Donald Trump is proving us all idiots

Well, it is Sunday and I should be writing about the best of humanity. Instead I am feeling a bit …shoot I do not know if there is a word for it or not. At least I cannot think of it, I thought it might be smarmy, but even that doesn’t sound like the mood I am in or even a real word. It is not exactly tongue in cheek either, but the topic is not tongue in cheek so it can’t be that. I really believe many things that are wrong with this country is being exposed because of Donald Trump’s rise in the political world.

And I know many people will say it is all the ignorant people who listen to everything he says and believes what is coming out of his mouth without any vetting or fact checking and they are the ignorant ones or idiots. No, this is one symptom of the problem. And besides if I say everyone is being proved an idiot then identifying this one group doesn’t work. Not everyone is believing everything he says.

So how is everyone proved an idiot if the majority of us do not support him or support what he is saying?

And it isn’t because he is now a Republican and wasn’t really politically active in the party before now.

Or because he was a reality star and now he is running for President.

And it isn’t the press’ fault that he is popular by constantly running stories about him.

It would be very presumptive of me to say all this without some acknowledgment that this is all just blogging, and yet can I say that is he proving us idiots without question without my entire tongue in my cheek?   yes he is…

The problem is our society has come to the point where we need or think we need Donald Trump.  And not just Donald Trump, but his whole attitude and persona. Do you remember Ross Perot? He ran for President and is a very successful businessman, much more than Donald Trump yet he did not become as much of a lightning rod as Donald Trump. Yes he was popular and even a bit controversial, but he was no where near the divisive person Donald Trump is in this election.  So why Donald Trump now?

Donald Trump is the poster boy for everything that has gone wrong with American Politics for the last fifty years and especially the last ten. If our political system had responded to the people and supported the people of this country everything Donald Trump would not exist. Even the people who don’t support him, don’t care about him, or hate him need him right now. Why?

He makes it feel right for the people that support him and gives everyone who doesn’t support him an out on who to blame for our current political system. It is easier to attack him than address what has become of us.

We have many problems in our political environment. Some of the people who support him are examples of a failed education system. There are other reasons too. They are disenchanted (and rightfully so as we all should be, but for completely different reasons) and they are using Donald Trump as a recourse for all their anger. I think most of you see that. Yet we all fall into the trap of addressing everything around him based on what he says. To use the sports comparison he is all offense and doesn’t worry about the defense. He is just outscoring everyone else right now. And this is working.

And other factors have played into his success. And it isn’t that he is in the press all the time. It is the fact he can take advantage of what the press created over the last few decades, commonly known as sound bites. Once politics became a TV game and we as a populace accepted shorter and shorter bits from the candidates it was inevitable that someone like him would be the dominant player. He appears in short bursts on TV, keeps the rhetoric in his speeches simplistic and repetitive, and is using Twitter as an attack dog.

Obviously sound bites are working well for him. And the reality is he is saying a bit more than what is put on TV, the press just went with his first few offensive statements which garnered the attention in the first place. For example if no one in the press had made such a big deal or even mentioned the immigration comments, how big would he be right now?  It was a great sound bite.

The repetitiveness of his speeches prevent people from being able to break him down in a policy argument. He does have a few ideas he is presenting, but not much substance which allows him to continue to vilify other people without giving them a chance to critique him.

And somehow or another he became the Republican nightmare on Twitter. The platform for Twitter fits in well with how he operates. Whether by design or accident it doesn’t matter, he just attacks and attacks on it which the press picks up and disseminates even further. And with how Twitter works with being able to attract followers, he can send out targeted messages to his followers that by pass any constructive criticism that does manifest in the press or from other sources.

And the standard bearers of politics cannot stop him. The Republican Party is having to come up with machinations to find a way to get around him. And do not think the Democrats are any better, they just have a candidate they can rally around at the moment. If there were as much discourse on the liberal side they would be just as susceptible to the emergence of some type of Donald Trump as part of the Republicans have become. Lucky for the Democrats Bernie Sanders is not Donald Trump and they have a standard bearer for their discontent. This does not mean they are better than the Republicans, just in a better way right now.

So how does this prove, he proves, we are all idiots. It is simple. We let this happen. We have been setting this up for years. Not our government, not our press, but us. Yes the failures of Congress and the system the Press created help him, but because we have let our education system flounder, our decreasing ability to think critically, relinquishing power to fewer and fewer people, and letting everything under the sun, but what our government is doing become more important has led us to this moment.

We did not choose to be proven idiots and truly we are not.

We are potentially failing as a democracy. We have chosen to let this happen by default. And in doing so, Donald Trump is winning and we, the people, have been and are losing. How idiotic is that????????????????????????