Dude’s a symptom
Former President Obama on Friday delivered a blistering criticism of the political tactics of his successor President Trump, saying he had built on the fears of the powerful as they look to diminishing importance in a rapidly changing nation.
“It did not start with Donald Trump,” Obama said during a noon speech at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “He is a symptom not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, the fear and anger that’s rooted in our past.”
Naturally; Trump isn’t intelligent enough to originate anything. But by god he does have a talent for connecting with The Evil in people, and drawing it out and amplifying it.
“Obama, a very Bad (or Sick) man, admits that President Trump is Innocent and Problems started in his own Administration! #Trump innocent #Witch hunt“
This is very important. Too many people see Trump as an aberration, not as the logical culmination of Republican party politics and the continued degradation of civility and decency in the country. Democracy can only work if you give a damn about other people – your family, your neighbors, your community, and, yes, people who live a thousand miles away, perhaps in one of those howling packs of coastal elites.
If you don’t care (and my admittedly informal surveys of the people in my town suggest that few care beyond their family), then you will vote for policies that hurt other people if there is a (real or merely perceived) benefit for yourself. You might even vote for policies with no benefit for yourself just because they will be detrimental to the others, because rather than caring about them, you hate them and want to hurt them. This seems to be what is happening. And it has been building for a very long time….
I am slightly sympathetic to the Trump cultists point of view because I also hate them and want to hurt them… But I’m not dumb enough to shoot myself in the foot to do it.
I think Trump’s both a symptom and a cause, or at the very least a major catalyst.
Half-rotten brain and all, he retains the talent to whip people into a frenzy and bring out their ugly side. Nobody else in the field of 16 (or whatever) Republicans in 2016 came close. Nobody else had love for tyrants like Putin and Kim. Nobody else would be so incompetent. Nobody else would hire their family to key positions.
He’s in a horrible league of his own. Without him, things wouldn’t be this bad.
But, yes, the Republicans created the fertile soil in which Trump’s evil could grow. I think he is a aberration, one that the Repuplicans allowed to flourish when he should have been weeded out, as past aberrations like Pat Buchanan and Barry Goldwater were.