Warming Up for the 2024 Elections

 I saw something quite frightening when I was driving somewhere this morning.  It was a nice, new full-sized SUV with a "Trump 2024" bumper sticker.  If you've been reading my blog for any length of time you know I'm not a Trump fan.  For some reason I have a problem with the leader of the free world brazenly telling lies every time he opens his mouth.  For some reason there are a substantial number of people who think he should be elected President again.

Trump's only accomplishment as President was to normalize being mean and dishonest.  Other than that the only thing he did was systematically dismantle all the things that made the United States the best country in the world.  It was sad to watch what transpired over those four years.  When he lost the 2020 election I breathed a sigh of relief for about a week until I realized that he wasn't going to just go away quietly and disappear.  I soon realized that he would continue to dig his hooks into the soul of the country long after he was out of office and might well come back for a second shot at it in 2024.

The thing I want to write about here is that there are still many, many people who believe that Trump should be elected to another term as President.  The perplexing thing about this is that you know they heard all the lies during his first term and have chosen to just pretend he never even spewed them out to the world.  Many times we saw stories on the evening news where they showed video of him saying something and then followed it with another video saying something that directly contradicted what he said in the first one.  When he was challenged on the obvious contradiction he told the interviewer "That never happened."  Seriously.  We just saw it and heard it.  Knowing this, he just continued to say "That never happened."

Trump supporters ignored what they saw and heard themselves and swallowed up Trump's denials as if the heavens opened up and God spoke those corrupt words directly to them.  Classic example of gaslighting -- you didn't see or hear what you saw or heard.  At first I thought that these people were a special brand of stupid, but then I began to wonder if there was something more to it.  There were even people I knew to be very intelligent and aware of what's going on in the world around them who also bought into it.  Eventually I decided that Trump must have a special type of charisma that makes otherwise rational people become blind to factual information and makes it impossible for them to weigh facts against fiction.

Anyway, what has me worried today is that people are starting to do crazy things prior to 2024.  They're hoarding food and supplies, planning escape routes to get them out of the cities where they live, buying as many guns and as much ammunition as they can find, and learning survival skills.  Recently I've started to hear people talking about impending social unrest and possibly even civil war.  I even saw a news story from a major network (not Fox) where over 50% of people surveyed believed at least one state would secede during their lifetime.  What. The. Fuck.

It just seems like the country is dividing into one part where people are embracing the changes happening all over the world and another part where people are working hard to return us to the type of life we had in the 1950's.  If the country is basically split each way along geographical boundaries then maybe it really is time to consider splitting it into two entities.  Things change over time and sometimes it's better to just embrace the change and let everyone move on to whatever they believe will be better.  I don't know the answer to this.

I could ramble on about this stuff for a long time, but my greatest fear is that 2024 will bring a resurgence of extreme Trumpism and the ruthless cruelty that comes with it.  This will undoubtedly bring friction between both sides and I think the greatest losers will be ordinary Americans.  We stand to lose a lot while we are fighting the battles of our political leaders and I'm afraid many of us won't even understand what's happening because of Donald Trump's special type of charisma.  Hopefully we'll be able to survive as a country, but if not then we need to make whatever changes are necessary and move on.