Over the holidays read about how people were concerned about how to handle inevitable encounters at family gatherings with family members who fervently support Donald Trump.  We have close family member (I’ll call him Dave) of that persuasion and I suspect his wife is on that bandwagon as well, but I am not 100% sure. In order to not disrupt otherwise friendly family gatherings my wife and I try to follow one simple rule, we simply never bring up the subject of the mad man in the White House, even when presented with situations when it is very tempting to do so. For all practical purposes the other couple follows the same rule.

One thing has always bothered me is the fact that “Dave” doesn’t fit the stereotype embedded in my mind of a Trump supporter.  He is not a knuckling dragging, shallow minded bigot who attends white supremacist or right wing militia meetings in his spare time.  He is not a factory worker who has fallen for Trump’s lies that immigrants are destined to take away the rights of Americans to earn a living and that he can fix the loss of factory jobs with tariffs and new trade agreements.  “Dave” is intelligent, well-educated and generally well informed. He is not one to fall for Trump’s lies hook, line and sinker.

“Dave” has always been very conservative, but all and all a pretty decent guy.  Other than this one “defect” he and his wife are fun to be around.  He is in the upper tier of managers of a fairly large construction company and before the Trump era I would have described him as a classical establishment Republican.

It has always amazed me that he has stooped so low as to support the dishonest, self-serving egotist in the White House who continually lies, flouts social norms, and abuses the power of his high office for personal gain.  How can an otherwise decent guy support someone who is having an ongoing bromance with Putin, embraces our enemies, constantly insults and offends our best allies, and puts his selfish self-interests above the security of our country?  These questions were again brought home by an incident which occurred over the holidays.

We were all at my mother-in-law’s home during the Christmas season. She’s 90 and was watching TV while contributing sparingly to the general conversation the other four of us were having.  You need to understand that her favorite thing to watch are sappy Hallmark movies, especially during the holidays, so I was relieved when she changed the channel to CNN.  I was then surprised and frankly a bit shocked when “Dave” immediately said in loud voice, “Can’t we watch something else besides that terrible TV channel!”, or words to that effect.

Now others may differ, but I view CNN to be as close as we have to straight news network.  MSNBC is unabashedly liberal leaning and FOX News is extremely hard to the right and backs Trump regardless of how much he lies and sells out our country. On the other hand I can recall early on in the Trump administration how the CNN hosts and their guests danced around the fact that Trump was continually lying, refusing come out and call his falsehoods “LIES”. They were apparently afraid of being accused of taking sides in the political wars.

However, as the situation grew steadily worse and it also became obvious to everyone with a brain that Trump was ill-equipped to do his job and was using the power and bully pulpit of the presidency to try to destroy those he viewed as enemies and advance his selfish self-interests above all else, even the well-being of the country.  There came a point where the network decided that unless they called out Trump when appropriate, they were no longer doing good journalism. That’s when they started calling a spade a spade.

So with all of that as background when “Dave” mouthed off about CNN, before I could stop myself I blurted out, “Why? Because CNN points out that Trump is an idiot?”  His instant reply was, “WE AREN’T GOING TO DISCUSS POLITICS!”  He was obviously very perturbed, so I let it pass and eventually the normal conversation resumed.

Druring following few minutes I wished that I had instead said, “Why?  Because you don’t want to defend Trump.  I don’t blame you; I wouldn’t want to try to defend him either.”  Now that I think back on the incident more calmly, it was probably best that those words were not the ones that came out of my mouth at the time.  Making “Dave” instead of Trump the subject of my reply probably would have made the already awkward situation even worse.

However, after since pondering the subject of why he supports Trump and why he is so hell bent on never wanting to discuss the situation, it is obvious that reason really is that he doesn’t want to be put in the position of having to defend the indefensible.  I have also concluded that he isn’t at all happy with the manner in which Trump operates.  However, like the evangelicals who support a man who is the antithesis of their teachings, he also supports Trump because of what he and his company gets out of the deal.  So obviously corporate tax cuts, reduced regulations, and his resulting bigger company bonuses are more important to him than what Trump is doing to the country.

But that begs the question, how can otherwise decent people (and yes many of the Trump supporters I know are otherwise decent) think that way.  The only explanation that I can come up with is that they have become very good at lying to themselves.

‘They rationalize that the end justifies the means and then they try not to think about it too much.  That’s why people like that get so irritated when they are put into the position of having to justify their support of Trump. They know that that they can’t adequately defend his abysmal behavior and that if they get involved in that process the arguments brought forth by the other side might cause them start to internally  questioning the validity their continued rationalizations.  It is much easier to avoid the subject entirely.

Cajun     1/18/2020