JF you may well be right about Trump and his entourage being morally bankrupt. I don't know the man or his entourage personally so I can't argue the point. Although I do know a number of people(male, female, black, white, Hispanic, etc) who do know him and who claim differently. I would tend to side with you though. Having said that, IMO there are few high level politicians who have not sold their soles to get were they are(or have been), and that includes the Clintons. So since I don't know either Clinton or Trump personally, and since I assume they are both morally bankrupt, and since I am a republican, voting for Trump was not all that difficult for me. And now I am going to put my full support behind him, not that I agree with everything he does. I would have done the same for Hillary and I did the same for Obama, even though I didn't vote for him and never thought held him in high regard as a president.
The problem with treating the left reasonably is that the left's default position is incivility. To democrats republicans are either dumb - like Dan Quayle and Ronald Reagan - or evil - like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld - or in special cases both dumb and evil, like Nixon and Bush the younger. And meanwhile Al Gore, who flunked out of half a dozen colleges, he's a genius, and LBJ, a died in the wool racist, he's a champion of civil rights. Trump is a bigot because all 17 members of the KKK voted for him and Robert Byrd, who was actually in the KKK when it mattered and who dropped an N bomb on national television, him we name airports after. Woodrow Wilson, who re segregated the government after reconstruction and campaigned for miscegenation laws, he's a great guy, not like that awful Steve Bannon, who edited a website that 17 racists posted on. Joe McCarthy, who claimed rightfully that their were officials in the US government making common cause with hall of fame mass murderer Stalin, he's the antichrist, and Alger Hiss, who was actually making cause with Stalin, every ten years some dope writes another NY Times bestseller proving he got a raw deal. Forget how irrational that all is. How is that civil? Explain how that is deserves comity and respect? Pro tip: you can't.
You can see it in this thread: Trump and his entourage are "morally bankrupt" and deserving of "disdain". What does that tell us? First, that the writer considers himself good and moral; and second that he finds anyone who disagrees with him the opposite: they're bad and immoral. That's not a civil position that serves as a jumping off point for calm and reasoned discussion. It's the jumping off point for William Buckley's response to Gore Vidal: "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.” And it's especially not deserving of comity coming from someone who voted for a member of the Clinton Crime Family, a husband and wife team of criminal masterminds who made hundreds of millions of dollars while in "government service," where government service is defined as selling the hereditaments of government both tangible - missile technology to the chinese, uranium to the russians - and intangible - influence and access - in exchange for speaking fees and political contributions and donations to the Clinton Foundation - odd how the CF closed its doors ten minutes after CNN declared Wisconsin for Trump, isn't it. And meanwhile the left worries that Trump the self made billionaire is going to make a couple of dollars booking hotel rooms in Trump Towers or that his kid's going to get rich quick selling shmatas at Nordstrum's.
The charge that Trump is a fascist is especially laughable. Trump is a game show host. He's not going build concentration camps in the desert and name Bob Eubanks head of the Gestapo and put Chuck Woolery in charge of the Luftwaffe. What he says he's going to do is cut taxes, and curtail the regulatory bureaucracy, and diminish the influence of government in the lives of its citizenry. That's the opposite of fascism. Fascism is when the president says if Congress - the duly elected representatives of the people who have consented to be governed - won't act then I will, unilaterally, because I know what's best for the people. That's the very definition of totalitarianism: a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
I did not vote for Donald Trump and for all the above am not much of a Trump supporter and bottom line think Trump is a vapid narcissistic chucklehead: if he were a basketball coach he'd be Steve Lavin, except more successful and with a slightly less bulbous head. But all this Kumbaya stuff is BS. Newsflash: the left hates you and everything you stand for. They hate you for who you are, and how you act, and and what you think, and what you believe. If they had their way your ways would not exist. All that the pretense of civility does is make bring their dystopia closer to reality.
