None are so blind and those who stubbornly, fanatically refuse to see
Look up "Big Brother" memes on Google, and you'll see quite a few featuring an image of President Obama. I understand that he is an advocate of Big Government, and so forth. But why so few featuring the face of his successor, who fits the meme far, far better?
Donald once told reporters that “It is frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever it wants to write” and threatened to suspend NBC's license to broadcast because of news coverage he didn't like, threatened his critics with violence by the military and the police and Bikers for Trump, not only praised but pardoned barbaric, racist former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who routinely arrested people for being undocumented aliens simply because they "looked Hispanic" and ran what amounted to concentration camps in which prisoners died at many times the rate of those in other jurisdictions, praised Philippine President Duterte's programmatic extrajudicial killing of those suspected of drug trafficking, on more than one occasion during his campaign encouraged violence against protestors, even promising to pay the legal expenses of those who beat up hecklers at his rallies, and who praises the most brutal dictator on the planet, Kim Jong Un, to the skies, even willingly singing Kim's praises in a propaganda broadcast to the miserable and enslaved people of North Korea, whose starving citizens face martyrdom if they are Christians and concentration camps or execution for the most trivial of "offenses" even if they are committed by a close relative.
Donald Trump has never met a dictator he didn't like. Our democratic allies? Not so much. Maybe now that Boris Johnson is embarrassing the United Kingdom daily, he'll be an exception.
The one thing Mr. Trump will not forgive is criticizing Donald Trump. To him, that is an inherently illicit act. The man is a narcissist and a bully, who loves abusing the vulnerable and portrays himself as a great man and a great leader despite those abusive, whiny tweets about how people pick on him that he sends forth every day and which would embarrass a grade-school girl.
Donald Trump does not understand our Constitution. He does not share our values. He does not believe in our way of life. He believes in only one thing: Donald Trump. And it is only the resilience of that Constitution, the strength of our institutions, and the frantic efforts of those who surround him which have kept those authoritarian impulses in check and preserved our freedom.
He is not Hitler. I do not believe that he actually wishes anyone harm. But he is the antithesis of our values as Americans and of everything conservatives who claim to revere the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers represent.
Yet they stand for him and even support and defend him. In doing so they discredit themselves and any claim they ever had to be lovers of the Constitution and of freedom. The conservative columnists and politicians who have climbed aboard the Trump Train have no credibility left- and neither does the Republican party. The Democrats and the crazy, equally authoritarian and irredeemably smug American left have, thanks to Donald Trump and the degree to which conservatives and the Republican party have embraced him, no credible opposition left. They are free to run amuck, those who oppose them self-exposed as massively self-deluded at best and as utter hypocrites at worst.
There is simply no excuse for anyone who has paid the slightest attention not to realize what Donald Trump is, how unfit he is to lead a free people, and the danger he poses to everything so many of those who fawn over him claim to hold dear.
Yet it's amazing how many Trump supporters don't even know about the statements and deeds I've listed above, and refuse to believe it when they're told about them. Denial, as Mark Twain once said, ain't just a river in Egypt. But far more disturbing is the number who do- and not only tolerate but support him anyway.
There is nothing new about the recent study which showed that the characteristic that best defines hard-core Trump supporters is, in fact, authoritarianism. That authoritarianism was the single greatest predictor of support for Donald Trump was documented already early in the 2016 campaign. The authoritarians and nativists and opponents of everything the Republican party and America itself have historically stood for managed to get their guy a plurality in the 2016 primaries and caucuses, and now they control the Republican party.
Now, after Fox News and Fox Business Network did stories suggesting that Google doesn't like him very much, Mr. Trump warns that he is "watching Google very closely." In a healthier time, those words coming from an American president would fill conservatives and lovers of freedom regardless of political leanings with alarm.
But this is 2019, the Republicans have become the new Know-Nothings, the conservative movement has become less about defending freedom and the Constitution than about defeating the left at literally any cost, and they are hardly even noticed.
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