My dad.
He fell down the trump rabbit hole. 😔
When I arrived at my folks’ house early 🥱 one morning a couple of weeks ago to hang out with my mom (who has dementia) so my dad could spend all day at an outdoor event with his friends/relatives, I saw the sign in the front yard. There was no denying it: It was right there in blue and white.
I’ve read the stories of adult children that watched as their elderly parents went from moderate Democrat to MAGA Republican via Fox 'news' and peer pressure from their MAGA friends/relatives. I never thought it would happen to my dad, he was too smart for that. He voted for Bernie Sanders in the MI primary in 2016 and Bernie won Michigan (he eventually lost the nomination to Hillary.) But my hometown is now big MAGA country, as evidenced by all the political signage, so maybe it was inevitable?
My folks do have internet at their house, but I don’t think my dad uses it very often, and probably not to read any news. The hometown newspaper had been converted into a media group and combined with three other area city newspapers years ago. That combined paper is only printed three days a week, and I know they do not have a subscription. They don’t listen to the radio, so the only political information entering their small world on a regular basis is what my dad is watching on Fox, hearing from my brother and the guys they hang out with, and what they might be exposed to with their friends or out in public.
My dad is a proud Vietnam veteran, and was a 30+ yr union member, and those are the biggest reasons why this decision of his didn’t make any sense to me.
I asked him about it. I said, “Dad, the guy called military veterans ‘suckers and losers.’ The veterans' groups refuse to endorse him for that reason.”
My father’s response: “There are a lot of rumors going around.” 😳
I said, “Dad – that’s what he actually said to his own Chief of Staff. It’s not a rumor, it’s well-documented.”
His response: “Well, there are a lot of people out there trying to make him look bad.” I couldn’t help it, I said, “He doesn’t exactly need any help in that regard, he’s doing a good job of that all by himself. They still haven’t figured out what he did with the Top Secret documents he stole.” It was probably a good thing that that was the end of that conversation.
My dad spends a lot of time with my brother (a former moderate Democrat) who transitioned to MAGA Republican in recent years, largely due to his spouse’s influence, I suspect. I’m starting to wonder if maybe one of the reasons that my nephew and his wife moved to the East coast was to get away from that? I’m pretty sure they are liberal Democrats.
As if I needed more evidence to confirm the hold that MAGA Republicans have in my hometown: When mom & I were at a yard sale that day, I saw an old man proudly wearing his red MAGA hat, but he also had a t-shirt on that had a picture of trump on it with the words “34 Felony Convictions” above it and “My President” underneath it. I couldn’t envision a stronger statement to others that he prefers a fascist dictator to lead our country over a democratically-elected President. This man was likely old enough that his mother or father could have lived through the Holocaust. Decades after the Holocaust, historians wondered how Germans made it possible for someone like Hitler to rise to power. I no longer wonder, as I am seeing it with my own eyes, in real time.
If I didn’t care so much about this country and want it to move in a healthy, prosperous direction for ALL of us, I almost wish trump would get re-elected, just to show all of these people who support him how truly awful he would be for us, our nation’s future, and our standing in the global community. I’m also fairly certain that VERY few of the MAGA Republicans from my hometown have read Project2025 so they have no clue how very much worse all of our lives would be under this plan. After the recent Listeria outbreak from the Boar’s Head plant, who thinks eliminating food regulations are a good thing? Do you really want to take your life in your hands like that every time you buy food from the supermarket? I don’t.
I think part of the problem is that the protective functions of our government have been in place for so long and have done their jobs so well that they have become largely invisible to the average person. We take for granted that our money is secure because of the guarantee of the FDIC. Government regulations exist mainly to protect consumers from the predatory practices of corporations. Corporations are profit-driven, government is not. We count on government regulations to make sure we get the amount of gas at the pump that we paid for, we count on government regulations to force companies to keep their pollution in check so we aren’t breathing soot every time we go outdoors, we count on government regulations to protect us from being taken advantage of in countless other ways, because corporations, by and large, are not self-policing. Even still, government regulations over the past 40 years have become more and more lax, as more and more corporatists have been hired into government oversight jobs as ‘regulators.’
It’s astonishing to me how many well-educated and otherwise intelligent people cannot see the obvious threat to our democracy that this particular candidate poses. (Does no one remember January 6th?) These are the same well-educated and otherwise intelligent people that don’t ‘believe in’ global climate change. It’s not really a matter of believing in it or not, it’s a matter of accepting or refusing to accept the scientific data. If you don’t accept it, then you are saying that you don’t accept as fact the mountains of scientific evidence that proves that global climate change IS happening, it IS human-caused, and unless we take some immediate and drastic steps, as a planet, things are going to get very much worse for everyone; maybe not for us, specifically, but for our children and grandchildren.
