Is There Finally Hope in Getting Rid of the Evil Saga of Donald J. Trump & His Band of Merry ReTHUGlicans?
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By Henry S. Villard
Dear friends and fellow RSR readers and aficionados:
As you likely have, my pre-occupation for the last some weeks has been with and regarding the Trump-created horror of the Covid-19 virus.
Did he “create it” in the scientific sense? Of course not, but it has been his complete and total inaction, his focus on nothing but himself, his blind determination that nothing—absolutely nothing—would deter him from winning re-election to a position he never should have had in the first place and would not have had were it not for a flawed electoral system that has put us in the terrible position and situation we are in today.
His ignorance, along with his ignoring everything from Bill Gates’s 2015 paper to the 69 page document on the coming pandemic left for him by the Obama Administration to his dismissal of most of the members of the pandemic commission to his totally ridiculous and completely unscientific belief that he knows more than (name your favorite: the scientists, the generals, the business leaders and everybody else) anybody about everything, along with his ridiculous and totally inane comment, late in March of this year that “It’ll be like a miracle and ‘poof’ on April first it will all be gone” are what have put us in the terrible position we are today. That stupid and thoughtless comment was then followed by his infamous “just take some disinfectant or hydrochloroquine and you’ll be fine,” but if that wasn’t bad enough, the non-genius added, “but just to be sure, take a very strong floodlight or ultraviolet light and put it down your throat and that will cure it.” Well, those “fixes” of his would and will do anything but “cure” and the latest death came in New Mexico, when one of three ignoramuses who followed the advice of a bigger ignoramus died yesterday or the day before, they all having ingested some kind of cleaning fluid. His two friends are still hospitalized.
Trump’s vile and disgusting behavior, which we kept saying, time after time, after each horrifically disgusting comment, that he could not top, was topped today, when, while watching a “protest” at The Villages, the Florida retirement community north of Orlando, he stated, after hearing one senior who was marching with Trump signs attached to his car and his body, yelling “White Power” over and over again, “See, there are fine people in this protest.” Really, Mr. Faux President? I totally disagree, just as I did when you made the ridiculous and god-awful statement, following the Charlottesville march, that “there were fine people on both sides.” Really? Since when do “fine people” wear KKK robes or march around with swastikas sewn to their shirts screaming “Heil Hitler” and giving the extended arm nazi salute? Sorry, Donnie, but you are, unquestionably, as wrong about that as you have been about and with almost every single decision and public statement you have ever made.
Ladies and gentlemen, take heart. I now commend you to this piece from today’s New York Times, which merits your attention and which I hope you will read. It is lengthy but worth your time and I will conclude today’s entry with a short comment following the article:
The New York Times
Trump Faces Mounting Defections From a Once-Loyal Group: Older White Voters
Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck
The New York Times June 28, 2020,
Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old Republican in Tucson, Arizona, never cared for President Donald Trump.
He supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primary race and cast a protest vote in the general election for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. An Air Force veteran, Wagner described the Trump presidency as a mortifying experience: His friends in Europe and Japan tell him the United States has become “the laughingstock of the world.”
This year, Wagner said he would register his opposition to Trump more emphatically than he did in 2016. He plans to vote for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and hopes the election is a ruinous one for the Republican Party.
“I’m a Christian, and I do not believe in the hateful, racist, bigoted speech that the president uses,” Wagner said, adding, “As much as I never thought I’d say this, I hope we get a Democratic president, a Democratic-controlled Senate and maintain a Democratic-controlled House.”
Wagner is part of one of the most important maverick voting groups in the 2020 general election: conservative-leaning seniors who have soured on the Republican Party over the past four years.
Republican presidential candidates typically carry older voters by solid margins, and in his first campaign Trump bested Hillary Clinton by 7 percentage points with voters over 65. He won white seniors by nearly triple that margin.
Today, Trump and Biden are tied among seniors, according to a poll of registered voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. And in the six most important battleground states, Biden has established a clear upper hand, leading Trump by 6 percentage points among the oldest voters and nearly matching the president’s support among whites in that age group.
That is no small advantage for Biden, the former vice president, given the prevalence of retirement communities in a few of those crucial states, including Arizona and Florida.
No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in two decades, since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. In 2016, Trump, now 74, seemed in some ways keenly attuned to the political sensitivities of voters in his own age group. As a candidate, he bluntly rejected his party’s long-standing interest in restructuring government guarantees of retirement security.
But Trump’s presidency has been a trying experience for many of these voters, some of whom are now so frustrated and disillusioned that they are preparing to take the drastic step of supporting a Democrat.
The grievances of these defecting seniors are familiar, most or all of them shared by their younger peers. But these voters often express themselves with a particularly sharp kind of dismay and disappointment. They see Trump as coarse and disrespectful, divisive to his core and failing persistently to comport himself with the dignity of the other presidents that they have observed for more than half a century. The Times poll also found that most seniors disapproved of Trump’s handling of race relations and the protests after the death of George Floyd.
And as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the country, putting older Americans at particular risk, these voters feel a special kind of frustration and betrayal with Trump’s ineffective leadership and often-blasé public comments about the crisis.
The president has urged the country to return to life-as-usual far more quickly than the top public health officials in his own administration have recommended. Some prominent Republican officials and conservative pundits have even suggested at times that older people should be willing to risk their own health for the sake of a quicker resumption of the business cycle.
In The Times poll, seniors in the battleground states disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic by 7 points, 52% to 45%. By a 26-point margin, this group said the federal government should prioritize containing the pandemic over reopening the economy.
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old Republican deeply versed in the politics of the retiree-rich swing state, said many seniors were disturbed by important aspects of Trump’s record and found Biden a mild and respectable alternative who did not inspire the same antipathy on the right that Clinton did in 2016.
Regarded by much of his own party as bland and conventional, Biden’s nostalgia-cloaked candidacy may be uniquely equipped to ease a sizable group of right-of-center seniors into the Democratic column, at least for one election.
“He’s not ever been known to be a radical or an extreme leftist or liberal, so there is certainly a degree of comfort there,” Curbelo said. He added: “This public health crisis is so threatening, especially to seniors, and because the president hasn’t earned high marks in his handling of it, I think that has also been a factor in Biden’s improving numbers.”
Biden and his allies have expressed growing excitement about the political possibilities that the shifting senior vote could create in the fall. That is true not only in Sun Belt retirement havens but also in Midwestern states where Biden is currently running well ahead of Clinton’s 2016 performance with a range of conservative-leaning constituencies, including older white people.
In Iowa, former Gov. Tom Vilsack, a close Biden ally, said the former vice president had closed a substantial deficit in the state through his response to the coronavirus, his connection with older rural voters and his ability to empathize.
“Part of it is the demeanor he has projected during the course of this pandemic,” Vilsack said, before acknowledging, “As much as Joe’s doing, it’s probably as much or more what the president has done or failed to do.”
He cited an ad from a group of anti-Trump Republicans that cast Trump’s approach to crisis as erratic and selfish, unlike past presidents who have confronted national tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Each of those presidents was able to connect emotionally to the feelings of the nation,” Vilsack said. “This president has had a really, really hard time doing that.”
Trump’s ineffective response to the coronavirus weighed on the thinking of many older voters surveyed in the poll, including Patrick Mallon, 73, a retired information technology specialist in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Mallon said he was a registered Republican who had long been unhappy with Trump but mindful that he was presiding over a strong economy. The pandemic set Mallon firmly against Trump’s reelection.
“The main reason is Donald Trump saying, ‘Don’t wear a mask, this thing is going to go away, we can have large gatherings,’” he said. “Everything he says is incorrect and dangerous to the country.”
When young people contract the coronavirus, Mallon added, “most of them will survive, but they’re going to give it to their parents, their grandparents — and I’m sorry, we’re just as important as that younger generation is.”
The abandonment of Trump by older voters is far from universal, and he still has a strong base among older white men and self-described conservatives. Nationally, the oldest voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy by 12 points, more than double the figure for voters of all ages.
And in the battleground states, Trump has a 10-point lead over Biden with white men over the age of 65, even as Biden has opened up an advantage with white women in the same age group. Nonwhite seniors in the battleground states currently support Biden over Trump by a huge margin, 65% to 25%.
Even among some seniors supportive of Trump, however, there is an undercurrent of unease about the way he approaches the presidency.
Karen Gamble, 65, of Reidsville, North Carolina, said that she was dissatisfied with the overall government response to the coronavirus outbreak and echoed many popular complaints about Trump’s persona. She said she wished, for instance, that Trump “wouldn’t be such a bully and would conform to being in a regal-like position, as our presidents have always been.”
Gamble said she was planning to support Trump in the election all the same, describing Biden as too old and too compromised on matters related to China. But Gamble, who said she has a “severe lung problem,” expressed hope that Trump would change his approach to the pandemic.
“We can’t blame him for this — how many presidents could really do any better than what he’s done?” Gamble said, before adding: “I just wish he wouldn’t let the country open up as much as it has. I see all these teens and young people at the beach, and I fear for them because now they’re getting sick.”
In Tucson, Gerald Lankin, a more forceful Trump supporter, said he would back the president mainly as a vote “against the Democrats.” Lankin, 77, said he found Trump’s personal manner offensive but agreed with him on most issues and saw Democrats as “much, much, much, much too far to the left.”
“He hasn’t really done anything that I can say I’m against,” Lankin said of Trump. “I think what he’s doing is the best he can. But, boy, he is tough to take. He is a tough guy to take.”
There may be time for Trump to regain his footing with seniors, along with several other right-leaning groups that have drifted away during the bleakest months of his presidency. His ability to do so could have far-reaching implications not just for his chances of winning a second term, but also his party’s ability to keep its hold on the Senate.
At the moment, Trump’s unpopularity with older voters appears to be hindering other Republicans in states including Arizona and Michigan.
Gayle Craven, 80, of High Point, North Carolina, said that while she was a registered Republican, she had not voted for Trump in 2016 and would reject him again this year. She said she saw Biden as an “honest man.”
“Trump is the biggest disappointment,” she said. “He has made America look like idiots. I think he’s an embarrassment to my country.”
Other older voters leaning toward Biden cautioned that they could still change their minds, like Frederick Monk, 73, of Mesa, Arizona, who said he had voted for Trump but quickly came to see him as “incompetent.”
Still, Monk said his mind was not fully made up. If Biden chooses an overly liberal running mate, he said he could cast a vote for Trump and hope his second term is an exercise in futility.
“Hopefully the Democrats retake the Senate and make his next four years miserable, if he lasts that long,” Monk said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
From H. S. V.:
I truly hope that you have read the entire article. Trump is a con-man, a flim-flamer and a snake oil salesman and is the least qualified person in U. S. history to hold the position as President of the United States and he defiles the Oval Office every time he sets foot in it.
You are all, I am certain, well aware of his viciousness, his hatefulness, his vile actions to demean almost everybody who has tried to do right for this country and I conclude this, yes, lengthy but necessary commentary as follows:
Hopefully, each of you will do all and everything you can to end the reign of terror of the Trump-led Hitlerian-like cult that is, literally, destroying this country in every way possible, domestically and internationally. If you truly care about the future of this country, then there is only one choice for all of us in November, and that is to be certain that you do not allow this madman, this sociopathic, psychotic, prevaricating, megalomaniacal, narcissistic, psychopath to continue his machinations, for to do so, to allow him to serve neither us nor the country, but only himself for the next four years will certainly and absolutely bring an end to the America we have known and loved.
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