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In the next few blogs I want to talk about America, specifically, America at the crossroads, with the direction we take from here determining what kind of nation we will be post-Trump.

The obvious place to begin is with Trump voters who, according to several recent articles I have read about them, say they are sticking with Trump because they feel disrespected by people like me, i.e., liberal elites, Democrats, and the like.

Here are examples of the typical comments they are making:

“I…dislike the fact that a lot of people stereotype Republicans [as] racists.”

“We voted for President Obama and still we are ridiculed. Still we are considered racists. There is no respect for anyone who is just average and trying to do the right things.”

“[When I started voting] there was so much respect for the president…I don’t care what he did, or what he said, there was always respect…it was always ‘Mr. President’,” which is why she says she is disgusted by the way people talk about Trump.

One of them said he believes loyalty to Trump is so strong that the only thing that could hurt Trump would be if it were to come out that his companies mistreated employees or small businesses.

Those last two comments are examples of just how uniformed Trump voters are.

The woman upset by people talking about Trump in a disrespectful way apparently did she not hear Republican Joe Wilson yell, “You lie,” at Obama’s first State of the Union address, or pay any attention the candidate Donald Trump who challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by joining the racist “birther” movement?

The man who said only bad news about the way Trump treated his workers or other businesses could hurt him must not know about the 60 lawsuits that have been filed against Trump for refusing to pay his bills, or the 24 times his businesses have been cited by the Labor Department for failure to pay people, or the 200 mechanic’s liens against his businesses for reneging on payments to contractors after their work was completed, or about the students Trump University defrauded winning a law suit that forced Trump to reimburse them millions of dollars?

It’s difficult to take Trump voters seriously when they persist in making accusations they know or should know are false, and then claim they feel disrespected because of those accusations.

But I persisted and finally came across an article by journalist Paul Waldman (Plum Line, Washington Post) who I think uncovered the real answer that explains why Trump voters feel disrespected.

Waldman reversed the question. Instead of asking why Trump voters feel disrespected, he asked why Democrats cannot win respect from Trump voters.

From this perspective what he discovered in talking to them is that how they feel “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say, [but from] an entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them.”

He’s talking about Trump voters feeding themselves on a steady diet of propaganda from Fix News and talk radio about how much Democrats and liberals hate them. They hear it over and over again until they start believing it, and then everything they hear reinforces it.

If you think about it, in reality Trump voters have no one to blame but themselves for how they feel because they are the ones watching and listening to the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh who keep telling them lies about how anti-Trump voters feel about them.

This is also why they show no concern for all the signs pointing to the fact that Trump’s presidency is having terrible consequences for the nation.

They don’t hear it on Fix News or read it in Breitbart news, and refuse to consult other news sources, so they believe Trump is doing great, and would do better if the liberal press would get off his back and Democrats would get out of his way.

If they did consult other sources of news they would see that Trump is constantly creating chaos with his reckless tweets, persists in calling people names, constantly denigrating immigrants while their families are being ripped apart Trump falsely blames on Democrats, continues to make it harder for millions of Americans to get healthcare because he is deliberately trying to undermine what is left of Obamacare, is cutting scientific funding to study the effects of climate change, and is gutting environmental regulations protecting people’s health, especially children and seniors, and on and on.

But they won’t hear or read about any of these things. Instead, they will hear about how liberals are on a witch hunt to bring Trump down, accepting his reckless assault on our democratic institutions and the individuals in them who are doing nothing more than their job.

Honestly, when I look at everything that is happening right now, my sympathy for how Trump voters feel stops at the point where the awful things Trump is doing to the country Trump starts.

They will survive, but I am not at all sure the values that were once bedrock for our country will, and in my view that is the greater concern.

If Trump voters began showing an interest in the well being of the country as a whole instead of focusing only on themselves, we could have a conversation.

But their steady diet of Fix News and talk radio makes that very unlikely, and that is the key reason why I want to talk about our country.

We are not only in a crisis because of the Trump presidency, we are at a crossroads, and everything depends on where we go from here.

If Trump voters have their way and keep Trump and his Republican Congress in office, the rest of us will not recognize our country after Trump is gone.

It is, therefore, imperative for all of us to know as much as we can about our current crisis, and I am hoping this series of blogs will contribute to that end.

Next time we will carefully examine the negative impact on the nation Trump evangelicals are having because of their attitude about civil rights, specifically in regard to abortion.