Rim Country Gazette: We already know the Trump voters and the truth is they only care about themselves

Frank Vyan Walton

Democrats get constantly told these days that their problem is that really don’t understand the Trump voters in fly-over country, far from the coasts. We just don’t understand the heartland, their values, and their perspective. If we would just reach out more, listen more, give them more of a voice—certainly things would be better and we’d come to some type of understanding. Right?

But the reality is that even regular conservatives are finding the Trumpsters impossible to deal with just as Tom Nichols, a conservative professor from the Naval War College, recently discovered after a nasty encounter with hardcore Trump fans after a lecture at Harvard University.

The women, who were immigrants from India and a post-Soviet region, asked to debate Nichols afterward, and asked if he had called them “willfully evil” — and he said they sputtered after he corrected them and said they were “willfully ignorant.” [...]

The women listed “phantom Trump successes” and insisted Trump was taking jobs away from foreign workers and giving them back to Americans, and Nichols tried to correct them.

“Look, what you believe to be true is false,” he told them. “The things you think are facts are not facts. We can’t go further here.”

In the end, Nichols discovered there was nothing to talk about because these women simply didn’t live within the same reality as Nichols or anyone else not part of the Trump cult.

H/T to the inspiration for this diary’s title:

Nevertheless, they persisted.

“These two people will never, ever change their minds,” Nichols said.

“They are not accessible to reason. They demand agreement and respect, even when they don’t give it and are themselves unreasonable. This is the cohort that neither the GOP post-Trump nor Dems will ever reach.” [...]

“These types of Trumpers are just lost,” he said. “They’re not going to climb down, change their minds, listen to new information. Trump really could shoot them on Fifth Avenue. There’s no point in discussion, because they don’t *discuss*, they *preach*.”

“No rational or fact-based politics will reach these folks,” Nichols added. “I hate to say that, because I believe in the power of reason and facts. But they’re gone. Some of them are nice people, but dumb. Some of them are just bad people. But rationality isn’t going to change much here.”

So if the supposed goal that Democrats need to accomplish is to further reach this demographic, they’re being sent on a fool’s errand. These people are fully indoctrinated, fully invested. They willfully, even with glee, believe each and every factual or logical distortion that Trump offers up.

They’re fully invested in the “Witch Hunt,” that Hillary Clinton pretty much got away with murder—I mean literally they think, in the case of Seth Rich—that Obama was Muslim Kenyan who never had the interests of America at heart or accomplished anything, and that only Trump can set things “right.” They believe the Deep State and the Mainstream (Jew) Media are hellbent on an anti-Trump vendetta to get him at all costs and will make up any outrageous “Fake News” story to accomplish that aim be it “Russia,” or the “collusion delusion,” or possible “Money Laundering” or “Wire Fraud” or “Stormy McDougal-Pork-a-Porn-Playmate-Gate” or whatever. They don’t care about what he says on an audio tape, what he says or does to reporters, whether he throws migrant children into cages and ignores a court order to return them to their parents who’ve he’s already deported without an asylum hearing in violation of international law. They don’t care whether he retaliates against his critics by threatening their security clearances or whether any of that screams “fascist authoritarian dictator” at all. They don’t care about any of it.

And Trump makes this fairly easy for them because he tells them exactly what it is that they want to hear, which is that everything that bothers them, everything that troubles them is someone else’s fault. The ungrateful unpatriotic blacks, the uppity women who demand they be provided birth control, the gheys and the trans who shouldn’t be in the military, the terrorist Muslims and the rapist Mexicans, the thieving, cheating Chinese, and those greedy Europeans are all the bad guys, while they are the good guys and Trump is their single, solitary champion.

He tells them that they are the good people, the neglected ones, the “forgotten man” and they love it. Why shouldn’t they love that? They’re very happy.

And they really think, honestly, that we should all be happy too and just ignore all those “problems” out there. This was recently noted in a seminal dairy this week by FaithGardner in her open letter to an “unwashed conservative” Trumpster.

Why not relax and enjoy the results Trump has accomplished in less than two years? An exploding economy, lowest black and hispanic unemployment in history, 7 TRILLION appreciation in the stock market where anyone - rich or poor with any savings or pension for retirement is benefiting, a not-yet accomplished task of securing our southern border from drug dealers, human traffic smugglers and rapists, etc?

Seriously, it is unfortunate you have swallowed and believe the "resist" propaganda -- and actually contribute to it. Consider that your view might actually be wrong and holding it makes you bitter and depressed.

Why not sit back, relax and enjoy everything? Seriously?
Faith managed, I think, to really hit the crux of the matter in this section of her response.

Your letter perfectly illustrates the blinders at work in the conservative mind. Pathologically shortsighted, you look at your life and think, “I’m doing well, so this is fine.” There’s no deeper thinking than that. Your vision doesn’t reach beyond your damn self. It’s juvenile. It’s a fundamental inability to empathize with other people who might not have it so well under this administration. Yes, I’m doing well, you’re doing well.

Some people do quite well under dictators and fascists. But at the cost to whom? Do we not have human hearts that enable us to imagine what some of these policies are like for other people? For kids in detention camps, with no parents to fight for them? For people who are targets of hate crimes brought on by hateful rhetoric? For baby fucking bears? I’m not a migrant kid in a cell, I’ve never been bullied, and I’m not a baby fucking bear, but you know what? I can imagine. And that, my friend, makes me liberal.

Empathy. That’s what’s missing, basic human empathy.

They argue about how great things are—or they think they are—for them, but it really doesn’t register how bad things have become for just about everyone else because they just don’t fucking care about that. In fact, again, they like it that way. They think all the people that Trump is screwing over deserve to be screwed over because they’re fully invested in the idea that they’re all criminals, and rapists, and terrorists, and whiners and are stealing away good jobs for “real” Americans.

So this is where we get #PermitPatty calling the police on people having a bbq in the park, or a kid selling lemonade in front of his house, or on an eight year old selling water, or on two guys trying to use the bathroom at Starbucks just two minutes after they arrive while waiting for a friend. And of course, they always deny that what they did was “racial” even though all appearances are that that is exactly what it is.

Roseanne, in her own defense of her comparing Valerie Jarrett to the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, has denied the racism of her statement by saying 1) “I thought the bitch was white” and also 2) “Islam is not a race.” Neither of which is anywhere near the point of trying to reduce someone to a subhuman status because they are an “other” to yourself.

These persons refuse to consider the ignorant bigotry behind the views and the policies they support, that they have joined in a complete common cause with alt-right, neo-Nazi, white nationalist forces. They swear that they aren't racists—or bigots, or homophobes, or Islamophobes, or women-haters, or gun nuts—even when it’s stunningly clear that they really, seriously are.

According to WHDH, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a complaint on Wednesday against Hicham Ali Hassan, owner of high-end clothing story The Tannery.

The lawsuit alleges that Hassan violated Massachusetts’ Public Accommodations Law and Consumer Protection Act “by denying service to an African-American man and a Middle Eastern woman shopping in the store,” WHDH said.

In one December 2017 incident, a black man tried to enter the store 20 minutes before closing but Hassan prevented him.

“What’s up brother man?” Hassan was quoting as saying.

The complaint claims that Hassan told the defendant that “he did not want [his] kind in [the] store” and implied that the man was too poor to shop there.

“I love Trump! I am glad he is going to get rid of all the immigrants,” Hassan is said to have told her. As the woman was leaving the store, the owner allegedly shouted that he didn’t “trust [her] people.”

All the immigrants? I thought it was only supposed to be the undocumented “illegal” immigrants?

Let me digress for a moment about this immigration issue. It becomes quite obvious that it’s not about who abides by the law when they kidnap the children of migrants who are following the asylum laws by legally surrendering after they enter because that law doesn’t require that they only surrender at a “point of entry.”

Domestic law is grounded in widely-accepted international standards, starting with Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 27 of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, and continuing with the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

As stated by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees ‘‘refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay… the seeking of asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules. Prohibited penalties might include being charged with immigration or criminal offences relating to the seeking of asylum, or being arbitrarily detained purely on the basis of seeking asylum.’’

Under 8 U.S.C. §1325, anyone who enters the country at an ‘‘[i]mproper time or place’’ can be sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of up to $250 (repeat offenders can be jailed for up to two years and fined up to $500).

There is a bona fide argument that entering the U.S. without documents to seek asylum is never entering at an improper time or place — especially considering that CBP has been turning asylum seekers away at the bridge so many people have no other option but to cross without documents. To the extent that the illegal entry statute may conflict with our asylum law, the asylum law trumps the illegal entry statute due both to its long-standing and widespread acceptance, and that the illegal entry statute was never intended to prevent people from seeking asylum.

So, in short, if you’re legitimately seeking asylum legally it doesn’t matter how or where you entered.

If they were really concerned with just “criminals” why have they increased deportations of non-criminals by about 173 percent, but improved the deportation of actual criminals by only 12 percent over the previous year, while overall deportations are actually down by 10 percent over Obama's final year and down 45 percent from his deportation peak in 2012 of 409,000 people?

In FY2016 DHS had a total of 240,255 deportations which went down to 226,119 in FY2017 despite the Trump administration claims that they are making the border “safer”. Why? Because arrests at the border by CBP are down massively from 67,493 in FY2016 to just 59,540 in FY2017, which is a 10 percent drop. [...]

While that’s been going on DHS has indeed increased their deportation of “criminal aliens” by about 12% they also increased their deportation of those who may be undocumented but have no criminal record by 173% going from 5,014 to 13,744.

The priority here is not criminals.

If they want more legal immigrants why have they closed the program for people to seek asylum from their home country?

Update: On Nov. 9, 2017, the Department of State stopped accepting new applications for the Central American Minors (CAM) refugee program. USCIS will stop interviewing CAM cases on Jan. 31, 2018. After that date, individuals with pending applications who have not been interviewed will receive a notice with further instructions.

The decision to terminate the CAM refugee program was made as part of the U.S. government review of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for FY 2018.

The CAM program was established in 2014 to provide certain minors in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras the opportunity to be considered, while still in their home country, for refugee resettlement in the United States. Individuals who were determined to be ineligible for refugee status were then considered by USCIS for the possibility of entering the United States under parole. The parole portion of the CAM program was terminated in August 2017.

If it’s about whether they enter “legally” why do they want to modify the family reunification program—which is perfectly legal—to end so-called “chain migration” where a citizen or green card holder has the ability to sponsor an immediate relative? Why do they want to end the visa lottery program which only includes potential migrants who've already been fully legally vetted?

Simple answer: because it's not about "criminals"—it's about immigrants. It's about people who are different, not the right religion, not the right race, not the right values, not white and right-wing enough. It's because they just don't care about "those people."

And if we can't reach members of the Trump-cult with facts, or reason, or logic or reality—what are we to do? Well, the news isn't all bad. As Nate Silver has pointed out the number of people who self-identify as Republicans in the age of Trump is dramatically shrinking, while their approval of him seems to be improving. These two factors appear to be linked.

A widely held tenet of the current conventional wisdom is that while President Trump might not be popular overall, he has a high floor on his support. Trump’s sizable and enthusiastic base — perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the country — won’t abandon him any time soon, the theory goes, and they don’t necessarily care about some of the controversies that the “mainstream media” treats as game-changing developments. [...]

But the theory isn’t supported by the evidence. To the contrary, Trump’s base seems to be eroding. There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an “enthusiasm gap” that works against Trump at the midterms. The data suggests, in particular, that the GOP’s initial attempt (and failure) in March to pass its unpopular health care bill may have cost Trump with his core supporters. […]

But 20 to 25 percent isn’t all that large a base — obviously not enough to win general elections on its own. Instead, Trump won the White House because most Republicans who initially supported another GOP candidate in the primary wound up backing him in the November election. Trump has always had his share of reluctant supporters, and their ranks have been growing as the number of strong supporters has decreased. If those reluctant Trump supporters shift to being reluctant opponents instead, he’ll be in a lot of trouble,³ with consequences ranging from a midterm wave against Republicans to an increased likelihood of impeachment.

GOP support for Trump remains high at 89 percent approval but if that's 89 percent of just 25 percent of the population it's really only 22 percent of the potential electorate. We’re not reaching those people, but roughly 8-10 percent of GOP voters who've become disillusioned with Trump and have consequently left the Republican party are people we can reach.

These would be people like Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, John McCain, Tara Setmayer, Ana Navarro, Max Boot, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, Bill Kristol, George Will, Judge Anthony Napolitano and the late Charles Krauthammer, staunch long-time rock-ribbed conservatives who’ve managed to find the intestinal fortitude to defy the hostage status that has taken over most of the GOP and disavow Trump to varying degrees.

Or people like the father and mother-in-law of Letty Stegall, a 41-year-old mother who is married to a U.S. citizen, her husband Steve, but was still deported supposedly because of a misdemeanor DUI charge six years ago.

Many in the bar this night, including Steve's parents, gave their vote to Trump. They liked his promise to bring jobs back to the U.S. and the vow to make trade with China fairer. And they supported him when he said criminal immigrants would be deported. They just didn't consider Stegall one, even if she came to the country illegally.

"I've always been proud to be an American," says Shirley Stegall, Steve's mom. "But now I'm ashamed."

Jerry Rosetti, sipping scotch and water near the box of letters to Stegall, doesn't think she should have been targeted and calls the situation "a raw deal." But he still supports the president and still thinks illegal immigration is wrong.

"I would trade places with her in a minute," he says. "She shouldn't be in Mexico. She should be right here, right now."

The dichotomy angers Steve. When someone balances compassion for his wife with support for Trump, he's confounded.

"He's destroying American lives," Steve says of the president. "How can you do this? How can you do this to your own American people?"

He’s doing it because he can. He’s doing it because that's exactly what his base wants. Because his supporters don't really care about "those people" until they happen to become one of those people, or someone who has a close friend or a relative in the cross-fire. That’s when their strategically missing empathy will return when they themselves become the target and victim of these policies. When one of their family gets deported, when Trump’s tariff games destroy their business, when Trump’s newly empowered and deregulated electrical and chemical plants dump some toxic sludge into their rivers and streams, and when they start contracting black lung again (which they already are) they’ll slowly start to see why they shouldn't be so “happy” about all this.

Even if you ignore his own numerous personal failings, Trump's policies are a horror show that already have destroyed thousands upon thousands of American and immigrant families and lives. All of that is only going to get worse, Democrats don't need to tie ourselves into knots trying to figure out how to convince his faithful base of this. If they're even capable of recognizing the reality of the situation, they eventually will regardless of anything we tell them and in fact probably in spite of our efforts.

For those with empathy deficit disorder if they ever figure it out, it’ll be the hard way.

From bitter personal experience.