My theory is similar, and it goes like this:
Every single thing he did in his entire life was calculating to make him money, fame, and power at the expense of other people. This started when he young: dodging the draft in the Vietnam War, cheating contractors, and defrauding his “university” students.
Predictably, it extended into his presidency: conning the lesser educated white nationalists into believing that he along could eliminate liberalism and make American great again.
His friendship with Putin (arguably the world’s most ruthless dictator) showed our nation and the rest of the world how little regard he had for honesty and decency, and how he adored the absolute power enjoyed my Putin and the other world dictators.
Then came his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the violence of January 6th, his interest in annexing Canada and Greenland, and his economic policies that can only prove devastating to the United States in the long-term (long after he’s gone).
It all comes down to one guiding principle: Trump will do whatever’s good for Trump in that moment of time, regardless of how destructive it is to all others.
I wish I had $100 for every time I heard some uneducated Trump supporter tell me this.
A democracy is a system where governmental power is derived directly from the will of the majority. A constitutional republic is a specific type of representative democracy where the people elect officials to govern, but those officials are strictly limited by a supreme, written constitution designed to protect minority rights from majority rule.
I remember a conservative friend who lived in Hawaii who complained that the native people objected to a project directed from Washington to build something at the top of one of their volcanoes, on the basis that this was their holy land. My friend asked, “Doesn’t the majority rule?”
“Not necessarily.” Trying to make my point in the simplest way possible, I explained, “People have rights. My neighbors like me, but imagine that they didn’t, and 20 of them, a 20:1 majority, wanted to come in here and beat me to death. I have a right not to murdered. When you think about it, we’re lucky not to live in a country where ‘the majority rules.’”
“Oh. I guess you’re right,” my friend said.
My biggest beef with Trump isn’t the many individual points of failure, but the fact that they are all the product of the mind of a criminal sociopath whose only way of thinking is self-enrichment, normally at the expense of anyone who cannot serve to make him richer and more powerful.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that our problem isn’t that our children don’t understand science, but that our adults don’t.
Three comments:
1) Wind is not a finite resource as long as the sun comes up every morning and disproportionately heats the Earth’s surface. 8th grade Earth science.
2) Wind doesn’t cool anything except the skins of certain animals that perspire. 9th grade biology.
3) Putting one’s ignorance of public display is not a strong idea, even in rural Texas.
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