How to describe Trump supporters, including friends, without sounding condescending? They identify as conservatives, but they support a man who tramples on traditional Republican beliefs such as free trade, strong alliances with other Western democracies and fiscal discipline (we’re headed for a trillion-dollar deficit).
Then what are they? Conservative columnist George Will nails it: “low-information” voters.
So here’s my fourth public service list of “information” Fox News loyalists are missing: Trump is “boorish, dimwitted, inarticulate, inconsistent, narcissistic and insensitive,” says George Conway, an outspoken Reagan supporter.
Fifty-five percent of Republicans who claim Fox as their primary news source say “there is nothing Trump could do that would lose their approval” of him, according to the research institute PRRI. Now that’s the awesome power of propaganda masquerading as news.
Fifty-three percent of Republicans say Trump is a greater president than Abraham Lincoln, according to a survey by the Economist magazine and polling site YouGov.com. For any Trump personality cultists who slept through high school history classes: Lincoln freed the slaves and led our fragile democracy through its greatest crisis, the Civil War.
The president mocked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg after Time named her Person of the Year, an honor Trump coveted. He said she needs anger management classes. Is anyone surprised that he is also a sore loser?
Let me be clear — for the third time in this space — that despising Trump and everything he stands for doesn’t make me a “liberal.” It makes me a patriot.
Dave Griffiths, Mechanic Falls
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