Let’s go back in time to January 1, 2015.
The 2016 presidential election is just starting to be a thing, with Jeb Bush the only Republican candidate so far. Bush would be followed later in the month by
Chris Christie, then Lindsey Graham
and Mitt Romney, but nobody has any idea who might end
up being the front runner at this point.
You
don’t really care for Barack Obama. But
the economy is doing great, with the Dow Jones Industrials more than doubled from
when he first took office, and unemployment at 5.7%, down from 8.1% six years
earlier. Still, you’re a political
conservative and you hate Hillary Clinton.
So you plan on voting Republican this year.
But
what if I told you that the candidate
the Republicans chose:
·
Had
zero (no) experience in government?
·
Was
described by a former professor as the stupidest student he ever had in 35
years?
·
Lied
to the American people almost every time he opened his mouth?
·
Faced
charges of sexually molesting more than a dozen women, and would soon brag on
tape about “grabbing women by the pussy”?
·
Was
a convicted conman, having ripped off many contractors and run multiple scams?
·
Would
be diagnosed as a malignant (as in evil) narcissist?
·
Was
a really horrible person in just about every other way imaginable?
BUT
WORSE THAN ALL THAT,
·
Was
Russia’s guy, and their election interference is what would put him in office?
Just for now, assume that you were convinced that all of
these claims were true, and be perfectly honest. You’d
never vote for this guy in a million years, would you? And neither would anyone else you knew,
Republican or otherwise – right?
That
guy, who of course turned out to be Donald J. Trump, was on nobody’s radar as a
serious candidate in early-2015. Yet he
won the US presidency, and then went on to add such deeds as these to his earlier résumé:
·
Reneged
on his promises to release his tax returns
·
Asked
Russia to release Clinton’s private emails, which they did the following day
·
Publicly
announced that he believed Putin rather than his own intelligence experts
·
Met
privately with Putin 5 times with no witnesses, and refused to release the
transcripts
·
Was
impeached for blackmailing Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election
·
Has
reversed, or is working on reversing, 94 key environmental protections
·
Refused
to comply with numerous constitutional requests by Congress for testimony and
documentation
·
Made
over 18,000 false or misleading claims since taking office
·
Refused
to believe the corona virus was a real threat, causing 54,000 needless US deaths
Those
are just a few of the countless ugly things Trump has done as President. But the big question is: Are those claims really true? Earlier
I asked you to “assume that you were
convinced” that these things are true, but actually you are probably NOT at all convinced. So how about this:
Have a conversation with the you from 2015. You really do love your country, and you do not want a horrible person like I described running it. With
just a modest amount of effort, you can see
for yourself that these things are true. Most of them can be proven to be 100% factual,
without any doubt at all – reasonable or otherwise. Much of this proof comes in the form of Trump’s
own words shown and heard on tape, and his own tweets. The rest comes from written records and other
documentation that can be easily verified as legitimate.
These things are not opinions
or theories. They are facts that you
yourself can verify. They’re also not a matter of politics – which political
party thinks it’s OK to collaborate with our enemies, to defy Congress, to lie to us all the time, for example? Take a fresh look at the facts, with an unbiased eye. Truth can shatter the spell that Trump's never ending lies have cast over millions of decent people and TRULY make America great again.
