I had the unsettling but enlightening experience yesterday of interacting with someone who believes, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that Trump was an outstanding president and is being maligned now. Emphasis on the word "believes."
This interaction taught me all over again how impossible it is to reason with Trump's fans who base their adulation not on reason but on raw belief.
Context: the person with whom I interacted is a man. He's over 90, retired military.
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He lives in North Carolina and has a wife a few years younger who claims to vote Democratic. He has a weekly breakfast meeting with other retired military men who are up in years. He also attends a weekly bible study — men only — at his United Methodist church. I strongly suspect that at both his breakfast meeting each week and at his bible study, he hears a lot of the downright nonsense he spouts with utmost confidence that it's true.
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He maintains that the current horrors taking place in the Middle East are Biden's fault. Trump demonstrated outstanding leadership and would have negotiated a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine (or, perhaps precisely, the determination of Israel under Netanyahu to obliterate the Palestinians).
Absolutely none of this is true. It distorts the history of Trump's presidency in the grossest ways possible.
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But this pack of lies represents what a large number of people in the US are choosing to believe, notably white Christian men like the man with whom I interacted yesterday.
And you cannot reason with these people. Facts do not matter to them. Their blind devotion to Donald Trump and their abhorrence of Joe Biden is not about facts. It's about belief.
And that belief is — this is shameful in the extreme — propped up by white Christian churches in the US.
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@wdlindsy I’ve found opinions tend to differ when broken down by both race and grade.
@AlliFlowers Sounds right to me.
@AlliFlowers Officer. Retired colonel, I think.