The mad dash to get behind candidate Trump and save the Republican Party from extinction is perhaps the most obvious sign of widespread cynicism and political decline in American history. How badly do we hate our nation if Donald Trump is considered its standard bearer? As House Speaker Paul Ryan recently uttered, “You have to have standards to be a standard bearer.”
Psychology Today magazine describes cynicism as “part of a defensive posture we take to protect ourselves. It’s typically triggered when we feel hurt by or angry at something, and instead of dealing with those emotions directly, we allow them to fester and skew our outlook. When we grow cynical toward one thing in our lives, we may slowly start to turn on everything.” The rise of Trump is a sure sign many Americans have turned on everything.
Most terrifying is how Republican Party leadership is flocking to support Trump in the 2016 presidential race. What does Senate and House congressional support for Donald Trump say about the caliber of Republican leadership today? This is how twisted Republican politics has become: Donald Trump is running on a platform stipulating that Republican politicians in Washington DC are crony idiots and those crony idiots support him nonetheless. If voters really are upset about the direction America has taken, they need to dump Congress, not elevate the king of cynicism to the highest office in the nation. How do you correct a problem with the problem?
Think about this. The United States is the leader of the free world. As president of the United States, is Donald Trump really the kind of person we honestly consider to be leader of the free world? If our answer is yes, we seriously need to question our moral imagination. In the pantheon of American leaders and world leaders, does Donald Trump even enter your mind’s eye? If he does, you too are the problem.
How many times do we have to go down Trump’s dirty laundry list of awfulness? There are a myriad of truths about Donald Trump’s life and record – he’s not a self-made man, he’s a nativist, he’s a populist, he’s a nationalist, he’s anti-trade, he’s anti-immigrant, he’s clearly a misogynist and he could be one of the worst businessmen in America today. By any reasonable standard, Trump is a vile human being. But none of it seems to matter for his angry supporters. And, worse, none of it now seems to matter to national Republican leadership. That’s how cynical Republicans have become – and Democrats are hardly any better choosing between a socialist and a crook.
But the cynicism doesn’t stop there. Even otherwise principled conservative pundits now apologize for and support Trump. The latest is talk show host Dennis Prager. His argument, like so many other despairing Republicans, is summed up this way: Trump is better than Hillary Clinton. Really? How does he or anyone know that? To defend his argument, and I’m not kidding here, Prager reminds us that America once chose Stalin over Hitler. By inference, Prager is suggesting that Hillary is Hiltler and Trump is Stalin – as if Hillary is the worse of two evils. Maybe he forgot that while the monster Hitler oversaw the killing of more than six million people, Stalin oversaw the killing and starvation of 60 million people. This is how ridiculous these apologists for Trump not only have become, but need to become to cover a broken and dehumanizing character as Trump.
Lastly, Prager writes, “I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.” Again, the cynicism just reeks in that comment. Trump is really the only person in America who can stop the Left? Not Congress. Not the states. Not the people. Only Donald Trump. This cynicism is more than distrustful of the American people. It is contemptuous of them.
“A party that willingly places Donald Trump at the top of the ticket has relinquished its claim to the allegiance of principled conservatives.”
If the hope of the free world now rests on Donald Trump, we’ve already lost. Fortunately, all of this Trump vs. Hillary talk is a false dichotomy. Like the choice between Hitler and Stalin, there is an alternative – crush both. Have we lost our moral imagination? Can we not see that Trump and Hillary are both unacceptable?
Here is an opportunity for Utah to lead the nation, again. It’s high time that Utah Republicans rally around an alternative candidate and give that person a majority of votes in this state. Crush both Trump and Hillary and lead this nation back to rationality. Utah can do it.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
