to deny the worst president in American history?”https://t.co/etqewmiWX8
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) September 25, 2024
What doesn’t he offer? The list is long but here are just a few major shortcomings.
Total lack of Integrity
Belief in Adherence to our Constitution
Concern for all citizens not just the Elon Musks
Insuring safe Abortion and contraceptive Choice for women
Assuring Democratic Governance
Enhancing Gun Safety
Continuing to support a strong Pro NATO alliance
Continuing full Ukraine support
Belief and support of solving the environmental crisis
We now have a person of integrity and full competence to vote for; I can only pray for deliverance from the tentacles of another Trump term.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.“What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”: https://t.co/fHuh0CG6JD
“We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”: https://t.co/TA4j7cp1tE
“From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”: https://t.co/lkC2t3E1A9 pic.twitter.com/bQsL2mLBcO— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) November 1, 2021
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