Jim Wright is certainly worried that too many Americans aren't aware of how dangerous the Trump 47 regime is. He compares the more credulous Americans with Timothy Treadwell, aka Grizzly Man. Treadwell thought that he could live among grizzlies and eventually be accepted by them. It eventually got him and his girlfriend killed, as people who have lived near grizzlies predicted.
For Wright, Trump is our grizzly, and he's getting ready to eat us up. I don't disagree. A social media discussion I was recently part of has convinced me that too many people don't realize that we're in a political situation that is different in kind from the politics we've been used to. Their thinking has not been flexible enough to adapt to Trump, and they're still convinced of "bothsidesism," and that our current political life is business as usual.
A friend of mine who is more conservative than I, and who is not in the habit of spouting off about politics, posted a picture of a National Guardsman patrolling Washington, DC, and opined that this was authoritarianism. Some of his more credulous friends apparently think that Trump's deployment of the Guard in liberal cities is well-intentioned and really aimed at fighting a crime emergency.
One points out that there hasn't been a murder in DC in the ten days that the Guard has been patrolling. That's a rather small sample, time wise. I would counsel waiting a little bit before saying, "problem solved!"
Another asks why we don't want a safer capital.
The first has reservations about using the National Guard, but truly believes that Democrat-controlled cities are really having a crime problem and need Trump's help. This is the kind of credulity I'm thinking of. Nobody who is really paying attention thinks that Trump is a truth-teller. It is as though January 6 never happened. They believe that Trump has America's best interests at heart, despite all evidence to the contrary.
When I pointed out to the first commenter that crime was already down in DC, he took issue, informing me that the House of Representatives has opened an investigation into whether DC Mayor Bowser falsified the numbers. The House of Representatives, under Republican control, is Trump's creature, and their investigations have not been in good faith for many years. This person has not noticed that, and I'm afraid that too many people share his mindset.
The time has long passed since our politics has had two parties who deal in good faith. The Republican Party is divided into two groups, in my opinion: those who approve of one party rule, and those too afraid to speak out for fear of their careers being derailed.
Trump is not occupying Democrat-run American cities for their own good, but for purposes of intimidation. And I would posit that, if these occupations become entrenched, the military will be used to intimidate voters. Trump is already trying to ban voting by mail. If he is successful, anybody who wants to vote will have to brave militarized voting locations.
The second person I've mentioned in this post, still thinking in liberal vs. conservative politics as usual terms, compared Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Democrat-run cities to the federal government in the 1960s sending the Guard to the south, as though the two situations were the same. In the Jim Crow south, white people could, and did, murder Blacks with impunity because no jury would convict a white person for a crime against a Black. In addition, there really was a problem of inequality in education between the races that forced integration was the answer to. The notion that there is any such emergency in today's Blue cities is a figment of Trump's imagination, and too many people still believe him.
People need to realize that things have changed and that Trump, like Jim Wright's grizzly bear, has predictable behavior.
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