Don’t let all the Trump enablers off the hook in the future; they are complicit

I know plenty of Trump supporters. I live in a deep red county and a mostly red neighborhood. I have family members, co-workers, neighbors, old friends, new friends and others who are Trumpers. They may get pretty darn sick of me not being one and not picking one of the two parties — the Democrats or what used to be Republicans — but I don’t hold their views against them. They have a right to their wrong opinions.

They believe his diatribes. When he says inflation is down, they believe it. When he says gas is less than $2, they believe it. When he tackies up the White House with his gaudy gold, and his family is enriched through his presidency, they are just fine with it so long as they don’t adopt Hunter Biden. When he is publicly insane, that’s cool, so long as his mental issues aren’t hidden like Biden’s were. Trump takes credit for anything good and blames others for anything bad, and they just nod. When the numbers aren’t to his liking, he fires the scoreboard operator. When his past deeds and alliances come back to haunt him, he suddenly gets amnesia. And when he says 3,000 things that they would have wanted Obama tried for treason had he said a single one of them, aww, that’s just ol’ Trump being Trump.

Ha-ha!

I don’t resent their Trump support. In this insanely binary country where it’s either Democrat or Republican, Trump or Biden, Beatles or Rolling Stones (both), Ginger or Mary Ann (the latter) it doesn’t leave a lot of room in the middle for any kind of reasonable discussion. They didn’t want Biden, and I didn’t either. I get that.

They didn’t want Kamala Harris because she did what VPs do — not much — and was seen as one of the people who propped up Biden. They remembered the good economic days that Trump inherited from Obama and that continued until Covid hit and made him the third straight GOP president to inherit a growing economy and leave it in shambles by the end of his term. They don’t see the difference between coincidence and causation, and they therefore allowed Trump to take credit. Deep down, I think they know Trump’s a dishonest slimeball and con man, but they contort themselves to defend him and his ilk because they did not like the alternative.

Fair enough on that. The Biden Administration overpromised what they could deliver in an American government divided 50/50 and underdelivered in key areas, especially on immigration.

I didn’t want Biden in 2020, but he happened to be running against Trump, and I’d have voted for a used toaster oven over Trump. By 2024, when Democrats arrogantly told everybody who’d begged them not to run Biden again to “get on board,” I was ready to write in The Thing from The Fantastic Four. He’s orange like Trump but far less likely to smash everything to smithereens as Trump is doing with our economy, institutions, our standing in the world and our overall sense of decency.

I can forgive them for wanting Trump’s rhetoric to pay off — well, except when he’s bragging about grabbing women or hanging out with his buddy Epstein and somehow not knowing anything about what the guy was up to for 25 years other than “he likes them young.” (Although that could have just been something he said while serving as an FBI informant into the Democratic hoax.)

I was a young Republican. I know how all that “shining city on a hill” talk and flag-humping can sway people. I came of age in the Reagan era. Trickle-down economics made sense to me. I believed him when he cited JFK in repeating that a rising tide lifts all boats … until we found out a rising tide lifts all the yachts but swamps everything smaller than a Staten Island ferry.

It’s even worse today where people on the left and right isolate themselves in their bubbles and engage in incessant whataboutism. And when any -ism allowed to run rampant and unfettered — capitalism, socialism, anarcho-transhumanism, vegetarianism — well, that just ain’t good. (Only Parrotheadism practiced to the extreme works out.) And now we’re flirting with authoritarianism. No thanks.

Those friends, family members, neighbors and others who are Trumpers, I can forgive when American institutions are being rebuilt — hopefully — in the years to come. Those will be years when people ask, “How did we let that happen?” And they will be years of denials from the very people in power who are facilitating the dark times.

Those are the people I can’t forgive, and I don’t want to hear their “I was against him the whole time” baloney. Those people who know better but do not have the integrity to stand up for what’s right when it’s more convenient to go along with what’s wrong for the sake of future power are the ones who must never be let off the hook.

That includes the propagandists pretending to be journalists, the religious leaders pretending to be “Christians,” and especially the lawmakers, justices and economic leaders who are trying to ride out this tempest instead of battling it. Y’all had the power to do something — and you didn’t. That should never be forgiven.

However, I have no doubt that it will be forgiven and forgotten. But, please, even if you are a Trumper now, don’t let them off the hook in the future when they deny everything.