My two very dear friends, both Republicans,

[Raven]

raised the subject if Trump tonight. We have a pact that we will not talk about politics but tonight, they raised the subject of Trumps Oval Office speech. Neither of them follow politics, usually. One asked me if I watched the speech, I said no, I just couldn't, I listened to it. She then told me that Trump was a horrible man, as if I would be shocked by that concept. The other remarked about Trump's appearance, his staring into the camera and reading from the teleprompter and, as she put it, breathing heavy. Both told me that they thought the country was in real danger from this man, as if this would be a new concept to me.

I think I should get some kind of an award for not reminding them who they voted for in 2016, don't you?

If he's lost these two ladies, who are like canaries in the mine, he's dog meat.

[ProudLib72]

1. Did you remind them that he snorts crushed Adderall?

Ladies, this IS the new normal. It was obvious from the get go, and you happily signed on for the ride.

[dchill]

4. Heh. Maybe they do, too. Something.

[EarthFirst]

2. I don't believe these types to be honest...

They’ve all proven time and time again that they are far from immune from the sleight of hand during the lead up of election cycles.

Sure; they may feign moments of clarity from time to time. However, if as many of these individuals were truly as disinterested or (gasp!) outraged; the GOP would have been effectively useless a generation ago.

These moments would be cute if they werent so dangerous come election time...

[CrispyQ]

23. This.

They will vote repub next election.

Back in 2012 when the republican men were making all sorts of horrid comments about women, like legitimate rape, & we can just shut that whole thing down, & put an aspirin between our knees, a republican acquaintance of mine went off about how they better not come after her birth control, or her daughters'. Two weeks later she "liked" Romney/Ryan on her FB page.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

29. They're all the same.

Really good point about the brief moments of clarity we may sometimes see coming from the brainwashed conservative cult. Don’t think you’ve made a convert or even broken through, farther than two layers of dura mater, the outermost membrane protecting the brain.

[demosincebirth]

50. You said a mouthful, Mr EarthFirst.

[Denzil_DC]

3. An old, very experienced campaigner friend of mine used to say:

"When people start telling you about your issue as if it's their own discovery, you know you're winning."

[Doreen]

5. How in the hell can you make an intelligent vote

if you do not follow politics at least to some extent?

[Talitha]

18. My spineless, uninformed husband lets the NRA direct his vote.

[Doreen]

28. Ah yes, blind followers.

It is just like the NRA telling gun lovers to go ahead and clean their guns without taking the bullets out and the barrel pointed at their face.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

30. I wish they'd advise that.

😆

[Doreen]

31. My reply to your comment,

Hehehehehe hahahaha don't we wish....oh...I did not say that. Me bad.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

33. Heh!

I know, Right? 😁

[Talitha]

38. Close, but no cigar....

A few years ago he had his Deer rifle laying on the bed... did something, AND BLEW A HOLE IN THE BACK WALL OF THE HOUSE!!!! Straight through the drywall and insulation, and blasted a 2" hole in the 1/2 log siding - which he later filled with same-color caulk but you can still see it from the outside.

His buddy was outside (thank God the bedroom is on the second floor or he might have been shot), and came running in/up to see what happened. Hubby was looking at the rifle asking "How'd it get loaded?" To which his buddy answered (in a disgusted voice) "DUDE - it's your rifle!!"

Another point... if that rifle had been aimed toward the inside of the house instead of the outer wall - and I was in the tub - I wouldn't be here typing right now, because it would have been (literally) 4' from the back of my head with only drywall between us.

Welcome to my world.

[Doreen]

47. Yup, you have the cigar.

And, they do not learn. I am glad everyone is OK.

[RainCaster]

46. Single issue voters are the stupidest

It doesn't matter what the issue is, if you make your choices based only on one issue, then you are an idiot.

If you cannot discern the interrelationships between a multitude of issues, then you should not vote.

Put down the pencil before you hurt yourself.

[not fooled]

42. Oh ho

The qualifier being "intelligent" vote.

I know many, many catastrophically uninformed morans who hold strong opinions and vote. And no, I'm not disparaging them just because they vote puke or hold "conservative" opinions. I'm disparaging them because they have little or no knowledge of current affairs or how government functions, but think they know everything because rush and shawn told them.

[djacq]

6. He came with a Warning Label.

[dalton99a]

10. with terrific flashing neon lights

visible from 100 miles

[Chellee]

51. + a bajillion

The idea of willful stupidity, that they just didn't notice that he was a horrific person, infuriates me. They noticed. They found it acceptable. They don't get to pretend now that they're just finding out that he's terrible.

[mastermind]

7. back in 2016 my 8 yr old grand nephew came up to me and said that Hilary was a lair.

I know he got that from his parents or grand parents as they are staunch repugs. I told him that trump was a scary guy and he agreed. Lost contact with them since, don't know if they still worship the orange nazi yet but probably do.

[lunatica]

8. I think Trump looked uncertain and weak

and I think women who support him do so because he acts like a strutting alpha male. The problem with that is the women won’t tolerate what could be seen as a wimp, wuss, or uncertain, stumbling loser.

Many a passionate crush has come to an abrupt end for those reasons.

[Midnight Writer]

14. I believe the men who voted for him are also searching for a strutting alpha male.

[lunatica]

37. I agree though the dynamics are probably slightly different

The women really do get a romantic crush, like young girls’ crushing on “sexy” movie stars and celebrities, and being rich just adds to the aphrodisiac effect. It’s the image they’re attracted to and Lord knows Trump gets it. These women are not offended by the idea of getting groped by him. They probably even fantasize about it. I’d bet their main genre of literature is the Romance Novel.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think the attraction for men is that they want to be him, or what they think he is. The alpha male who, like John Wayne in the Wild West, can make his own laws by the power of his own fists. The billionaire cattle rancher who owns Texas and rules by pure might and starts his own dynastic family.

The reason they forgive or even admire his lawless ways is all because of these fantasies.

Anyway, that’s my theory. Probably way over generalized, but also probably comfortably in the ballpark.

[ode2joi1]

58. They want to be him-idea of an alpha male

A friend said, "It's the US ammo sexual culture that comes out of a wildly toxic mix of the cowboy myth, screeching racism, raging paranoia and rampant sexual insecurity."

[C Moon]

9. Putin really did a number on us. It's scary when you think about it:

if Putin can pull this off in the U.S., what the hell has he done in other areas of the world?

[bdamomma]

19. The EX-KGB'er

who has a foothold in Syria, neutralized the US, he hates democracies also I don't think he's done yet. He needs to go down too.

[Pluvious]

32. Surely Russia could not have done it without Fox Network's support as well ? nt.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

34. This. It's the propaganda, people!!!

Without that damn network (and hate radio), we wouldn’t have the catastrophe of millions upon millions of misinformed and frightened conservative minions.

[ProfessorPlum]

65. I couldn't agree more

He's ruined us with Trump. He's ruined the UK with Brexit. And both by pushing on our weak spot, racism. What the hell else is he doing? We know he backed the populist racist candidate in France.

[pnwmom]

11. I love hearing stories like this, Raven! Thanks for sharing! (And good for you for not

rubbing it in about their mistake. All that matters is that they're anti-trumpers now. We'll need every last one of them.)

[LittleGirl]

12. I hope you're right! eom

[Moebym]

13. My Republican friend, unfortunately, has yet to change her mind

Our little group of friends also has a tacit agreement about not discussing politics, but it does come up occasionally. She has shown a few cracks, such as criticizing him for his tariffs, but is otherwise still fully invested in the Trump cult. She once referred to him as "wonderful" during a heated discussion with someone she'd just met. 🙄

[GreenPartyVoter]

15. My BIL was a Ben Carson fan, but voted Trump because he had

to vote his Evangelical conscience despite not really liking him. Totally regrets it now.

[callous taoboy]

16. My 2 moderate Republican friends

regret writing in Jeb Bush. I suspect that social media influenced them to be suspicious of HRC.

[Joe941]

17. You deserve an award for being so nice to them.

[csziggy]

24. Matybe because of other common interests?

I have a couple that are friends even though I despise their politics. They are Tea Party types and supported Trump. The wife bought a horse from me 35 years ago and while we had lost contact for decades we got back in touch because we both do needlework and are in the same needlework group. The husband is a very talented woodworker and has restored antiques for me - he's also a horse person.

Since late 2015 - when the wife asked me what I thought of Trump and I told her in detail with facts and references - we have not discussed politics at all. Not one peep. It's just not worth getting into the morass. There are too few people in this town that are into similar subjects that I have contact with.

[RobinA]

27. I Have A Repub Friend

We've been friends since first grade, we are now 61. You don't throw that away over who you both vote for. The thing in our situation is that we really aren't so far away politically. She was raised to vote Repub (as was I) and she can't bring herself to do otherwise. She basically ignores anything that is dissonant to her actual beliefs and eats up all fake news that's anti-Dem. Probably thinks Hilary ran that child porn ring out of the pizza shop. They have to believe that nonsense to validate sticking with their party. Our last political argument was about the WMD. I said there were none, she said there were. I considered myself to have won that battle and remained smugly quiet. We never discussed politics again. All has been well.

[better]

52. It's like Hillary said about the deplorables...

There are those who supported Trump because of his faults and those who supported him despite his faults. All have culpability for the results, but there is some hope of redemption for the latter group. I too was raised to vote Republican, but did see the light when 43 vetoed funding expansion for SCHIP. But I can also tell you that had I been subjected to the kind of vitriol in this thread early in my awakening, I would never have become a Democrat. We do ourselves no favors putting everyone who votes the wrong way in the same bucket. Those of us who paid attention to Hillary's full remarks I stead of just the deplorables soundbyte remember that she herself made the point that there are decent people who merely don't yet realize why the way they vote is wrong.

We should also remember that many, especially in the south, thoroughly reject what they recognize as racism, but do not yet realize how much of what they believe politically has been instilled in them to coopt them into supporting the people who really are racist. And again, the damage their choices can inflict are equal, but their respective decency is not. We should be mindful of that difference.

[ode2joi1]

59. 'Deplorables'

What do you do? Do I just sit on my hands watching how their beliefs hurt others and 'hurry up and wait.' It hurts to see the effects that their beliefs have on other individuals who have done nothing to them but be a different race? a different religion?

[better]

63. No, I'm not suggesting we do nothing.

I'm merely suggesting that we should make the effort to determine whether a given person is at heart a good person who believes some misguided things, many of which are rooted in racism, though many who believe those things do not share that racism, or even realize that it is the root of the things they have been led to believe, or they are actually an irredeemable soul before we decide how to react to them.

Like many white guys who grew up in the south in the 70's through the 90's, I know plenty of people who still identify as Republicans, but whom I also know to not actually be racist in their treatment of other people. But despite their rejection of overt racism, many of them still buy into bogus arguments that they have been fed to justify support for policies that all of us here recognize as being rooted in racism. For example, opposition to the BLM movement on the basis of arguments like "white people are more likely to be killed by police than black people".

To someone who only pays attention to the surface of an argument rather than examining the finer nuanced intricacies, that might actually somewhat reasonably sound like a valid argument for downplaying the concerns raised by BLM, even for people who don't actually hold the racist views that talking point exists to advance. To those of us who do make a point of paying closer attention to such things, however, it's obvious that that argument is flawed on its face because likelihood is a fraction, and the statistics on which the argument rests omits the denominator of the overall size of the populations the numbers of which are killed by police. But if you don't realize what's been omitted from the statistics supporting the argument, you may well not realize that the argument is false, let alone how.

My point is that there are people who are swayed by arguments like that purely because it validates racist views they actually hold, but there are also those who are swayed by them only because they are some combination of intellectually lazy and ignorant, and genuinely do not even realize that the argument is flawed. And until they realize that they are being lied to, they don't have much cause to begin to question why.

For those who fall into that latter category, there is at least the chance that their views may be changed by addressing and remedying their ignorance, provided of course that they are not too heavily invested in maintaining it. The difficult part, though, beyond merely the part about figuring out which group a given person is part of, is to avoid creating resistance on their part to having their ignorance remedied. Utterly denying their basic human decency on account of just their Party affiliation is a really good way to make just about anyone resist learning the lessons we need them to learn, especially when their problem is ignorance, not malice.

That's where I think the relevance lies about what Secretary Clinton said about the the deplorables being irredeemable, but there also being those who supported Trump because of valid grievances not rooted in malice, and that "those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well". Their reactions to those grievances were somewhere between uninformed and misinformed, I think we can all agree, but that in and of itself does not mean they should not be regarded as friends. I think most of us have some experience with friends who make stupid and sometimes dangerous decisions. It doesn't necessarily mean that they actually have any malice.

Take for example people who vote Republican because they care about national defense and fiscal responsibility. Those are valid reasons for which to identify with a Party, and while those concerns leading them to support Trump quite arguably reveals a darkness of awareness and understanding, it does not necessarily reveal a darkness of spirit.

[MrGrieves]

21. At which point

At which point did you remind them that this danger to the country is being propped up by the republican party? As bad as trump is they are the ones that have brought us to where we are. They have been pushing for this for years and don't forget that they wanted to put us one heart beat away from Sarah Fucking Palin being in the seat.

[mercuryblues]

22. Those 2 ladies

are not the canaries in a mine. They are the miners who just found out they bought a mine filled with fool's gold.

[gratuitous]

25. Stay engaged

If you get together again in a few days, mention that you watched a video of Trump's address, and that you can see what they were talking about. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed; just remind them of their initial distaste on seeing Trump live without a barking seal audience. Work it into the mix, like yeast in bread dough.

[Freethinker65]

26. Admit Trump is a fucking disaster but cling to the belief demonized Hillary would have been worse

Those people will NEVER admit they were duped and will NEVER vote for a Democrat

[lanlady]

41. exactly!

that's the key to cults and con jobs of all kinds. Believers don't want to confront their gullibility and vulnerability to scams. They'd rather flagellate themselves. I found myself once at a promotional event - it was clear to me within a matter of minutes that the promoters were crooks pushing some pyramid scheme. On my way out the door, I saw a man in his 50s actually sobbing and pleading over the phone with his credit card company to honor a $25,000 payment that he wanted to make to this same band of con men. Hopefully he figured out sooner rather than later that the credit card company was doing him a favor.

[better]

53. Your assessment is only valid if both are true.

I'm a living example of someone who admitted that Bush was a disaster, but voted straight Democrat for every office from 2004 onward, including Hillary, and I've been bombarded by Clinton hate since before I was old enough to vote. Thankfully my awareness of the massive campaign against the Clintons prepared me somewhat to see the bullshit for what it always was, once I realized how much else Republicans had lied to me about all my life.

It really co.es down to whether or not one begins to recognize and reject the bullshit, not just whether they ever didn't.

[MarvinGardens]

61. Maybe not, but maybe they don't vote or vote 3rd party next election.

Which is still better than voting repug.

[Blue_true]

35. My take.

Complement them and then try to talk about a shared vision that all of you have for the country, as long as none of it violates your values. If you do that, they may run to vote for the democrat in November 2020.

[anarch]

36. maybe they should tell it to their congressional representatives n/t

[lanlady]

39. I'm hearing similar from my Republican girlfriend

She's been Republican all her life. Grumbled constantly about how awful Obamacare is even though she depends on it for health coverage, as she's long-term unemployed but not yet eligible for Medicare. At the start of the Trump presidency, I said to her, let's see what your president and party come up with to replace Obamacare and deliver "beautiful" health coverage, as Trump once claimed.

Well lo and behold, she is still on Obamacare and FURIOUS that her beloved GOP did not deliver the goods on health care or anything else during their 2 years of total control. Her previously mild critiques of Trump (gee, I wish he'd stop with the tweets) are evolving into expressions of disgust (why doesn't he get off his ass and do something). I actually think she'll vote for the Democrat in 2020 or not vote at all.

[cynatnite]

40. Your two friends chose a man who bragged about sexual assault...

That's what I would remind them.

He may have lost their support, but if you ask if they'll vote for him a second time or go with the Dem party instead, what would their answer be?

[KPN]

43. Thanks for sharing that. Let's hope they really are

canaries in this particular cavernous mine we’re in.

[JDC]

44. I like seeing cracks in the ice, but if they had to vote again

Would they do anything differently?

[Kurt V.]

48. maybe. today at work, my long time rep friend said he wants a dem for next pres

i fell out of my chair (for effect)

[Rizen]

45. As usual, Democratic voters make up the "I told you so" club.

Duh...

[Honeycombe8]

49. Good to know, Raven. Thanks for sharing. nt

[Martin Eden]

54. Recriminations would have no positive effect

Without validating their 2016 vote, the best course is to encourage further progress in their change of mind (and possibly, heart).

[MRDAWG]

55. If you support a racist. you are a racist and you.............

won't be called a friend much longer.

What say you?

[Raven]

66. I say that your post is pretty strange. n/t

[Alpeduez21]

56. These stories are fun to hear

but ultimately don't amount to anything. My wife likes to point out that single payer healthcare polls really well. That may be but only a democratic candidate will run on that issue. Ain't no way repukes are voting for no Democrat.

Trump is the symptom of the disease that is republican. Never forget that.

[Crowman2009]

57. I was hating Drumpf before it was cool.

It all started in the early 90's during his "God's gift to women" phase.

[UniteFightBack]

60. I'm glad to hear it! Most of them will be turned off for one reason or another. Granted is should

of happened long ago but it didn't. I believe he is going to piss off the whole country including a lot of his followers by the time this is all said and done.

[burrowowl]

62. K&R

[Nonlinear]

64. There seems to be some pessimism

About whether or not your friends will change their voting habits based on their realization that President Trump is scary bad at the job.

As a veteran of 44 years in politics in which I have campaigned for and managed the campaigns of many hopeless cause politicians I can assure you that a) miracles do happen, b) you never know how people are going to vote, and c) the secret is to change one mind at a time until you hit a tipping point.

As a teenager I door knocked for this ferocious young politician named Peter Lougheed. This was in Alberta. He was running to be Premier of the province. The Social Credit Party had been the Government for more than 40 years. Lougheed and his Conservatives (politically like Moderate Democrats) weren't even in third place. We were a distance 4th at 7% in the polls. Right up to the night before the election it was obviously a lost cause.

But door knocking you could feel the momentum shifting. We talked to lots of people like your friends but the polls never moved. It was demoralizing but Peter kept rallying us and we kept running the ground game.

Peter Lougheed and his Conservatives won a massive victory. Close to 100% of the seats in the Legislative Assembly and more than 70% of the popular vote. The Social Credit limped along for a fewer more years and then vanished into the mists of time.

Every time since when one of my lost cause candidates has won an election I have known they would in advance because people like your friends "woke" in my presence.

I am hearing from lots of Trump voters about how much they regret their vote and plenty of people who didn't vote who now realize that was a terrible mistake.

The wave in 2018 was only the beginning. If Republicans don't change strategies soon they will join the Social Credit and your Whigs in the dustbin of history. You can feel it coming.

[Eliot Rosewater]

67. Rump voters are upset that rump isnt hurting the right people, enough. the VAST majority of them

are deplorable and incapable of doing the right thing.

Not all, but the VAST majority.