Opinion/Editorial
WAITING IN TREPIDATION
Although this article is written by what many would consider a way left progressive liberal, they would be wrong. What has happened to most of the American public is happening to this author and to most others living under the broken umbrella of Donald Trump’s form of protecting everyone from storms that are made up and not at all real, thereby creating ever-growing galvanic earthquakes beneath our feet. Those earthquakes are real, however, and the growing list of them becomes staggeringly huge and filled with potential consequences that well may end the great American experiment or dream for all of the country’s citizens, save a few billionaires who are mostly American in name only.
The progressive part, the majority, of the voting public has been worried ever since this current president was elected so this article is not being written about their trepidation about what is not only currently happening but what seems to appear to be a direction into a future filled with denial, paucity, and mean-spiritedness directed at most of the public, very much including most of the people who identify as MAGA members or supporters. Although the vast majority of the MAGA crowd are not overly intellectual, there exist many who certainly are. Those are the people I write about, and how I have come to know so many of them because of the articles I write and the experiences I observe and participate in.
The current president has called for taking over Canada and making it the fifty-first state. He’s called for the overthrow of Greenland and its occupation. He’s threatened to conquer Panama and take the canal back. While doing these things, he’s also closely befriended many international leaders who do not share the U.S. belief in democratic rule, like the Prince in Saudi Arabia, Putin, and the leaders of the UAE and Qatar. At home, he’s promised not to go after Medicaid-insured, but then is going after them, the same with those on Social Security and Medicare…and even military veterans. The question becomes one of whom he’s not gone or going after, and that class of people is very small and very wealthy. Quietly, and with the support of most of the American mass media, he’s not been attacked for going after his supporters, or the MAGA members of his supposed base, although it is obvious that man of the governmental positions being terminated have been held by people selected and appointed by republican leaders. He’s attacking judges appointed by republicans, and maybe he’s in his first term.
Most supporters of Trump to this day, no matter what he’s done so far, much of which seems to be the work of a madman rather than an astute and sensible world leader, have continued to back him, although that backing is beginning to crack and crumble at its foundations. There is simply no way to for Trump’s supporters to avoid being hurt in the mass layoffs, attacks on medical assistance for the poor, and the devastating effects of the tariffs just now beginning to be felt as Walmart amazingly and dramatically announces that all its prices must go up. If you are a Trump supporter today, and don’t feel that any of what he is doing to hurt so many for almost no reason at all is oka,y then you are not using your powers of observation to examine any of the evidence.
Trump is not yet being abandoned by his supporters, but the feeling of trepidation they are beginning to experience is palpable out in the public places they frequent. The hats are coming off, not with drama or discussion, but simply retired to closet shelves or hanging from bare hooks on the wall in homes. The trepidation that the liberal masses felt and continue to feel as Trump’s actions take effect is eating its way into the minds and hearts of his followers, as they begin to have ever-growing evidence that the pain and suffering this president is doling out is going to go well beyond hurting and killing illegal immigrants, criminals and drug dealers. The country is not being taken apart and brought down in its infancy, early development or position of weakness, and as it falls, it is going to take almost everyone and everything with it, including those who followed the MAGA mantra and bought into this, the largest cult to ever exist on the planet.
What became the cult of Nazism before WWII was distilled from a population of only about seventy million and that, the formerly largest cult, did not truly expire until the end of WWII. Seventy million people had to die before that one was over. How many must die before this current developing cult expires, which must if history can be used as a guide. The trepidation beginning to winnow its way in bands, strains, and emotions among the Trump followers is coming on early and strong. Quite possibly, the development of that trepidation is all that may save what it is this country has become.
