linnposts.com

I admit I don’t understand why anyone would continue to support Donald Trump, or even have a kind word to say about him.

The man betrayed all of us when as a sitting President he tried to stay in power after he had lost his bid for re-election.

It doesn’t matter if he believed the election was rigged. He had an obligation to protest the election through legal means. That is what it means to be a nation of laws.

Trying to stay in power illegally as he did was an attempt to destroy the democracy he claimed to want to lead and represented a betrayal of the people he claimed to want to serve.

To preserve and protect our democracy as he swore to do, if Trump actually believed he lost the election unfairly he had the obligation to make his case in court, not to stage a coup in an effort to overthrow the government.

Trump did that at first, 62 times in fact, and lost all of them in regard to the election outcome, many of those rulings by judges he appointed. He had every right to disagree with those decisions, even to rant and rave about them.

He did NOT have the right to try to stay in power in spite of them, but that is what he tried to do, something we now know he had planned to do even before the election in the event he did lose. The evidence of his scheming is overwhelming and irrefutable.

Because of what we know Trump did, continuing to support him means supporting what he did that was wrong, illegal, and destructive. Nothing justifies that any more than Trump being justified in what he did.

But it also means something else. It means giving in to grievance politics. One of the definitions of “grievance” is “a feeling of resentment over something believed to be wrong or unfair.”

I feel that way a lot these days, but what I have discovered is that holding on to that feeling is a miserable way to live.

That’s why I believe Trump must be miserable all the time. He is consumed by grievances, what he believes people have done to him that is unfair, wrong, or disloyal. Not just in the 2020 election, but in every aspect of his life.

That is no way to live, but everyone who supports him has made his grievance about the 2020 election their own, adding misery to misery. That is just too much misery for any sensible person.

Political commentators say grievance politics has taken over the GOP, and 291 Republicans running for office in November are proving it (representing 51% of all Republicans running), many of them election deniers who are not even willing to say they will accept the outcome of their own election if they lose.

It’s all about grievances that groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers carry to such an extreme that they are willing to take up arms against the government. They eat, sleep, and drink grievances. It’s why they exist, their raison d’etre. They want to tear the country down, to take over and run things themselves.

What they really means is that they want everyone to be as miserable as they are. I can’t imagine how unpleasant it must be to live with these people or be forced to be around them on a regular basis.

People consumed by grievances, who see what’s wrong and refuse to see anything that is right with the world, exude negative energy. They are human clouds hovering over everyone and everything near them.

Moreover, grievance politics thrives on chaos, which is exactly what we had during the Trump presidency, four years of constant chaos because he didn’t get his way all the time.

That is not the way the real world of democratic politics works. Compromise is the key to a functioning democracy because everyone has a voice and no one gets to dictate to everyone else. 

Trump, however, has convinced MAGA Republicans that they can rule America if they will “fight like hell” (his words) to keep him in power. 

They don’t know enough or care enough to put forth something positive. They only know what they don’t like. Their grievances are all that matter.

Life is too short to live that way, but Trump will never let them live any other way as long as they believe what he says and do what he wants them to do.

Those of us who see more to life than grievances have a chance in November to defeat every candidate who engages in grievance politics and by extension every Republican who votes for them.

The experts say we will fail, that MAGA Republicans will take over the House, may take control of the Senate, and will win a large number of state wide races. 

They may be right about that. If they are, though, it won’t be because there are more MAGA Republicans than there are of us.

It will be because Democrats and independents and mainstream Republicans ignored one of the truest things President Obama ever said – that elections have consequences – and did not vote to preserve and protect our democracy.

The worst part if the experts are right is that grievance politics will have scored another victory and we will find ourselves in the situation similar to the man who let things happen and then spent his life wringing his hands wondering what happened.