What happens when one side plays by the rules and the other doesn’t?
What happens when the people on one side of an issue believe they are more worthy than the other, or that they are good and the other side is evil?
What happens then?
You have Donald Trump’s America.
There appear to be four basic types of people who fall under the heading of Trumpanzees, only two of which really like Trump.
These are the people for whom the fact that he was a TV star, the fact that he was on a highly rated show that made him appear to be a much more competent businessman than he was, matters the most. If you look at the actual facts of his career, the multiple bankruptcies and thousands — yes, thousands — of lawsuits, it’s obvious that the character he played on “The Apprentice” was only slightly less fictitious than Homer Simpson.
My wife Nicole is the smartest person I know, but her first real exposure to Trump was through the TV show. It look her a while to understand who and what he really was. She didn’t vote for him ether time.
The people who love Trump because they think he is something he isn’t are the saddest group. They’re the ones about whom Trump said, “I love the poorly educated.”
They’re not all the Trumpanzees, but they’re the majority of them.
The second group loves Trump because they are completely delusional about him and see him as a religious figure they rank right behind Jesus.
This group is maybe the saddest one. American life has moved so far from where they think it should be that they are desperate to find someone who will at least pay lip service to their beliefs. I’m not sure there could possibly be someone less appropriate than Trump, but desperate people can often go to strange places.
This is someone who said his favorite Bible verse was an eye for an eye, from Exodus. Then he interpreted it in a way that had nothing to do with the verse or with Christianity. Trump said if someone hurt him, he would hurt them ten times as badly.
Of course the original verse was about proportional response, not revenge, and Christ modified it in the New Testament with his verse about turning the other cheek. Does that sound like Trump to you?
In Trump’s favorite book of all — the ghostwritten “Art of the Deal” — he actually said being an atheist helped him in business because he was not bound by the moral strictures religious people were.
The third group who follow Trump are people who are such hard-core Republicans they would vote for anyone or anything with an R after its name on the ballot. These are the people you see with bumper stickers saying they fear Putin less than they fear Democrats.
What they like the best about him is that he seems to have no limits at all on what he says or does. It may turn out to be that this one-term president did more to change the future than anyone since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The three Supreme Court justices he nominated will affect America for generations in the future.
Which brings us to the fourth group.
These may be the strangest. These are the Trumpanzees who may not even like Trump, but they see him as a means to an end. These are basically the people who hate the federal government so much they want to see it fail. One friend who not so surprisingly has gone over to the dark side refers to taxation as theft and says the only money government should collect is user fees.
Pretty much all four of these groups, whether they will admit it or not, believe that when it comes to Trump, the ends justify the means. They would rather live under a soulless autocrat than a liberal Democrat.
That’s what makes the election this fall so critical.
America is dying.