My friend, the time has come for an intervention. This relationship you are in is toxic. He isn’t rough around the edges and blunt. He is verbally abusive. He tells you what you want to hear, but then he tells you that you are a fat, ugly, and a stupid loser. He woos you with grandiose ideas, but never provides details. He brags about how much money he has and how successful he is, but he won’t explain why he filed for bankruptcy four times. You don’t need to know the details, he says, because he doesn’t want to lie to you like all the others do.
Other suitors are stupid liars, he says. They will lie to you about anything. He is the only one who cares about you. He is the only one who can make you happy. Trust him, he says, he will take care of everything. He’s the best! He tells you that you are really great, he really likes you, but you’re just not that pretty.
He says he likes your friends — they’re great — but then tells you the mean things they say about you. You don’t believe that your friends would say those things, but he pledges that they did. They are not loyal to you like he is, he says. He is the most loyal person ever!
My friend, this is the one that our Founding Fathers warned us about. He isn’t the gun-toting military dictator or the theocratic tyrant, but Donald Trump is a forked-tongued, false prophet. He is a crass, obnoxious jerk, who mocks the American political process, demagogues people’s vulnerabilities, and disregards American ethics, laws, and traditions. The disconnect between Trump’s words and actions is huge like the Grand Canyon.
Like an abusive spouse, Trump will use and abuse his supporters, and when it is too late, they will realize he played them for fools.
The presidential debate in Greenville, S.C. last Saturday proved once again the futility of debating Donald Trump. His machine-gun insults and out-of-control interruptions revealed a hateful and fearful person, who does not respect the office of the presidency and the sacred trust that it holds.
The only substantive debate in this cycle was that which excluded Trump. Good leaders know that one toxic team member can destroy the whole organization. Remove that one element and the value of the whole exponentially increases.
At the East Cooper Republican Club Monday, Trump spent the first thirty minutes of his speech insulting and slandering the other candidates, particularly Ted Cruz, his most threatening opponent. Trump offered nothing positive, nothing that would improve Americans’ lives. A few questions from his local supporters pitched him the opportunity to mention Health Savings Accounts and military veterans, stock Republican rhetoric.
Attending Trump’s lunchtime speech and Jeb Bush’s Monday evening speech highlighted the stark contrast between them. Donald Trump is not a good person. Jeb Bush is a good person. I am not supporting Bush in the primary, but I would in the general election. The same goes for Ben Carson and John Kasich. The current occupant of the Oval Office deserves the Pulitzer Prize for petulant narcissism. The American people can hardly take another four years of it.
The question for S.C. voters is who will win the S.C. delegate votes to the national convention.
Trump is too divisive, and the Republican Party will not unite under a Trump nomination for president. His negatives far outweigh the positives, and his supporters need to accept that reality, which brings us back to the intervention.
The undeniable truth is that Donald Trump is a hypocrite and a demagogue, and his lack of ethics and morals is reason enough to disqualify him for elected office. He pretends to be a conservative, a Republican, and a Christian, and by this pretense he mocks everything that conservatives, Republicans, and Christians believe.
The most realistic choice for Republicans to represent American values and the U.S. Constitution and win the general election in November is between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
If Trump wins the S.C. primary, the momentum may carry him on to Nevada’s primary and then Super Tuesday, but the Republican base will sit home on Election Day like they did with John McCain and Mitt Romney and we ended up with two Obama terms. Do Trump supporters want to risk the election of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders?
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