Charlie, I don’t have any contact with people who still think it’s a positive thing that Trump is president, so bear with me. I'd really like to understand where you and other Trump supporters are coming from.
Let’s say for discussion sake that Trump’s view on torture is not a problem, and that his approach to fixing things economically for people who need it is going in the right direction and is going to help them financially and jobs-wise in ways they’ve been wanting for a while now.
Even apart from those things, and even if they are (in your view) things in his favor, how then do you and others live with the fact that Trump:
- cannot possibly avoid entangling his business interests with his politics
- has 8 members of his Cabinet whose combined assets equals the total assets of the bottom third (or is it half?) of the U.S. people
- befriends Putin, and compliments him in preference to his own country’s intelligence agencies
- suggests that NATO is obsolete even though his own Defense Secretary says it may be the most successful alliance in history, and one that aided the U.S. greatly after 9/11
- denies climate change and is undoing whatever progress we’ve made to wean our economy from fossil fuels and coal
- tangibly incites hatred, prejudice, and xenophobia
- suppresses opposing views
- attacks the free press, without which democratic society is impossible
- lashes out inappropriately at the slightest provocation or criticism, even though every president in history has received criticism every single day of the presidency
?
Again, even if you and other Trump supporters are in agreement with the first things I mentioned, do you feel that those positives outweigh the negatives I’ve listed and the great damage he can do to the U.S. and the world?
I assume you have squared this with your conscience, since you obviously think about these things, and I am genuinely curious to hear how you do it. I’m not being polemical here--I’m curious, and honestly, utterly bewildered how it’s possible to believe that the negatives are worth taking on board for four to eight years.
I’ll end this post by saying that I have working-class friends and family members whose job situation has sucked for a long time, and they still hate Trump--with a passion--for the reasons I stated. So there has to be something else besides jobs and money that makes it possible for other people to think that Trump’s positives outweigh the negatives. What are they, for you and others you know?
Again, what I'm trying to get is not just what's good about Trump, according to you, but how the bad things are acceptable, as though they can't cause more damage than the good things bring good.