Did you see my little Jimmy marching with the soldiers up the avenue?
There was Jimmy just as stiff as starch like his Daddy on the seventeenth of March.
Did you notice all the lovely ladies casting their eyes on him?
Away he went to live in a tent over in France with his regiment
Were you there, and tell me, did you notice?
They were all out of step but Jim.
– “They Were All Out of Step But Jim,” Irving Berlin, 1918
Like the proud parents watching “Jim” march out of step, Trump supporters remain incapable of understanding just how incompetent, just how clueless and just how dangerous Donald Trump really is. WC will illustrate the point by pointing out a few folks who have condemned Trump and his policies in the last week.
Pope Francis approved an article in the Catholic publication Crux, which points out
[F]ake religious arguments are being used to demonize segments of the population – particularly when it comes to migrants and Muslims – and to promote the U.S. as a nation that is blessed by God, without ever taking into account the ‘bond between capital and profits and arms sales.’
Those who believe that they are entitled to power, material wealth and spiritual superiority use their theological justification – including biblical texts taken out of context – to justify their belief in a war between good and evil, with their side representing good.
WC guesses that the meeting between Trump and Pope Francis back in May didn’t go quite as well as Trump’s tweets suggested.
Patti Davis, the daughter of the late President Ronald Reagan, and a deeply conservative political voice, wrote in her blog,
In six short months Donald Trump, the president who doesn’t know how to be one, has tipped America off its position as the most powerful country in the world and left us scrambling in the dust, trying to remember who we are and who we are supposed to be on the international stage. David Gergen pointed out how sad and sobering it was to see, at the G-20 summit, that America is no longer the major player. I would add that what is particularly sobering is how quickly power can be dismantled. Our democracy was supposed to be invincible — that’s what many of us had come to believe. But that isn’t true. One man, whose arrogance and ego lead him trippingly into chaos of his own making, can turn a shining city on the hill into a shadowy, taudry replica of itself. Where once we had currency in the world, we are now left holding fool’s gold.
Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, is deeply disturbed by the Trump Administration’s terribly short-sighted proposed cuts to U.S. foreign aid. She wrote in a CNN opinion piece,
When the United States invests in strengthening health systems abroad, it also makes deadly epidemics less likely to land on our shores. As devastating as the Ebola epidemic was, the death toll would have been even more catastrophic if the disease had not been contained in Nigeria, a global crossroads.
She also pointed out,
What’s more, by helping countries lift themselves out of poverty, we also create markets for US products. Eleven of the top 15 purchasers of US goods are former aid recipients, as are 43 of the top 50 consumer nations of American agricultural products. Far from locking countries in cycles of dependency, smart aid investments actually help countries unlock virtuous cycles of growth.
Gates’ article lists a lot of other benefits, too. If, as WC suspects, President Trump attaches credibility to immense wealth, then perhaps criticism from the wealthiest couple on the planet will get his attention. Even if it appeared on CNN.
Then there’s Charles Krauthammer, unreconstructed cold warrior, neocon and long-time Trump defender. Krauthammer wrote in a New York Daily News opinion piece,
The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
And,
I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.
WC could list a lot more, but you get the point. Climate change denial, NAFTA, NATO; the list is endless. Only Trump is in step.
You remember that Trump, at a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, said, “”I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”?
He seems to be field-testing that claim.
Wickersham's Conscience 