Say why his WikiLeaks praise matters

[struggle4progress]

By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
April 12 at 12:15 PM

By now you’ve probably seen a montage of clips showing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump praising WikiLeaks and its distribution of hacked Democratic emails. It is of course telling that Trump now says he knows nothing about WikiLeaks (if he’s being truthful, he really does have an alarming memory problem), but it is far from the most important aspect of this.

What’s key here is the degree to which Trump invited and praised the release of emails illegally obtained by a hostile power. Well in excess of 100 times in the closing weeks of the campaign Trump relied on the Russian handiwork to help his election prospects ...

The clips substantiate a key point critics of the president have made (and which apologists are only too happy to ignore): Never in our history has someone won the White House relying on and amplifying the skullduggery of an enemy of the United States. Whatever the legal ramifications, there are moral and political implications to consider.

On the moral front, Trump’s cheerleading for WikiLeaks, a conduit for Russian hackers, was a celebration of a crime, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s and the Clinton campaign emails. The candidate running to be chief executive found nothing wrong with this crime — in fact, he celebrated it. Beyond that, he betrayed his country and our democracy, which posits that the American people choose our leaders in free and fair elections. Trump found nothing wrong with letting a hostile foreign power put its thumb on the scale. Anything to help him is great! That’s his narcissistic mind-set ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/12/democrats-need-say-why-trumps-wikileaks-praise-matters/?utm_term=.4778c4097a3b

[gratuitous]

1. Trump is impervious to criticism

It's a waste of time and energy to try to make him accountable for himself. This attitude seems to have spread generally over the entire Republican party and its officeholders. Every day now for more than two years, each and every one of them have gotten up in the morning, surveyed the wreckage of the Trump administration and the harm it's done to the country, and said, "This is fine." Not one of them has stood up for the country or the Constitution and joined with Democrats and other citizens of good will to protest what's going on.

If the nation survives, we owe it to the Republicans to hold them accountable for their silence.

[struggle4progress]

3. We are not trying to reach The Don -- nor his ossified core supporters -- but others

[PeeJ52]

2. The sad thing is that according to polls, 40% of America agree with him...

and even worse, there are 51 Republican Senators and 197 Republican Congressman that don't care.

[struggle4progress]

4. Key traits of Trump supporters

Bobby Azarian Ph.D.
Posted Dec 31, 2017

... A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published this year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election ...

... support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism ...

... a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support” ...

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to. For example, an analysis conducted by FiveThirtyEight estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was $72,000 ...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201712/analysis-trump-supporters-has-identified-5-key-traits