Trump Con-Man Par Excellence: His Supporters Don't Even Know It (Yet)

 He can't accept 2^nd place; Always top dog; Always #1; Never disputed

This introduction from FOX now reporting on Trump’s bogus fraud claim and states refusing to bend to is commission request for records … in short, there is no there there.

Now the original post for today and full disclosure on the following: My mother, grandfather, two sisters, and several other close relatives are Republicans - my dad, grandmother and few others are DEMS... like me. So here goes.

The Republican Party has been around for a very long time — 163 years, in fact. So, needless to say, there’s a lot of history associated with one of our nation’s two largest political parties. Of course, the GOP we see today is not the same party it once was — not even close. Today’s Republican party is really a TEA party bunch of ultra-rightwing conservatives who call fellow Republicans hey don’t deem “conservative enough,” RINO — that is “Republican-in-name-only.”

They are not the same people who supported great Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower instead today’s Republicans wouldn’t even support Ronald Reagan if he were alive and ran for office. That’s how far they’ve devolved downward from the days when the party was honorable and could be considered a respectable political organization.

1. The GOP is the party of a president (Lincoln) who waged a civil war to end slavery. Now it supports and defends Trump, a president who is supported and cheered by white supremacists, all because he fueled his campaign with bigotry, racism, and intolerance. 

2. The GOP has gone from the party of a president (Ike) who built the Interstate Highway system and then warned against the military industrial complex having too much influence over the country, to the party for the most part that scoffs at any mention of spending to improve our crumbling infrastructure and makes increasing our already bloated defense budget a key talking point for essentially every member of the party.

3. They’ve become such an absolute joke we’ve seen some Republicans leave the party altogether because of Trump’s success. 

4. GOPers like Paul Ryan — despite repeatedly condemning Trump’s horrific rhetoric during the campaign — have treated most Americans like we’re all brainwashed Trump supporters who believe the absurd lies he’s been forced to come up with trying to defend his documented “childish, reprehensible, and disgusting behavior.” That cannot be disputed.

Ryan is far from the only Republican who knows Trump’s a national embarrassment and unfit for office, but they have chosen to put their party over country to defend someone who’s turned the United States into a global laughingstock. Every day it gets worse. Another fact – undisputed.

Related from a fine article by Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post.

The highlights follow:

This is moment in our history is bizarre for obvious reasons, and as Thomas Paine would write in December 1776:  “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

We have a president who neither understands nor respects the basic norms of American democracy. Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a true aberration.

There is no figure like him in U.S. history, for which we should be thankful.

• Trump’s inexperience is unique; he is the only president never to have served in government or the military.
• This weakness is exponentially compounded by his ignorance of both policy and process, his lack of curiosity, his inability to focus and his tremendous insecurity.
• He refuses to acknowledge his shortcomings, let alone come to terms with them; and he desperately craves the kind of sycophantic adulation that George Washington, a genuine hero, pointedly rejected.
• He strings along his supporters with promises he has no idea how to keep. Like many a would-be strongman before him, he defines himself politically by the fights he picks; he erects straw men — faceless “elites,” cable television hosts, Muslims, Mexicans, nonexistent individuals or groups waging an imaginary “war on Christmas” — because authoritarians always need enemies. Yet his ego is a delicate hothouse flower, threatened by the slightest puff of criticism.

The Founders, mindful of their own faults, ultimately designed a system to contain a rogue president. They limited his elective term to four years, gave checking and balancing powers to the legislative and judicial branches, and designed impeachment as a last-ditch remedy. The Trump presidency compels all of us to be mindful of our constitutional duties.

The role of the citizenry — to express approval or disapproval at the ballot box — includes making sure that suffrage is not selectively and unfairly denied by restrictive voter-ID laws or partisan purges of the voter rolls. It is heartening that red states have joined blue in resisting the attempt by Trump’s trumped-up “voter fraud” commission to assemble a national list of voters.  Perhaps some future administration could be trusted to make sense of our confusing patchwork of voting systems. This one can’t.

Congress must assert its powers of oversight. One reason the signers of the Declaration gathered in Philadelphia to pledge “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of independence was that they saw the mingling of royal power and British commercial interests as corrupt. We now have a president whose far-flung business empire — which he has refused to divest, and which his family still operates — presents myriad potential conflicts of interest. Trump has deepened the swamp, not drained it; and Congress has a duty to sort through the muck.

Congress also must let Trump know, in no uncertain terms, that any attempt to impede or disrupt special counsel Robert S. Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling will have the gravest consequences. 

Trump should be told that firing Mueller would automatically be considered grounds for impeachment.