A letter in last month’s NewsGazette invited “the liberal/progressive wings” to “join the Republicans on some of the good things that are being done,” presumably by the Trump/Republican Party.
It brought to mind, obliquely, a joke I heard years ago. A diner ordered the specialty of the house, a very expensive cut of Kobi beef, “known for its exceptional marbling, tenderness, and flavor.” When the order arrived, the diner saw the waiter’s thumb firmly planted on the middle of the steak and flew into a rage.
“This is outrageous! What are you doing with your thumb on my steak?”
“Whatta you mean??!” the waiter replied, “Did you want me to drop it on the floor again?”
The letter writer opened his invitation for cooperation with the observation that “there are a lot of letters to the editor complaining about our president[,] and I understand that because Lexington is a left leaning town.”
That doesn’t sound like a positive inducement for a bipartisan meeting.
That tone is further reinforced with “I also see in the media a lot of frustrated liberals protesting with weird outfits, banging pots and pans, using the strongest of swear words, singing, chanting, waving signs and dancing around in an effort to get on an evening TV clip.”
Really? I recollect a different crowd of frustrated people: a mob of an estimated 10,000 plus, urged on by Donald Trump, that assaulted the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. They were dressed in their own weird outfits, but armed with bear spray and anything that could serve as a weapon. Their chants were “Hang Mike Pence.” Their effort: to criminally stop the Constitutional procedure of validating the 2020 presidential vote.
I expect there was an abundance of “strong swear words.”
Police officers were smashed in the head with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. There were cracked ribs, shattered s pinal d iscs, i njuries t o limbs, even a stabbing with a metal fence stake. At least one officer suffered a heart attack during the riot. Others had lung damage from tear and pepper gas.
Some officers were left with longterm disabilities.
“Defend the police”? Not this MAGA crowd.
A far cry from an amorphous crowd “banging on pots and pans, singing, chanting, and waving signs and flags.”
Nonetheless, then President Trump didn’t call out the National Guard or send in the Marines; he later pardoned those insurrectionists, as he does all his idolizers.
The writer offers a list of unsubstantiated “good things that are being done”: “lower taxes” (For whom?), “business regulation reform” (To whose benefit?), “peace efforts in Europe and the Middle East” (When, now almost five months after Trump’s promise of first-day-in-office solutions?), “bringing in trillions of dollars for domestic manufacturing and jobs” (How, with on-again/off-again tariffs?), “trying to get rid of unnecessary spending” (By what means, the precision of a chainsaw?)
Maybe if the “liberal/progressive wings” joined the Republicans on these “issues” we could see some actual movement on them, but would Trump listen? He ignores the conservative financial experts, the scientific community, and even the court rulings that go against his actions.
This letter states that Trump is “a man who is loved by the majority of Americans.”
The last presidential election was razor thin in Trump’s favor. He received 77,302,580 votes to Kamala Harris’ 75,017,613, a margin of 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent.
According to the University of Florida Election Lab, approximately 245 million Americans were eligible to vote in the 2024 general election. Nearly 90 million didn’t!
Of registered voters, Trump got 31.5 percent; Harris 30.6 percent. Ne it h er can claim being “loved by a majority of Americans.”
The Democratic Party was inexcusably slow to acknowledge the waning mental acuity of Joe Biden, but when that fact became too obvious to ignore, it took measures to insist that he withdraw from the race.
Can anyone doubt what mayhem Trump would raise if there was anyone left in the Republican Party to challenge his current fitness for office?
Of course not. Trump has purged the erstwhile “Grand Old Party” of all dissenters. He has moved to purge anyone in the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., and the military who does not kowtow to him and support all his imperious whims.
Trump has put obsequious sycophants – many from his fawning press, today’s Volkischer Beobachter, that see no evil, hear no negatives, and report no facts – in key positions throughout our government.
If he gets what he wants – full control of the government, the censorship of our free press, and the throttling of our institutions of learning – our democracy will cease.
Which brings me to my opening non sequitur, the joke about the thumb on the steak.
Donald Trump has his thumb on the Republican Party, which he drops and soils whenever asked a legitimate question or contradicted by a verifiable fact.
He has no integrity, empathy, loyalty, or sense of decency. His only rhetorical tool is thuggery. It is his “art of the deal”: humiliate and bully someone through a vulnerability or weakness. If one doesn’t exist, lie and invent it.
This “steak” is woefully contaminated.
As long as Donald Trump is their standard bearer, I’ll not vote for Republican candidates who won’t stand up to him or at least question his oft bizarre behavior and pronouncements. I won’t be an accomplice, either passively or actively, to his machinations.
There are Republicans who denounce this new tone and direction of their party!
And “left leaning Lexington”? Readings of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution show that these citizens, too, are Centrists on our core values.
It is Donald Trump and his minions who have gone astray from the path our founders set.
