I heard you on NPR’s The United States of Anxiety the other day, Patty, talking to the reporter Arun Venugopal. Arun said that you are an Irish-American woman of sixty. You voted for Barack Obama, but now you are an active supporter of Donald Trump. I live about thirty minutes from you, Patty, and I’m a woman of your generation. An active Obama supporter, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and now I plan to vote for Hillary Clinton. I wonder how you, an admirer of Obama, could be working to elect Trump, a narcissistic sociopath, racist and misogynist, a man with a short fuse and an even shorter attention span?
I doubt that you get your news from the sources I rely on. Why am I so sure? Because you said that you suspected the timing of the latest revelations about Trump. Why, you wondered, are all these women speaking up now, so close to the election?
These allegations have been made for decades, Patty. I read them months ago in the New York Times, along with reports on Trump’s dubious business practices and the lawsuits against him. There’s an old rape charge (involving a 14-year-old girl) finally going to trial this December. Look it up for yourself, Patty, along with newer stories about “coke-fueled parties” at the Plaza. If you get your wish and Trump is elected, he may get to serve time before he ever gets to take the oath of office.
You spoke of your disappointment with President Obama to justify your choice of Trump. Since Obama was both “black and white,” you expected him “to bring us all together.” In what magical ways did you expect Barack Obama to use his mixed parentage to erase 245 years of slavery followed by 51 years of oppression and discrimination? LBJ had to twist arms to get a Civil Rights Act and even now the battles over voting rights are far from over, thanks to Republican state legislatures.
Arm-twisting is not our President’s style. He tried to work with the Republicans, to bring us all together as you’d hoped. I expected the worst from them and they more than fulfilled my expectations. In fact, the Republican Party has been tirelessly working, ever since Reagan, to “starve the beast” of government, to make sure that our government can’t and won’t work. Then they blame Democrats for the fact it doesn’t work! They seem to be in politics solely to defeat Democrats and get re-elected. On day one of Obama’s presidency, Mitch McConnell announced that the primary goal of his party would be to make Obama a one-term president.
Perhaps you expected President Obama to bring us all together with his famously broad smiles? But you didn’t like it when the President smiled or laughed too much. You said you felt he was laughing at people like you, mocking your concerns about Islamic extremism, illegal immigration and violence against police officers.
Where did you get that strange idea, Patty? The President was not mocking you. He does not take lightly the threat of Islamic extremism, the issue of illegal immigration, or violence against the police. But sometimes he just has to shake his head and laugh at the crazy stuff people on the right wing “news” sites are saying, stuff that too many people seem to believe.
In Brookhaven Town, you and I have the chance to replace a Tea-Party Republican Trump-backer, Congressman Lee Zeldin, with a capable woman, Anna Throne-Holst. We have the power to elect our first woman President, too. Yet, because Obama did not fulfill your unreal expectations, you are choosing to support a bully, a cheat and liar, an ignorant, serial abuser of women. He lacks empathy, Patty. He lacks common decency. Talk about mockery! Who hasn’t he mocked?
After I heard you on the radio, I decided to do some informal research. Since my friends and relatives don’t vote Republican, I talked to random people whose paths I crossed throughout a day. I didn’t have to meet many people in Brookhaven Town to be shocked by what I heard. They were full of conspiracy theories about the Clintons! A quick search of these theories took me to the Alt Net and Breitbart “news” sites, places full of lies and exaggerations so extreme they might as well be outright lies. A few clicks further, I found the real stories by real journalists that debunked all these crazy theories. You can find them too, Patty, and you can fact-check candidates on reliable sites like Politifact and Factcheck.org.
So why do people believe Breitbart when it’s so easy to unmask the lies? Some young people I met on Cedar Beach told me they loved all this conspiracy stuff because it was fun! Here’s some fun “news” they shared: The Clintons plan to put us all into “FEMA camps” for re-education! Now one far-right conspiracy theorist spouting utter nonsense is not convincing. But a chorus of well-financed attack dogs, barking nonstop on the radio and internet, staying on message 24/7, makes people imagine that they must be gnawing on a pile of real, juicy bones! Nope. No meat. Not even one real bone.
So who’s paying for this garbage? There is a class of wealthy reactionaries (heard of the Koch brothers, Patty?) willing to funnel money into this noise machine in order to keep their taxes low and their profits high. But even the Koch brothers are repulsed by Trump. Why aren’t you, Patty?
You rejoiced when you heard Trump say, “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.” You said you’d been waiting to hear that since the eighties. Really? Do you think political correctness is a great danger to civil society? Is it time to insult women and minorities again? Do you think America was a safer (and greater) place when white males could get away with anything?
I happen to think it was a better place when billionaires paid their fair share of taxes. Ronald Reagan put an end to that, but he did it with a smile. Did you feel mocked, Patty, by Reagan’s smiles? I did. I knew that his smiles meant that more children were going to grow up in poverty and ignorance in America. Now too many of those children vote Republican, against their own best interests.
Political correctness is not killing us. We are killing each other. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2001 to 2013, 406,496 people died by firearms in the USA. (This number includes homicides, accidents, and suicides.) The number of American citizens killed overseas by acts of terrorism in that same period was 350. Adding this number to the 3,030 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism (not necessarily by Islamic extremists) brings the total to 3, 380.
Illegal immigrants are not killing us either. They commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans. Committing crimes can get you deported and they want to work here. A study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the roughly 11 million illegals pay about 12 billion dollars a year in the form of income, property, sales or excise taxes. They are far more patriotic than Donald Trump, who hires lawyers to help him avoid paying taxes.
Inform yourself, please. Just Google “Donald Trump’s lies” and read them on Twitter, on Politico, on Daily Kos, the New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, almost any site you can find. He lies at least once every five minutes. View the videos where he says something that he later says he never said.
There is still time to turn things around, Patty. Please have the courage to admit on NPR that you were duped by a con man, along with nearly forty percent of all registered voters. Listen to your capable brain this time, not your gut. And while you’re saying that you now realize that Trump is not qualified to be our President, you might want to add a word about how gerrymandering of House districts is undemocratic. It is the reason why Republicans still control the House of Representatives, although Democrats outnumber them.
Don’t remain on the wrong side of history, Patty. Use the platform NPR gave you to redeem your mistake. You owe it to yourself and your country. You owe it to the generations who will be growing up here long after you and I are gone.