Trump defensiveness and "Mr. Cemetery Chimes"

(Jim Carrey painting)

Where to find escape from the dreary and continuous Trump-related news? BBC World News might be a consideration. But now, the embarrassing avalanche of Trump-related revelations is on the world stage. It is with exasperation that sensible people, people in possession of a normal moral compass, deal with this.
We expect a tipping point like in the closing stages of Watergate. Richard Nixon was a corrupt politician. Or, he was a burned-out politician who retreated into a paranoid world of self-preservation. But Richard Nixon was always a politician with good enough instincts to realize when the jig was up. He then left, got a pardon from a fellow Republican and had a pretty dignified lifestyle, writing books etc. Gerald Ford said Nixon was "a sick man" at the time his presidency wound down. But RN was not too sick to end up writing books. Maybe he was temporarily insane and he recovered from this upon getting the pardon.
We might feel heartened if Trump had the true background of a politician, having come up through the ranks. It would even help if Trump had been in the military. The discipline would have helped him. He would have gotten lessons in humility. Trump is now like a petulant child who has gotten accustomed to getting his way. He flails forward, getting enough continued support from the usual places, so much that we are forced to conclude that Trump can do nothing wrong in the eyes of the sycophantic base.
Nixon never had a base of support like this. Consider the recent letters to the editor in our Morris MN newspaper. We have had one of those pissing matches recently, one in which the participants don't realize that nothing is ever solved in the letters section. Jim Morrison once said the letters section is just for "people with an ax to grind." Mr. Cemetery Chimes wrote a letter in which he seemed convinced that there was indeed media bias against Donald Trump. He seemed to suggest that any coverage of Manafort should not even mention Trump and that if it did, it was legitimate cause for Trump to get upset. We all know what Trump says when he thinks the media (not a monolithic entity) are unfair against him. He says the media are "the enemy of the people."
Mr. Cemetery Chimes bragged about his own education as if this would buttress both him and Trump from criticism. The "code" here is that "I'm a big Trump supporter and we need to let him carry out anything he wants, because he can make America great again." I have my own interpretation of the sub-text here: We had eight years of a president popularly described as "African American," never mind that he could be described with equal accuracy as white or Caucasian (or whatever) based on his mother's side. It is dated to even characterize in such racial terms.
The paranoid crowd fears that Obama represented a movement to simply re-distribute assets more because of a racist perception that non-white people want more charity from government, more "free stuff" as it were. We do in fact have re-distributionist ideas in government - that is why we have Social Security and Medicare. Other developed countries around the world have sensible health care systems based on the idea that we're all entitled to adequate and humane health care. The U.S. is increasingly looking like an outlier. All advanced industrial nations are a combination of free market enterprise and socialism. Yes, socialism. The day is coming when we would appreciate our government getting more involved in long-term care to relieve the anxiety of families with aging and infirm members. Families should not be unduly burdened by this.
The Trump supporters of today relish an unquestionably "white" man thumping his chest and speaking in the kind of "code" they salivate over.
  
A rebuttal that didn't need a response
There was a very well-written and respectful rebuttal written to the letter from Mr. Cemetery Chimes. The rebuttal seemed to bend over backward to be respectful and even complimentary toward the guy. In the back of my mind, I knew that Mr. Cemetery Chimes might still return fire. I remember that at the height of the cemetery chimes controversy, when there was an extended series of "pissing match" letters in our Morris paper, Jim Morrison got exasperated one day about Mr. Cemetery Chimes and said: "I wish he would just shut up."
So, Mr. Cemetery Chimes had a response to Mr. Lackey, but if it was intended as "return fire" he was just firing blanks. I was astonished at what a non-response this really was. All he did was re-iterate his journalism education and how he just knew bias when he saw it.
The Trump supporters know no humility. We cannot assume this ends well with Trump's resignation as with Nixon. Trump may attempt to "deflect" as he so often does, and this time with an action that would throw the world into crisis and even cause deaths, maybe on a mass scale. As a result of Trump's relationship with porn stars? I guess that would prove Republicans right on how pornography is evil, n'est-ce pas?
Do you think the German people are inherently evil? So what happened to them as they devolved in the 1930s? We are in a genuinely scary time now in the U.S.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com