It doesn’t even matter. That’s the shame of it.
No matter what Donald Trump says, how he acts, or who he fires, there will always be a good 45 percent of the electorate that will never give a damn, and will be right in line on November 3, 2020 ready and raring to re-elect him.
If brainwashing voters constituted a federal offense, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh would be in a Supermax prison right now. It was their actions that broke this country, and made it possible for Trump to seize the White House. Yes, bigotry in American politics existed long before these individuals–the Three Horsemen of American democracy’s apocalypse–were born. However, Murdoch, Ailes and Limbaugh harnessed that bigotry, refined it, gave it an energy and force unprecedented in modern American history…and cleared a path for a madman.
Trump’s fanbase will never, ever walk away from him. They can’t. Trump is their last best hope to stop the progress of diversity and enlightenment (especially through his nominees to the federal bench). Their loyalty is unshakable. Democrats and progressives must face that harsh truth. Remember, these same folks weren’t always thrilled with George W. Bush in his first term…but how many of them abandoned Dubya for John Kerry in 2004?
To rework a line from the book Trump’s devotees claim to believe in, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to get any of these folks to consider an alternate political route. The raw reality is that these folks have been led to hate everything the Democratic Party stands for. They never would have crossed the aisle to vote for Bernie Sanders had the Vermont Senator secured the Democratic presidential nomination last year: their preferred media sources would have smeared Sanders as a crafty collectivist eager to “steal” money from working- and middle-class whites and redistribute it to gang members in Chicago and undocumented immigrants in East Los Angeles in the name of racial justice. Sanders might well have lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Trump.
Seven years before Trump seized control of the White House, ex-evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer
explained the thought process, or lack thereof, of these peculiar individuals:
[T]he mainstream–not just media, but culture—doesn’t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth, through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts as a matter of faith… [W]hat we‘re really talking about is a group of people who are resentful because they know they’ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature. The rest of us are getting on with our lives. These people are standing on a hilltop waiting for the end…
There is no end to this stuff. Why? Because this subculture has as its fundamentalist faith that they distrust facts per se. They believe in a young Earth, 6,000 years old, with dinosaurs cavorting with human beings. They think that whether it‘s economic news or news from the Middle East, it all has to do with the end of time and Christ’s return. This is la-la land.
And the Republican Party is totally enthralled to this subculture to the extent that there is no Republican Party. There is a fundamentalist subculture which has become a cult. It‘s fed red meat by buffoons like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other people who are just not terribly bright themselves and they are talking to even stupider people. That‘s where we’re at. That‘s where all of this is coming from.
Donald Trump is a cult leader, just as Jim Jones was. His brainwashed followers are willing to die for him. They’re willing to see our democracy die, too. The thing is, you don’t need thirteen reasons why these folks are so self-destructive. You only need one: Hate.
