The Crucible, a Donald Trump Production

Despicable. Outrageous. Appalling. Dangerous. It is hard to come up with enough pejorative words to describe the behavior of Donald Trump, the president of the United States, who ahead of the midterm elections is ramping up his tried and true fear-mongering race-baiting divisive campaign of lies, especially about illegal immigrants, and predictably blaming everyone else, particularly the media and Democrats, for creating the poisonous political environment that he and his surrogates are responsible for above all others!! This was aptly termed “the politics of the apocalypse” in a recent Washington Post opinion piece. And this all continuing in the immediate aftermath of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, carried out by a bigot who online was parroting and praising POTUS’s language about illegal immigrants being invaders!! No surprise that anti-Semitic acts jumped 57% between 2016 and 2017, the largest increase since tracking began, reflecting the overall rise in hate crimes and hate speech. It is almost beyond belief that Trump is also abusing his power as commander-in-chief to engineer a political stunt by sending somewhere between 5000 and 15,000 troops to the Mexican border weeks ahead of any possible arrival of the Central American migrant caravan, even though they of course are not permitted by law to enforce border security! And now he’s even promising to end the citizen by birth provision of the 14th amendment to the constitution by executive order, which nearly every expert, except for some of his political cronies, claims would be clearly unconstitutional! So much for law and order! It is absolutely sickening to see Trump’s cult followers at his rallies eat this all up like candy and beg for more! Beyond that, this smacks so much of rising fascism (from a self-proclaimed nationalist) it is truly frightening! Most elected Republicans apparently either support Trump’s policies of fear, hate and division or have made a shameful deal with the devil to keep quiet and let him say and do whatever he wants as long as it benefits them. I really hope this all comes back to haunt them someday, but there’s no hint of that happening anytime soon, other than hopefully many of them being thrown out of office. It is still looking very hopeful for Democrats to reclaim the House, but the margin is still very much up in the air. It is looking like Republicans will unfortunately gain one or even a couple of seats in the Senate, with multiple key races too close to call, but some recently apparently trending Republican. Many races will come down to voter turnout, which is why Trump is going all out for the next week to whip up his base into a frenzy with immigration fears and lots of lies and false accusations. I think that Democratic candidates in general have been too reluctant to directly go after Trump and his lies, particularly regarding illegal immigration. 

Aside from not tolerating bigotry and lies in our own interactions, which of course is very important, most of us can do little about any of this except contribute money to election campaigns, vote and encourage everyone we know to vote. So ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE: NO EXCUSES, GET OUT THERE AND VOTE!!!!!!!!!! Some prayers wouldn’t hurt either 😏 I hope my next post will at least have some good news to talk about!