This is one of the most depressing articles I've ever read. The only hope I see is if that enough of these voters didn't really want Trump to be a ruthless dictator. By Hal M. Brown

Since you're reading this you're one of the people Trump voters see as a smug privileged snob.

You don’t even have to read “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape in today’s New York Times (subscription)” to get the gist of it. You can just look at the graphics. Here are four more of them:

There are graphics showing that even in primarily Black or Hispanic communities Trump has made more gains than Democrats.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.

The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

Trump has managed to divided the country into as us against them, or as the “them” would put it, “them against us.”

Those reading this are members of the more highly educated and more affluent “us.” I think you more likely than not can read the NY Times article because you have a subscription. The other “us” would read the previous sentences and say “see, that’s what we mean, these people are a bunch of smug privileged snobs.”

We have to admit that the so-called party of the working class is no longer the Democratic Party. It is now the Trump Republican Party. For decades since the decidely upper-upper class FDR was president for three terms, Democrats won elections because the working class believed that the candidates from the professional class and upper class, even upper-upper class, would make their lives better. They believed that they really cared about them. Jimmy Carter pulled off being seen as being just a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia even though his peanut farm was between 2000 and 3000 acres.

The cruel irony of this is that these candidates really did care about people less affluent than them.

Then along came Donald J. Trump. While he was not only a member of the upper class, he was an in-your-face member of the upper-upper class.

He took his cruel Apprentice “you’re fired” persona and turned it into his brand. Millions of people ate it up. None of the people who got the “you’re fired” treatment were villains. In fact they were even horrible potential job candidates like many of the performers on The Gong Show who got the gong.

By way of comparison, Gong Show star and creator Chuck Barris (who once lied about being a CIA assassin) actually was the creator of the show while 13 time Emmy Award winner Mark Burnett deserves credit for the successful casting of Trump as a business genius on “The Apprentice.”

Trump isn’t an Einstein level genius like he thinks he is. He is a genius at some things like marketing and unabashed lying. In other areas he is as dumb as a post.

His most recent dumb as a post example is a demonstration of his segmented intelligence. This was in his comments about stealth aircraft. They were made at his weird trophy wife West Point commencement address (from below reference):

However, one avenue of free-associative speculation Trump meandered along while speaking about military investment seemed to confirm that one of his much-derided beliefs remains intact: the president seems to genuinely believe that so-called “stealth” fighter jets—military aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by radar—are actually invisible.

“We are buying you new airplanes, brand new beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump said, speaking to a proposed record increase in defense spending.

“I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sort of wondering.

“We shape a wing this way, they don’t see it. But the other way they see it? I’m not so sure, but that’s what they tell me!

Trump’s supporters don’t give a shit about any of this. While I doubt that if we could give them all IQ tests we would find that they aren’t what you could label “dumb” meaning having significantly below average scores. However if they answered honestly I think they would score fairly high on this gullibility test.

I took the test:

Trump sold himself as a man of the common man. He appealed not only to the gullibility of a large enough segment of the population to win, but hid his true intention to become a ruthlessly cruel dictator throughout the campaign. He made his bigotry clear, but he never said “vote for me and I will destroy democracy” for everyone including most of you in my adoring audience.

If enough people decide that this isn’t what they want their country to be there’s a chance there will be enough blowback to lead to an active resistance that will derail his blitzkrieg to Trumpify America. It took the Allies four years to undo what the Nazis did following their blitzkrieg to take over Europe. Alas, it may take this long for democracy loving Americans to undo what Trump is doing.

Addendum (nothing to do with the above):

Trump’s supporters don’t care that he is a grandiose narcissist who needs to hang pictures like this in the White House.

I just wonder what foreign leaders think about him when they see it. They don’t even have to be there in person as many stories are being published about it including this one in The Irish Star.

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