[quote=The Atlantic]
The breadth of Trump’s controversies is truly yuge, ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. They stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day. To catalogue the full sweep of allegations would require thousands of words and lump together the trivial with the truly scandalous. Including business deals that have simply failed, without any hint of impropriety, would require thousands more. This is a snapshot of some of the most interesting and largest of those scandals.
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The italics are mine. Even The Atlantic doesn’t have room to list all the “Reasons I cannot vote for Trump.”
The guy is a liar and a cheat. This is extremely well documented by many respected journalists. And judges. He’s also a buffoon, a narcissist (not using the colloquial definition, but rather the medical one), thin-skinned, vengeful, and a bully. Also all well documented.
You hear people who want to vote for him say, “He’s a businessman. That’s what we need.” But he’s a terrible business man. He has to cheat people to only lose 916 million dollars. He’s filed bankruptcy 4 times and had many other businesses completely fail. Maybe we need a business man, maybe we don’t. But we certainly don’t need a lying, cheating, failing business man.
You hear who want to vote for him say, “He’s not a politician. Politicians get nothing done.” Actually, politicians get a lot done. We live in an extremely prosperous and strong nation. A large nation with a lot of moving parts. And politicians are political for a reason. Diplomacy is required when people interact with each other. Trump is not a politician. That might not be a bad thing all by itself. Trump has zero diplomatic skills. That is a very bad thing all by itself.
You hear people say, “He tells it like it is.” WTF? He doesn’t tell it like it is. He lies freely. And hugely. And when there’s clear evidence that he’s lying. If you know he lies frequently (and if you don’t, check yourself into a hospital before you hurt yourself), then how can you say he tells it like it is? Just because he’s not afraid to say controversial things doesn’t mean he tells it like it is. There’s a huge difference between the two, and if you think he tells it like it is, I believe you’ve conflated the two.
You hear people say, “Hillary is worse.” The only possible way any reasonable person can believe that Hillary is worse is if they’ve believe what they hear on fox news and breitbart and their ilk. If they believe that the mainstream media is extremely biased. And if they believe everything they hear on fox and breitbart, they also probably believe that the msm is extremely biased.
A guy I work with is a right-winger. Voting for Trump. Says he’ll be great. I asked him what news he listened to. He said he listened to all of it, even though the msm was biases. I asked him why he thought the msm was biased. He said, “well, you sure get a different story when you listen to them (as opposed to fox, etc.)”
Well, of course you do. As I’ve said several times before on this forum, this belief that the msm is hugely biased towards liberals is the greatest master stroke in the history of American politics. Now fox controls the narrative for the gullible among us who want to believe that everything right wing is good and everything left wing is bad. And, now that the right-wing noise machine is so loud, powerful, and pervasive, its views are moving toward the mainstream. Many politically centrist people think Hillary is dishonest in a way, and to a degree, that there is no evidence for. And even many on the left are less enthusiastic about her than they might be without the 25+ years of attacks on her by the noise machine.
Donald Trump is aware of many Americans’ willingness to accept whatever is on fox news and disregard anything in the New York Times, and is taking full advantage of it. he knows fox will spin things his way, and that it won’t matter if he lies. It won’t matter if he doesn’t release his tax returns. It won’t matter that he’s a liar, a cheat, a bully, a misogynist, a racist, and a narcissist. None of this matters, because people will believe the fox news spin, and disregard the reporting of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Trump voters seem to want to give the nuclear codes to a man who responds to every insult with an attack. Wake up and take a look at reality. As good as it might feel to be on the side of someone you see as strong, and who you feel will make this country strong, consider this:
Trump is not strong, he’s weak. As are all true narcissists, he’s extremely insecure. He’s unable to accept any hint that there’s anything wrong with him. That’s a very serious weakness and one that – all by itself, forget about all the other massive flaws that he has – is big enough to cause his presidency to be disastrous. Not just for you and me, but for our children. Not just for America, but for the world.
