It takes only two things to keep people in chains:
The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders.
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This is a note to my friends on the right.
I lean toward the left, but we all are Americans. Fundamentally, we have similar needs and wants, and that is why I call you “friends.”
I have a sincere question: Why do you so strenuously support Donald Trump?
Yes, I understand. You dislike Hillary. Frankly, I don’t like her myself. I feel she is arrogant and phony. I just wish she would shut up and go far away.
And yes, I get it. You can’t stand Obama. I don’t like him much, either. I feel he is a weakling and not a real Democrat — much too cozy with the banksters and surely not the strong leader I had hoped for.
And I even understand that you don’t like progressives. You may feel they are a bunch of lazy “takers,” who don’t even have the decency to work for their bread. I disagree, but I understand your feelings and sometimes even empathize.
In our basics, we aren’t so far apart, which is why I wonder why you support Trump.
You know he is a coward and a blowhard. He bans transgenders from the military. They are brave people who want to defend our nation, while Trump dodged the draft by faking a heel spur. He bans them?
It’s not “fake news.” It’s the real Trump.
He told you he had plans to “make America great, again,” but he actually had no plans at all. He just had words of bravado.
He is a compulsive cheat, a liar who cheated poor students at his Trump “University,” cheated on his wives, cheated his creditors, cheated his employees out of their wages, cheated you by promising you he would “drain the swamp,” then hired his friends, the billionaire banker swamp creatures who caused the Great Recession.
These are the facts Trump calls “fake news.”
If the image of a brave, honest John Wayne-type character is the quintessential idea of an American hero, Trump is the anti-Wayne. Trump is a mean, immoral bully, who delights in making life difficult for powerless people like gays, Mexicans, and Muslim immigrants, even the little children of immigrants.
Trump is not a conservative. He is not even a Republican. He is the ultimate RINO. True conservatives have no respect for Trump. They would be embarrassed to defend him
He is a finger pointer, who takes credit for things he hasn’t done, and blames others for his own mistakes. He cares only for himself, not for you, not for America.
There is no kindness or compassion in his soul. He is a hate monger, a divider, a sociopath. He is not a President who makes us proud. Instead, he sows fear.
In the past, we bravely saved the people of the world from dictators. Now we fearfully crouch behind walls, and wish to build ever-bigger walls. But no wall will be big enough to ease our nightmares. With Trump as our leader, there always will need to be a bigger wall.
We no longer are admired in foreign lands. We have been turned into the world’s pariahs.
Trump is a dictator wannabe, and by defending him, we encourage not just him but future dictators. Bad people, who see his electoral success and the backing of Americans, will emulate him, hoping to become our leaders, and one day we will learn we have encouraged a mean dictatorship.
Trump is a little man, who while hiding beneath his covers in the dark of night, sends little tweets with misspelled attacks at anyone, right, left, or center, who has the temerity to be truthful about his many faults.
I understand why you may feel the country has been on the wrong course. I truly do. I agree in many ways. And perhaps you have felt that any change is better than no change at all. Desperate people take desperate measures.
But I urge you to take a step back and look at our America with clear eyes. Much needs to be changed, but we will not benefit; we will not improve; we will not become “great again” by supporting a clearly inferior, dishonest, incompetent, egocentric fraud.
Think now of the people whom you feel have made America great. Think of their characteristics and what made Americans admired around the world. Think of the kind of leader who would make you proud to travel to foreign lands and announce, “I am an American.”
Then demand that from our leaders. There are better Americans, better conservatives, better Republicans, even better Democrats.
We Americans should not be represented by an embarrassment. We shouldn’t follow the worst, most inept, mean-spirited windbag among us.
We are not a 3rd-rate, banana dictatorship. We are America.
You don’t need to settle for less.
You deserve better. Demand better.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
Rodger, this is outstanding!
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Thanks, Tip,
Trump followers are not bad people. Not at all. Most of them are victims of the rich, and the widening gap between the rich and the rest.
Like cancer patients, who in their desperation will believe any quack and try any fake cure, Trump backers want so desperately to believe he will help them, they will ignore the obvious: That he is a liar and a charlatan.
One only can empathize and sympathize with these innocent people.
Just as I would tell cancer patients not to deceive themselves with medicinal frauds, I tell Trump backers not to deceive themselves political frauds.
In both cases, the frauds actually worsen the situation, rather than helping.
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Playing to his base’? What about the rest of us?
I’m hearing some troubling notions from those who voted on the losing side of a presidential election.
Donald J. Trump, some of them are saying, “is not my president. I didn’t vote the guy and he ain’t my president.”
At the risk of sounding sanctimonious and self-righteous, I’d like to offer a rebuke to that sentiment.
I didn’t vote for him, either. I detest the notion that he is our 45th president of the United States. My visceral loathing of him is deeper than anything I’ve felt for any of his predecessors.
He is my president, though.
Why? Because as president he will offer policy prescriptions that affect every American. I’m one of ’em.
I intend to fight him whenever I can through It’s my right as an American to speak my mind and to protest what my government is doing. I will do so vigorously when the moment presents itself — and so far, those moments are coming with stunning frequency.
Trump is my president, nevertheless.
This “ain’t my president” mantra is far from new. Republicans/conservatives yapped the same nonsense when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. Democrats/liberals yammered the same lame refrain when George W. Bush was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004. You can go back as far as you want in history and dig up statements from those who said the very same thing about past presidents.
Me? My inclination — no matter the outcome — has been to accept the result. I might not endorse it. Sure, I’ve swallowed hard plenty since the Nov. 8 election. I’ve done so before.
I won’t, though, accept the idea that the man Trump) who took the oath of office isn’t my president.
I detest the notion of Trump having the word “President” stated and/or written with his name. I also reserve the right to be critical — even harshly so — of my president.
I’m a bit slow to pick up the beat on this, so I’ll acknowledge that right up front.
It’s been clear for a quite a while that Donald John Trump Sr. is a Republican In Name Only. Yep, he’s a RINO. He owns the pejorative term that true-blue Republicans hang on imposters, those who pose as members of the GOP.
The most glaring piece of recent evidence comes from the dozen or so Republican U.S. senators who are lining up behind Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who’s embroiled in a dispute with the president.
Trump blames McConnell for every legislative failure that’s come along. He has chastised at various times the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (another Republican), Sen. John McCain (he’s an R, too), and the attorney general of the United States, Jeff Sessions (a former Republican U.S. senator).
Oh, sure, he’s gone after Democrats as well.
The president, though, is playing exclusively to the 35 percent or so of Americans — his political “base” — who continue to stand by their man. They adore the president not because he’s a Republican, but because he, um, “tells it like it is.”
Hmm. It just occurs to me: They love Trump for the very same reasons millions of other Americans — including yours truly — detest him.
The man has no ideological grounding. He doesn’t have a core set of principles. He has no understanding of government, nor any interest in learning about it.
Trump ran for president as a “populist,” a friend of the Little Guy. Yet he jets off to his decadent resort properties in Florida and New Jersey where, I’m quite sure, he spends zero time talking up close with rank-and-file middle Americans who are the only political allies left on whom the president can count.
The president’s appeal has nothing to do with party, or ideology, or governing principle. The president is a RINO. Pure and simple
Part of Trump’s big appeal is that he FIGHTS … in the form of largely meaningless tweets!
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With the exception of a few diehards and the media, it appears the left/right paradigm is rapidly crumbling.
Trump let down his base when he campaigned to get us out of foreign wars and then here we are in Afghanistan for forever – boys dying for absolutely nothing.
Surprisingly – to me anyway – is that I find myself agreeing a lot with Ann Coulter these days. We need well-defined borders, we need to get out of foreign wars and bring our boys home, we need to rebuild our economy and the middle class, free speech must be protected, families are important, etc.
I think many of Trump’s supporters are taking a second look now. The man obviously lied and I would say that his re-election is anything but certain – especially if a great statesman ran against him. But that is almost certainly not going to happen in this country where money and free speech are the same in the eyes of the law.
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Is this the way we “make America great, again”?
With Trump, and Trump supporters, the hatred and cruelty never ends. Hate Mexicans. Hate gays. Hate Muslims. Hate the poor. Hate liberals. Hate the media. Hate immigrants. Racial hatred. Religious hatred.
And now he deports children who have been here for years.
Look at the comments on right-wing sites. They are all meanness and hatred. If you can’t even have compassion for children — innocent children who have made their lives in America — what are you?
This is what Trump has wrought. He has empowered the lowest, meanest-spirited among us. No wonder he thinks some of the Nazis are good people.
Deporting innocent children, and then trying to justify it . . . Truly sad what America has become.
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