“I Don't Know – I just Like Him”

The above is the answer you get from many Trump supporters and it is nigh on to impossible to dissuade a person whose bottom line is “I don't know.”

Yes, ignorance is one strong leg of the Trump Triangle of Ignorance, Racism, 

and Cruelty. Ignorance has become a proud Trumpian banner, stoked by thousands of presidential lies that are willingly believed by millions of American citizens. Does the governor of Virginia want to execute new-born babies? Damn straight he does. The president says so.

“When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose” could be the mantra – with apologies to Dylan – of many Trump voters. These are angry, ignorant, disaffected Americans – yes, Americans – who are scrimping by with, literally, no direction home. They bought the American Dream since they were kids and now have grown up into a vast capitalist oligarchy where they count for little or nothing, almost “surplus population” in Dickens' words. 

Battered by Terror Capitalism, rampant Opioid Addiction, quack TV religion, a media that limps along behind Trump's lies, a Republican Senate that is more than willing to let their lives slide into whatever moral chasm Trump builds,  these frightened and bewildered citizens “just like him” because, to them, there is really nothing else to like. Their lives are so benighted and their future so cloudy that a fast-talking flim-flam artist finds them easy pickings in a country at war with itself. 

These “I don't knowers” imaginations were more than ready for the lies that are cascading from Trump's twisted mouth. He alone is going to make it all right. Just hang on until he gets rid of all the traitors and criminals in Congress who are holding him and America from their God-given greatness. And hate, deeply and irrationally, any person or people who stand in the way of this already-assured greatness. The president is pointing them out one way or another, these  “bad people” who are holding back America from its destined greatness. And if the True Believers get carried away to the point of massacring worshipers at a synagogue or an African-American church, that is merely collateral damage. No omelets without broken eggs. 

Have any of these “I don't knowers” ever seen the damage to flesh and bone made by a high-powered weapon? Have they ever really heard the cries and moans of the survivors of these atrocities? If they have, to them it is collateral damage or “fake news,” take your pick, depending on how cruel you are. 

Donald Trump has identified a deep cruelty in the American bloodstream, a cruelty that goes back to the horrors of slavery and lynching – Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit” – and picked the scab off the country's original wound for all the world to see. And he has nurtured and fostered this cruelty to the point where a sizable portion of Americans go about their daily lives, unconcerned, while children in cages shiver and cry in vain for their parents or any other human comfort. 

“I don't know – I just like him.” Is that going to be the epitaph on America's tombstone?