The American Dark Age (2016-2020) An archived history of the worst President ever

The PBS Newshour put the number at 16 combat deaths and 17 sailors in accidents for Trump vs 340 servicemen who died during the first year of President Obama term.

By the way the contrast between how Sec. of Defense Robert Gates handles this is striking

Every morning, first thing, I would receive written notifications of servicemen and women killed and wounded in combat during the preceding twenty-four hours. There were no names, just a description of what had happened and the raw numbers. Immediately upon taking office, I starting signing condolence letters to parents, a spouse, or a child of someone killed in action. It wasn’t long before just a signature didn’t seem enough, and at night, I started hand-writing notes at the end of each letter. As the surge in Iraq progressed, I was soon signing well over a hundred letters a month. Sometime later even the notes didn’t seem enough. I was determined not to let these men and women ever become statistics for me, and so I asked for a picture of each, and the hometown news accounts of the life and death of their local heroes. I could look at the picture and read accounts from family, friends, coaches, and teachers about how fun-loving they had been, how they loved to fish and hunt, how they excelled at athletics, about their willingness to help others. Or I learned how they had been aimless until joining the military, where they found purpose and direction for their lives. And so virtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women, I wept.

Gates, Robert M. Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (p. 108). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

And my philosophy is to never attribute to malice what simple stupidity can readily explain. Though I’m sure that some Trump voters are the former, most are the latter, imo.

At a certain point maintaining a willful and destructive ignorance is the moral equivalent of outright malice, and to be frank, it was exceedingly difficult to be ignorant of how evil a vote for Trump was in November of 2016; it is essentially impossible to not realize it by now.

Fair point. Maybe. I try to never underestimate the power of stupid. I figure there are two primary reasons people voted for Trump. Greed or stupidity. And at first thought, you’d think the greed group was much smaller. But then, those two aren’t mutually exclusive and I suppose there could be a hefty size group of people who were stupid enough to think that Trump would make their lives better (greed) and not just the most wealthy Americans.

BPD doesn’t mean it’s almost a mental illness. It’s just the name of a particular syndrome. I suppose it verges on psychosis, is the historical origin of the name, but it’s its own thing.

Ya, I know I’m being tongue-in-cheek But borderline is such a strange term to use in talking about Trump’s personality.

Based on my experiences, mostly with Trump-voting coworkers and family members, I’ve identified five different types of Trump voter:

  1. The Rich. No surprise there. Muh taxes!

  2. The Lifers. Generally older, have voted straight-ticket R for almost their entire lives, and feed all day long at the trough of Fox News. They’d vote for a bag of moldy pork rinds if it had an R in front of its name.

  3. The Dead-Enders. Unemployed for long periods or hopelessly stuck in low-wage jobs. Victims of outsourcing and automation. Typically not very educated or skilled, and have practically no understanding or interest of history/civics/government. Some had never voted before, despite being in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and had little to no knowledge of Trump before The Apprentice, and voted for him mostly out of desperation.

  4. The Burn-It-All-Down Crowd. Doing a bit better than Group 3, but are frustrated with the slow wheels of change that benefit them as well as the fast wheels of change that benefit others. Mostly bigots who are victims of reverse racism hindered by their own behavior, and love that Trump tells it like it is denigrates minorities/LGBT/the poor. Trump is demolishing the state and they love it.

  5. The Spiters. They’re doing all right. Not rich, but are living fairly comfortably, and have little to lose or gain in a Trump presidency, but like the Lifers, are devoted Republicans no matter who is running, and mainly get their jollies from seeing liberals upset.

Greed and racism:

I assume it’s because the WH staff thought he’d likely mispronounce the country’s name.

I was responding to Miramon saying Trump has BPD. He’s already responded to you to clarify his own thinking, but I just wanted to clarify that. I do not personally think he has BPD, but if I’m wrong and he does it’s overshadowed by his cocktail of narcissistic personality disorder and and antisocial personality disorder that, together, make up malignant narcissim.

I can put down stupidity as a reason for voting for Trump but supporting him even today? No, that’s malicious.

Yeah, I thought it was a “I’m right and others are wrong” kind of thinking.

It’s not BPD, it’s cocaine and meds.

I really like this analysis. Groups 3 and 4 kind of represent the “polling surprise” Trump voter, I guess–

I see Group 3 including the Obama -> Trump voters, who are looking for a charismatic change agent and don’t process any other considerations, and Group 4 including racists who didn’t feel they had a stake in the political process before.

Not that racism isn’t at work to some extent in all the categories, of course.

Well, I was lumping in racism and other things like refusing to vote for a woman under the very broad category of stupid.

SNL covered this out months ago.

If his personality had a borderline, he already would have built a wall around it.