[quote=FlyerInHi]ZK, I think people who even consider voting for Trump are hopeless.
We are listing the reasons not to vote for Trump here for fun, but I don’t think those people can be educated. I believe nativist xenophobia is mainly what is driving the support for Trump, the other stuff doesn’t matter.
Don’t you think politics this year will cause a rift between friends and family? Thankfully I don’t have family voting for Trump. But I have totally lost respect for some friends. I don’t care to have friends who are Trump supporters. They say they want to tell it like it is, but they are so thin-skinned and get upset so easily.. So stupid… don’t even understand the basic of tax writeoffs giving the filer a savings of deduction times the tax rate.[/quote]
I must admit I’m struggling not to lose respect for some friends who are trump voters. I knew they were voting for Bush, and I thought, well, we’ll agree to disagree. I’ve thought Bush was an idiot since before 2000, but I could, with some effort, see things from their perspective. But it’s very hard for me to see trump from their perspective and not think that it’s a willfully ignorant perspective.
Sure, they’ve been manipulated for decades by fox et al. But even despite that, surely they can see that trump is a disaster waiting to happen. Right? How could they not see that?
Maybe they can see now that they’ve been bamboozled all these years. Maybe because trump is sooo bad, but the right wing noise machine is still painting him as good, maybe the contrast between reality and right-wing “news” is finally so massive that even they at last can see it. But they don’t want to admit it to themselves, so now they’re just sliding down the rapids toward disaster without even putting up a fight. “We’re not giving up now!” I don’t know. Just a theory. I really don’t understand it.
In any case, while I’m struggling to maintain respect, I’m succeeding. I’m not losing any friends over it. Think about this: Whatever trump’s appeal is, it appeals to over 40% of registered voters, so therefore probably at least that percentage of adult Americans. So you can’t really say that a friend who is a trump voter is flawed to a reject-them-as-a-friend degree without saying that same thing about more than 40% of people. The point I’m struggling to make is that whatever his appeal is, it appeals to something basic in human nature. Trump voters are human. Whatever their flaws are are flaws in human nature in general. It’s not like, say, being a true, diagnosable narcissist. A narcissist would have flaws that go beyond basic human nature. A severe narcissist is definitely, in my opinion, flawed to a reject-them-as-a-friend degree. But a guy who is drawn to somebody, no matter how outrageously bad, that over 40% of the population is drawn to? Whatever his flaw is has to be a basic flaw in human nature. And you can’t really blame a guy for that.
I’m honestly not sure if that last paragraph makes any sense. (And it certainly could’ve been written better, but I’m in a hurry.) But I like my friends, and that’s all I’ve got.
