McQUARRIE – What is in the minds of Trump Nation?

ON MONDAY evening, while driving back to Kamloops, I was able to listen to the Presidential Debate on the car radio. As it turned out, radio was probably the best way, as without visual clues it forced me to listen and to rely on just their words. And the words of Donald Trump were a mixture of bemused stupidity and frighteningly stark ignorance that demonstrated his profound inability to articulate a single coherent thought.

I couldn’t help but wonder what inner voices guided this man, making him unable to hold it together, to control his own words, thoughts, ego or temper for just those 90 minutes. If the stress and pressure of a televised debate were beyond his coping mechanisms, how could he be trusted to command and control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world? That anyone listening could even consider him a contender for leading their country and by default the world, both puzzled and scared me.

You would have to be beyond naive to believe he is capable of running anything let alone a country. His pretend (and top secret) solutions for domestic and international issues are childlike in nature and founded on nothing more than fictional or worse, delusional fantasies.

Many have commented on Trump’s multiple personality disorders but few have said anything about his followers and I think it’s time for all of us to take notice. For a Trump follower to believe in his candidate’s non-solutions only serves, in my opinion, to confirm an ignorance beyond belief and a complete disconnect with reality.

For example: Trump states he is for Middle America, the hard working guys and gals that make America great (again). Like trained seals, his audience claps and cheers while refusing to hear his next claim on personal income taxes. This is the claim where he brags about not paying taxes and how smart he is for foisting that responsibility onto them. His enthusiastic boast goes right over the heads of his followers as they fail to realize their tax dollars have to make up for his selfishness and greed. This is the trickle down theory in real life.

Another example: His protectionist approach to trade fails to recognize that America needs trading partners to buy the goods the USA produces. His followers do not take a moment to consider or understand that imposing tariffs and duties will generate retaliatory tariffs on goods the USA wants to export. Again, they jump up and down and shout “Make America Great Again” without realizing they are screaming for the end of their own manufacturing jobs.

But these are people blinded by the flash and glitz of reality TV electioneering by a smooth talking con man who wants to be President. They are told to hate Mexicans and so they scream, “Build The Wall.” They enthusiastically agree when told they must segregate (ghettoize) and then deport all Muslims. They ignore all statistical evidence when told crime is worsening in America. And in the end they start sounding more and more like the crowds during Hitler’s rise to power. The same crowds that were driven into committing despicable acts of violence and inhumanity when blame for Germany’s economy was placed on the Jews.

Trump is America’s cancer, a festering growth that needs a constant supply of hatred and ignorance in order to survive. When you say you support this demagogue of racism and hate, you feed that cancer and in the end you become infected with his disease. And when you say he has good ideas, your abysmal lack of intelligence and rational thought becomes apparent to the world.

So when I hear someone say they felt Trump won the debate, I feel an overwhelming sense of despair and disgust. Despair in the realization that America’s cancer has spread to Canada and disgust by the affirmation of intolerance and violence this support of Trump’s politics implies.

Bill McQuarrie is a Kamloops entrepreneur who writes about politics for NewsKamloops.