Keeping that thought in mind, let’s ponder how a clear minority faction (conservative Republicans) now dominates the three branches of our federal government. Majorities numbering in the tens of millions of adult Americans oppose the actions being taken by that minority faction on numerous key issues, but so far have little power to do anything about it.
We can start to understand this situation by considering that approximately 9 million more American voters preferred a Democrat to Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election. How is that? Well, the official tally shows that Hillary Clinton got 2,864,974 more votes than Trump. In addition though, we know that about 20% of Bernie Sanders’ Democratic supporters, who hated Trump, didn’t vote for Clinton in protest of how the Democratic Party treated him. They protested by not voting for Clinton, certain that even without their votes, Trump wasn’t going to win. Or so we all thought.
Given that Sanders won 46% of the Democratic votes in the primaries, and that there were nearly 66 million Democratic votes in the November election, that means Hillary would have had something like an additional 6 million more votes if the Sanders people realized their votes were needed to counter Russian interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders 2016_presidential_campaign. Adding those lost protest votes to Hillary’s margin of winning gives us the 9 million or so preference for a Democrat in 2016.
Now, it is well understood how the number of Electoral votes, not popular votes, chooses the President, so we can’t say that Clinton or the Democrats won the 2016 election. But this idea of Trump being the people’s choice, that he represents the majority of Americans, is a fantasy – “fake news,” if you like.
తదుపరి పాయింట్
Actually, the real story is stronger than the 9 million number suggests, however. We know that a clear majority of Americans do not support the issues that Trump is pushing and his followers support. For example, the majority of Americans want legal abortions, want gay marriages, want tougher gun control, want a pathway to citizenship for the Mexican “Dreamers”, want strong environmental protections, want the government to stay out of religion, and all the other “liberal” things Trump opposes. They also don’t want his wall along our border with Mexico.
We know this from more people voting against Trump than for him in 2016, and from the landslide victories of the Democrats in 2018. We also know it from numerous respected opinion polls. The latest Pew Research Center poll shows Americans favor abortion by 61% to 38%, and that 60% want stricter gun laws. Since the US Census Bureau says there were 309 million Americans in 2016, and that 77.6% (or 240 million) of them were 18 or over, then we can reasonably think that about 55 million more American adults favored legal abortion than opposed it, while 48 million more adults favored stricter gun laws than oppose them. Gallup says that 63% favor gay marriage, and that 65% of Americans value protecting the environment more than economic growth. Using that same mathematical process, then 62 million more Americans favor gay marriage than oppose it, while 72 million more favor protecting the environment over promoting economic growth. An NPR polls shows that 66% favor citizenship for Dreamers (77 million more adult Americans than those who oppose it), and that a majority oppose Trump’s wall. Finally, Statista.com says that Americans favor the absolute separation of church and state by 41% to 34%; that’s about 17 million more Americans not wanting more religion in government.
In every case on these key issues, the views and actions of the Republican Party that won control of this country illegitimately are opposed by a huge majority of American adults - tens of millions of them in most cases.
Wait – what? How did the Republicans win control illegitimately? Well, there is now no doubt that the Russians interfered in 2016 in a big way to help Trump win the election. Their help added to the Trump campaign’s own unprecedented use of blatant falsehoods (example: The Pope supports Trump!) to deceive American voters. And we can’t ignore the final dagger in Clinton’s back, FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of “possible” wrong-doing by Clinton, just ten days before the 2016 election. Comey’s action, which was a clear violation of FBI policy, reversed Clinton’s rising poll numbers. The FBI ended up clearing Clinton, but it was too late, and well – you know how the story ended. Those three actions, taken together, leave no real doubt that Trump did not win the election fairly; an objective observer could say that he basically stole the Presidency.
తదుపరి పాయింట్
Why does Donald Trump have many millions of American supporters? This question has been rolling around in my mind for several years now, because it so hard to understand why good people could support the man. As documented in my earlier essay (Four Reasons), long before the Ukraine incident and even long before the Mueller investigation, there were four powerful reasons why Trump had no business being President. Each of the four would have quickly disqualified the man in most Americans’ eyes just a short five or ten years ago. And yet – he is President, committing vile, illogical, unethical, or illegal (and often – all of those together) acts every single day, while never losing any supporters. How can this be?
It has become very clear that these people’s support is basically the result of two main factors. One has to do with how many of his supporters, for a number of important reasons, just don’t have an accurate picture of who Trump is, the actions he’s taken, and the consequences of those actions. But let’s leave that whole, complicated issue aside, and recognize that:
Trump’s supporters (his “base”) are politically conservative, do not like the direction the country has been going in recent decades, and they absolutely hated Hillary Clinton. They saw Trump as the antidote to the liberalism that Clinton personified, and as a result, felt he was their only option despite all of his flaws. They liked his efforts on immigration, abortion, protecting Christians’ rights, and so forth.
Further, they liked that Trump was an outsider, rather than a politician. Liked that he spoke his mind in plain words, liked that he wanted to bring down the establishment (the “Deep State”) that had kept the common people down, and liked that he wanted to get the government out of people’s lives. So even when they do realize he’s a horrible person doing bad things, they’re willing to overlook that because he supports things that are important to them. Evidence of this includes a 2018 article in TIME Magazine that stated that “Eighty percent of white evangelicals voted for and, by and large, continue to support President Trump,” even with his extra-marital affairs, constant lying, swearing, lack of humility and lack of just about every other Christian value. https://time.com/5161349/president-trump-white-evangelical-support-slaveholders/
To summarize, they back the man because they like his policies. And that takes us back to the original point made in my first paragraph. This country is founded on the concept of majority rule. That means we do what most Americans want, even while we respect the views and civil rights of those people who disagree. Besides that, we are a nation of laws, not people. That means everyone follows the law, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how powerful or powerless. Right?
అవును
The history of this country is the history of change, of progress. We used to have slavery, we used to have only property-owning white males allowed to vote, used to have people executed for minor crimes, used to dump sewage and toxic waste into our rivers – we used to do a lot of things that we don’t do now, because the country has gradually, steadily moved forward. In fighting against political progressives, the pro-Trump forces are basically saying they want things to stay like they were, back in the 1950s and ‘60s. And that’s great, as long as their's is the majority view.
But they are not the majority view in America today – we clearly saw that a few paragraphs ago. And yet those views are running the show, because Trump essentially stole the 2016 election. Just as bad is what’s happening to the federal courts. The Republicans defied the intent of the Constitution by not allowing President Obama to choose the next Supreme Court Justice in 2016, and thus illegitimately-elected Trump got to place a conservative on the court the next year. Incidentally, even a majority of Republican voters thought that blocking Obama’s constitutional right to name a Supreme Court Justice in 2016 was wrong. https://www.usnews. com/news/articles/2016-03-21/even-gop-voters-think-senate-shouldconfirm-scotus-nominee
Just in case anyone missed the political hypocrisy involved, when Obama was President, (Republican) Senate leader Mitch McConnell claimed that it was improper to place someone on the Court in his last year of office. Yet he now says that he would definitely let Trump name someone to the Court in his last year in office! https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/mitch-mcconnell-says-he-would-seek-to-fill-supreme-court-vacancy-in-2020.html
But besides that, illegitimately-elected Trump got to name a second Supreme Court Justice in 2018. His very conservative choice was Brett Kavanaugh, who strongly appealed to Trump (who was accused of multiple serious crimes) for his belief that a President could not be charged with crimes while in office. In an unprecedented step, more than 2,400 law professors of all political persuasions sent a letter opposing Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court. Additionally, for the first time in the nation’s history, the (Republican) Senate confirmed a Justice that the majority of Americans opposed. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/10/12/brett-kavanaugh-poll-majority-americans-disapprove-new-justice/1616237002/
But nevertheless, Kavanaugh is now on the Court, along with Trump’s earlier appointee, giving the Supreme Court a clear conservative majority, rather than the liberal-centrist majority it would have had if the people’s will had been respected. That’s the big headline story. But there’s more going on behind the curtain. While we don’t hear much about it, Trump has been appointing unprecedented numbers of other conservative Federal judges – 158 named and approved by the Senate as of last November. As the White House website boasts: “President Trump has appointed more circuit judges by this point in his presidency than any president in recent history. Approximately 1 out of every 4 active judges on United States Courts of Appeals has been appointed by President Trump. This historic transformation is only accelerating, with President Trump on pace to have more judges confirmed this year than in 2017 and 2018 combined.”
This is wonderful news – if you’re a political conservative. But remember, conservatives are in the minority now in the US. It is only because Donald Trump won the presidency, unfairly and with the help of Russia, gullible voters, and James Comey, that those judges will interpret the laws for the next 20 or 30 years. That is a reasonable span of service for judges since they are appointed for life.
So what we have now is a Supreme Court that will likely vote to protect Trump from prosecution, from having to comply with subpoenas, and in other ways. A Supreme Court that will likely hear a challenge to Wade v. Roe and quite possibly rule against legal abortions, despite Brett Kavanaugh implying at his confirmation hearings that wouldn’t happen. Conservative Federal courts, Supreme and otherwise, ruling in all kinds of ways that go against the country’s more progressive majority – that’s what we should expect, possibly for decades.
Meanwhile, the President has taken countless actions to gut environmental protections put in place by every previous administration, both Democratic and Republican, while continuing to deny climate change. This will benefit his own businesses, as well as those of wealthy conservatives who back him. But it definitely doesn’t reflect the wishes of the people. The latest Gallup poll shows that 62% of Americans want government to do more to protect the environment, the highest level since the question was first asked in 1992. And that number was before many of Trump’s subsequent attacks on the environment, including his latest move to repeal important protections for the nation’s streams and wetlands on January 22, 2020 that his own EPA appointees argued against. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/23/798809951/trump-administration-is-rolling-back-obama-era-protections-for-smaller-waterways. Not to mention Trump’s attacks on immigrants’ rights, on the separation of church and state, on efforts to reduce gun violence; attacks on our strongest allies while chumming it up with Vladimir Putin; betraying our Kurdish allies to score points with Turkey’s dictator Erdogan, and so many other actions that the majority of Americans do not want.
అవును, లేదు!
By the way, it’s common lately for Trump supporters to stop justifying his actions and instead claim that they just like him because of the strong economy. That's a little easier to understand, given the need to put food on the table, a roof over our heads, etc. But those folks don't really have it right. (NOTE: The following comments on the economy were written BEFORE the coronavirus pandemic and economic shut-down. Obviously, all of the latest figures are much worse than what is reported here.)
You see, most economists agree that Presidents have little impact on how the economy's doing; perhaps something like 15% of its health is due to whoever's in office. In Trump's case, it's probably fair to say his impact has been greater than average. In any case, let's take a look at some numbers, starting with GDP, which he said he'd make grow at "4, 5, maybe even 6%" a year. In reality, the strongest quarter ever in his presidency had a 3.5% gain, with the latest figure a dismal 2.1% growth rate. And as the pro-business magazine Forbes wrote last year, "Obama's last three years had better growth than Trump's three years." Hmmm…..
How about the budget and national debt? Trump boasted that he would balance the budget "fairly quickly," and “completely eliminate the national debt within 8 years.” Sounds great, right? But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just reported that the US federal deficit “will top $1 trillion annually over the next 10 years, ultimately reaching $1.7 trillion in 2030.” Meanwhile, the US federal debt now stands at $23 trillion, up from $20 trillion when Trump took office. Oops!
But at least there's the stock market, right? Stocks rose a very impressive 52.2% during Trump’s first 3 years in office. However, during Obama’s first 3 years, stocks gained 78.6%. So as another conservative magazine, Fortune, claimed recently: "The stock market is doing far worse under Trump than it did under Obama," and then backed it up on an apples-to-apples comparison of the two presidencies.
Well OK - surely in the area of jobs, Trump has been a winner, right? Um... no. Back to Forbes again, where its headline "Trump Has Created 1.5 Million Fewer Jobs Than Obama", makes us wonder. And just to be clear that it's a fair comparison, they followed up with "Trump’s job growth falls short of Obama’s last three years." Dang....
Meanwhile, one of the nation’s biggest problems – income inequality – has not been addressed by Trump's policies that have mostly helped wealthy Americans. As reported just 3 months ago “U.S. Census Bureau data confirmed that income inequality has hit its highest level since the federal government started tracking it five decades ago. The richest one percent of Americans now rake in one-third of the country’s net worth, while the bottom half of the population scrapes by with only 1.2 percent.” https://www.fastcompany.com/90427855/while-trump-boasts-of-economic-growth-inequality-deepens
Granted, the economy has done well under Trump, or truthfully: It has merely continued the strong trends established in the Obama years. Stocks are soaring, unemployment numbers are amazingly low, and Trump has done some good things in the area of trade agreements, IMO. But the theme he’s been pushing, especially evident during the State of the Union address, of saving America from the disastrous economic times of his predecessor, is an outright falsehood. Especially when you look behind the curtains to realize that the costs of further economic gains during his administration include the huge additional debt and environmental destruction his policies are creating. Donald J. Trump: the economic Wizard of Flaws.
చివరకు
So returning to where this essay started, the bottom line is: People who support Trump, despite what a horrible person he is because he favors issues that are important to them are betraying our country. They are NOT patriotic Americans, as they typically boast. They are throwing away the concept of majority rule, of fair play, and of nobody being above the law just so they can get what they want. They opposed his impeachment, just as they have opposed every other effort to reign him in and make him accountable for his horrid actions. In other words, they put themselves first, and the nation second. It’s shameful and brands them forever as being like Trump: Doing whatever it takes to get their way, regardless of the consequences.
Speaking of betraying the country, the very worst offenders are the members of Congress who keep protecting the President, denying that he does anything wrong, and continually pushing his agenda. (Oh, and the current Attorney General, who's supposed to represent the American people, but who very clearly works as Trump's personal protector instead.) While some in Congress support what he does, the majority of them know that he’s an illegitimate jerk, know that he constantly does things against the nation’s Constitution and better interests, but back him simply because they fear not getting re-elected if they cross him.
The classic example of this is Trump’s current BFF, Sen. Lindsey Graham. Back in 2015 when he still spoke truth, he said this about Trump: "He’s a jackass. You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell… He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for…” Many other powerful Congressmen/women have said similar things, and even more surely thought these things privately. But today, they all (except Mitt Romney, lately) back Trump – no matter what he does. It’s another case of putting their own interests in front of the nation’s interests which, by the way, they swore an oath not to do when they assumed office. Former (Republican) House Speaker John Boehner knows what’s up, and now that he’s out of office he can tell it like it is. Boehner knows that now "There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party.”
There are always consequences. Among the consequences for those betraying the country in pursuit of their own interests are that, in violating our Constitution, they are setting the stage for people in the future to violate conservatives' rights when they are in power, so they can do whatever they want. This is what our country is becoming. In the short-run, the minority of selfish conservatives wins. But in the long-run, we all lose, and the US is no longer America.
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