Yesterday I learned of yet another victim of the Trump presidency: my ability to speak courteously in the face of what strikes me as insanity. An old friend asked me to explain to her why she, a life-long Republican, should vote for a Democrat in the 2020 presidential election.

I gave her the short answer: that there was not a Republican candidate in the 2020 presidential election; that her choices were between a Democrat and a Klyptocrat. Knowing her to be an honest person who has a genuine regard for her country, I would assume that she would choose the candidate who would not be guaranteed to trample the Constitution and steal this country blind.

She appeared to take my answer under consideration, then she said, “You may be right, but my children are trying to convince me that if a Democrat is elected, the country will go down the tubes.”

That’s when all of my mother’s and father’s efforts to raise me as a civil human being deserted me. My answer was rude, abrupt, and not accurate. “Then,” I said, “your children are dumb.” She murmured something that I didn’t catch and evidently decided that she didn’t want to continue the conversation.

I’m sorry that I called her children dumb. They are successful citizens, parents, and they worry about and are supportive of their mother. However, I could not then nor cannot now think of any possible logic that would conclude that the United States will fare better under a second Trump term than under any conceivable alternative, with or without a pulse.

When George W. Bush’s administration invaded Iraq, I told a friend that when we crossed the border, we were on the road to third world status. Now, a couple of decades later, I believe that we are aspiring to third world status and may not reach it. Our vaunted economic strength is accumulated around the very rich, leaving the poor to get poorer.

Here is what I would like to have told my friend, had she not been so eager to get off the phone. It’s a longer answer than the short answer, but mostly the same thing.

1.   Trump’s economic claims are at best exaggerated, at worst, outright lies. It is, of course, true that the stock market has reached historic highs. Of course, it did that under Obama’s second term, too. If you draw a trend line from the beginning of Obama’s second term to the top of the market, you’ll see that there’s no real deviation. All Trump had to do was not foul things up too severely. (I don’t believe that the stock market is a very good measure of our financial health; more than 80% of the stocks are owned by the very rich and about half the population own no stocks at all. Additionally, the market was artificially inflated.  Much of the corporate tax savings from the Republican tax giveaway were spent not on raising wages or increasing plant capacity, but on stock buybacks, putting more money into the pockets of those who already had money.  There were also three Fed rate cuts, the first in my memory in a time touted as a booming economy.) Trump’s claim to the world’s or the nation’s greatest economy is either delusional or a calculated lie. The economy under the Clinton administration was better by almost any measure. We haven’t seen a 4% GDP growth since then.

2.   Trump’s claims about his administration’s response to the COVID19 pandemic would be laughable if they hadn’t cost so many lives. He did not act quicklyo or effectively. His actions and reactions were based not on fighting a deadly virus, but on how it would make him look. The fact that he put inexperienced people in charge of critical supplies proved the adage that when you hire a bunch of clowns, you get a circus. However, perhaps the most egregious thing he did was pit the states against each other and the federal government in purchasing personal protective equipment. One governor had to store his state’s supply of masks in a secret location guarded by his state’s National Guard to prevent the Trump administration from confiscating them. This morning, it was reported that in January, a US company had offered to reopen its four closed lines that made N-95 masks and turn out millions of masks a week. The company contacted the administration, who indicated that the government was not interested.  

3.   Trump continues, with Republican support, to trample the Constitution, then complains that not everybody approves of it. A case in point: when the Coronavirus relief package was passed, it specifically called for oversight by an Inspector General. Trump signed the law, then declared that he would provide the oversight. Early reports indicate that most of the money went to big businesses and that small business owners, the ostensible target of the relief, got little or nothing. He has forbidden his medical experts from testifying before congress because “they (Congress) don’t like him.” He doesn’t seem to have a clue that the checks and balances put into the Constitution are there to keep one branch of government from becoming all-powerful. He would like to have the same kind of power that he sees in his friends Putin and Kim.

This rant could, of course, go on, but there’s little point. Trump is not, as noted by so many knowledgeable people, the problem. He’s a symptom, a deadly one. The problem is that people like the children of my friend, people who are upstanding and responsible citizens in all other areas of their lives, have abdicated their responsibility to separate fact from fantasy, policy from propaganda, and partisanship from government. They hear a Republican scream “socialism,” and they run to man the battlements, not understanding that nothing proposed by any Democratic candidate rates the adjective “socialist.” They hear about big giveaways to the poor without checking to see how they compare to the much larger giveaways to the rich. They don't know that for decades 100% of the wealth increase in this country has gone to the very rich. The middle class, which grew throughout the middle of the last century, is becoming an endangered species.

I’m afraid that I’ve lost my ability to converse with a Trump supporter in a calm and rational manner. But that’s not the worst of it. I’m afraid that Trump supporters are destroying the country that I’ve been mostly proud of for many years.