This post is to capture a snapshot of something going on in the news now. Of course the gradual implosion of the US under Donald Trump's disastrous leadership isn't news, it's a day to day train wreck that will take 4 to 8 years to fully unfold, with the severe impact to US global influence and economic potential occurring for decades to follow. This is about a shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
It might as well be about a bomb mailing campaign from one of his followers to a number of prominent Democratic party members; that happened in the last week too. The running theme is the same: Trump holds rallies and says what's on his mind, and recommending that "someone should do something" as a vague reference to people taking criminal actions to settle the conservative score gets implied in some of that. He's a scumbag.
I really wanted to capture what a friend wrote of that related to reaction. The back and forth in Facebook discussion takes a familiar form, related to this divide. Liberals (or moderates, anyone but extreme conservatives, given what's going on) express outrage over any number of things: a tax cut for the wealthy, saying crazy things, defending violence by white supremacists, endorsing a likely rapist to the Supreme Court, starting a trade war, rejecting climate change, claiming to have an intuition for science that allows him to know better than climatologists how climate change is going to work out, etc., etc.
Then conservatives--at least the ones that support Trump--respond that things were no better under Obama, or that Hillary did something, or that we don't really know (whatever it is).
No need to flesh all that out too much further. Here is the response to this incident by Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh, who blame Trump (some of them cited in this article, at least):
https://politicaldig.com/jewish-leaders-to-trump-you-incited-this-massacre-youre-not-welcome-in-pittsburgh-liar/
A Facebook friend just wrote his own response about it related to his family having personally been impacted by the Holocaust, which is obviously enough related to this event:
Literally my entire family on my mother’s side was murdered in the Holocaust. My great grandmother, my great grandfather, and his older brother were the only survivors of my direct line.
I’m letting myself feel anger here. Not vengeance, not hate, but anger. Anger that the climate of intolerance, jingoism and complete lack of accountability fostered by Donald Trump and his administration has engendered a literal epidemic of high profile right wing terrorist acts. Anger that people are probably going to try to justify this shooting as something other than an act of terrorism, of anti-semitism, of racism. That people are going to try to pin this on something other than the hateful example set by our president. Anger that there are people laughing and making jokes about this right now, because the president was making jokes about his hair at the press conference. Anger that the right is going to trivialize this as “no big deal” or just an isolated incident while catastrophizing anything that goes against their agenda. That our president doesn’t care if he appointed a sexual predator to the Supreme Court, because “we won”. That winning is more important than justice in this country and that there are people who will see this shooting as a victory - that murdering Jews, Americans, human beings, is bringing joy to people right now, and that even those who may not condone these acts will look away and refuse to condemn them and the hateful rhetoric which has allowed them to happen for fear of looking “wrong”.
Read the writing on the fucking wall. Everyone makes mistakes but this is your chance to turn it around. Trump opened his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, he failed to condemn the murder of an innocent woman in Charlottesville and practically defended her murderers. There is a long list of ways in which Trump has emboldened hateful people to blatantly propagate their bigotry and engage in public acts of discrimination that would have never been accepted before.
I am feeling anger. Not that the people who were murdered are my people, but that they are people who were murdered, and they were murdered because they are my people, and that millions of Americans are going to look the other way and pin the blame on anything besides its true source, because they don’t want to feel wrong. This is your chance to see what is really going on. If the separation of migrant families wasn’t enough, if the condemnation of first amendment rights when wielded by minorities wasn’t enough, if the misogyny and casual racism and smug contempt for justice, truth, humanity, decency weren’t enough, let this absolute analogy to one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, the holocaust, be your wakeup call.
I feel sick. I feel angry. I feel heartbroken.
And if you want to fucking argue with me on this post, don’t. This is not a discussion it’s a statement of fact.
In my eyes, from this point forward, if you support Donald Trump, these peoples’ blood is on your hands and I don’t have anything to say to you. You can go ahead and remove yourself from my friends’ list, I’m done trying to understand you or convince you to have any modicum of compassion.
So that's where things stand. For some people this is about compassion and decency; the outrage is over Trump saying as little to condemn these actions as public outrage will let him get away with. It white supremacists kill someone he might even say "there is blame on both sides," or actually did say that in such a case, then switch over to a reasonable condemnation after weighing out the level of outrage.
For some people it's more about economic impact. The trade war will cripple the US economy in the longer run. Rejecting climate change is a nightmare on the long term level, related to the survival of the species and humanity's future, but in the short term embracing coal as a power supply and eliminating government support for renewable energy development turns away from one of the clearest growth industries occurring now. The impact won't be immediate but as the world turns to resolution countries that developed renewable energy technology and production will benefit, and those that didn't will have missed an obvious opportunity.
For others it's more about those long term issues. Climate change probably will be the most serious threat and impact to human civilization over the course of the rest of this century and beyond. The pollution currently occurring as a result of all but shutting down the EPA will cost lives, with impact to be felt for decades.
Political issues are more serious for others. Trump has turned away from current economic partnerships, with Asia (cancelling a trade agreement set to go into effect, starting a trade war with China), and with Canada, Mexico, and the EU (more of the same), embracing stronger relations with North Korea (?), the Philippines (at least in terms of supporting the radical actions of another nationalist dictator), and Russia.
All of this is beside the initial point, isn't it? It is the related context.
This isn't intended as a complaint, or venting, or to change anyone's mind (not that that ever happens), just documenting where things stand. My own take is that people can believe whatever they want to believe much more than I ever thought possible. It doesn't matter what Trump does to his followers; they've already concluded how they'll feel about it.
To some extent the blindness must extend to the liberal side too but what we're seeing is unprecedented in the US. This is a capture of fact-checking on Trump's count of public statements, cases of stating a position or idea that can be clearly verified or rejected as untrue:
17% of what Trump says is True or Mostly True, 69% is Mostly False, False, or "Pants on Fire" blatantly a complete lie. In many cases you don't need to fact-check his statements against reality because he's contradicting himself; it's clear that one or all of a set of statements aren't true when he makes several that all can't be true together.
I'd like to see this as a low point in US modern history but all signs indicate the trend is still downward; that the next two years could be even worse. At least the fall-out almost certainly will be; there's an economic crash coming as a direct result of two years of worst-case decision making.
As a natural optimist I often like to pair an "at least" positive factor with any set of ideas, no matter how horrific. There isn't one this time. With 40% of the US completely behind Trump regardless of what comes next, essentially oblivious to it, the die is cast. Even with better leadership and the other majority pushing a more reasonable agenda it just seems like too much of a limitation to overcome.
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