linnposts.com

To all of you who continue to be upset by Donald Trump’s failures in regard to the coronavirus pandemic and his constant lying about it, I want to make a simple suggestion that I think can help you.

You need to realize that all those lies and stupid comments Trump keeps making during his daily propaganda briefings are contributing to his defeat in November.

You can’t do anything about his malfeasance that is costing American lives. That is a tragedy over which you have no control.

But you can see that the minute he starts talking at those briefings he builds the strongest possible case against his bid for re-election.

No one is more effective in exposing the reasons Trump is failing in his job than Trump himself.

Instead of being upset by his antics, you can hope he continues to show the nation why he not only doesn’t deserve another four years, but why the nation couldn’t survive it if it happened.

My advice, then, is to relax a bit, calm yourself, and watch with some sense of satisfaction as the Trump show continues to prove why he has no business being president now, and certainly not for a second term.

I also want to suggest a way for you not to let his supporters drive you crazy for standing by a man who is such a threat to everything every American should care about.

These people are not supporting Trump because they are dumb, though some of them are. It’s not because they are bad people, though some of them are. It’s not because they follow him like members of a cult following a leader, though some of them do.

The real reason they like Trump is because he denies the ambiguity that is endemic to everything about life.

The word ambiguity means “a word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways.” Thus, ambiguity creates uncertainty.

When a subject is ambiguous it means a simple answer is never the right one. That makes people feel uneasy. They want things to be nailed down, easily understood, except most things about life aren’t that way.

Indeed, almost every problem we face personally and every problem we have as a nation is ambiguous, that is, it can be understood in at least two (or more) ways, making us feel insecure and uncertain about what is going to happen.

This is why facts, information, and science play a critical role in making good decisions because subjects are always and forever ambiguous, complicated, never as easy to understand as they appear to be.

Trump, of course, does not take being informed about a subject seriously because that requires intellectual effort he doesn’t want to give. His supporters love this about him because they are exactly the same way. They don’t like ambiguity and feel threatened by problems, questions, and issues that are.

Donald Trump makes them feel secure by ignoring ambiguity which in turn oversimplifies the problem. He then gives an answer that doesn’t solve anything, but makes his supporters believe it does, and also that he actually is the only one with an answer.

The solution to every problem is what he says it is, period. If things don’t go the way he says they will, he blames someone else, insists he never said what he actually did about the problem or its solution, and, if worse comes to worst, he pivots away from the problem completely.

Many Americans, a minority, but a lot of people anyway, like this about Trump, but what I find encouraging is that, much like Trump’s strange behavior at his propaganda briefings, uncritical support of him in the face of such obvious incompetence is not winning him more support. Just the opposite, more and more people see such loyalty as foolish, if not dangerous.

A recent example of this trend is the fact that neither Trump nor Fix News has been successful in convincing the public that Trump didn’t actually say what he said when he speculated about the benefits of injecting disinfectants such as Clorox or Lysol into the body. He did say that, and in this instance the truth has won the day.

If this pandemic is an unfolding story that will surely outlast his days in office, as I believe it is, at this point we know based on numerous polls that fewer and fewer people believe Trump is up to the challenge. What is more, uncritical support for him is becoming all the more inexplicable.

The good news in all of this if you want Trump gone is that he and his supporters are making a good case for bringing the Trump show to an end in November.

That said, then, I suggest that Trump being Trump and Trumpers being Trumpers is hastening the moment when both will pass from the American political scene and our nation shall have a chance to be great again for the first time.