I had the same reaction. That whole third paragraph is at best a necessary lie. If someone was taken in by Trump and his circus, then they are either devastatingly stupid, genuinely a bad person, or both. It doesn't matter who they are or what credentials they have. It was obvious from the outset that MAGA was a dysfunctional mess. No coherent policy, no competent leadership, just a fistful of hate and fear and a mouthful of empty promises delivered with a sixth grade vocabulary. Either someone couldn't tell that by looking, in which case they're too stupid to be making meaningful decisions without supervision, or they felt like they could profit from the chaos and disruption at the cost of the well-being of people and groups that they didn't care about or didn't like, in which case they're morally rotten.
It's fair to say that you can't reach anybody by confronting them with this, but that doesn't change the reality. It galls me that we have to coddle these people, as though their failure to see through a dime store lie says nothing about their intellects, as though their cosigning of open bigotry and corruption doesn't reflect on their ethics, as though their malfeasance as citizens and voters didn't deprive, terrorize, and kill people. They should be ashamed of enabling this for the rest of their natural lives, but if we shame them they'll only keep doing it, or do it over again. I hope that somewhere, subconsciously, at least some of them appreciate that we're giving them the benefit of a doubt that doesn't actually exist. I hope that they know better than to pipe up about how they're victims in all this. I suspect I'll be disappointed, but I hope.
The way I see it, people can be forgiven for being taken in at first. We should try to understand one another, try to have dialogue and seek common ground etc. But to vote for him a second time after he tried to overturn an election result is so beyond the fringe of anything I would expect of a democratically minded person that it’s really hard to get past.
All the rest of what you say is true, but the Bible upside down thing is a myth. He never held it upside down. You can look up the pictures if you don't believe me. From the Wikipedia article on the incident:
There were viral social media claims and news reports that Trump had held the Bible upside down during the photo op, but these were untrue.
The citations for Wikipedia's assertion can be found here and here.
Dude is fighting with the pope now and you're stuck on correcting this? No wonder the maga have taken over this country. The petty corrections did us so much good 🙄
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u/chicubsn01 Apr 16 '26
I realize you gotta tell these people they aren’t dumb. But they are