According to political satirists and late night talk show hosts, it’s been an eternity since Donald Trump officially took office as our nation’s (this can’t be right) President. It’s not so much that the last 2 and ½ months have been boring, it seems like almost every day there’s a White House related gaffe that certainly makes things… “interesting”. If anything it’s a depressing look into the future to see just how much time is still left of Trump’s 1st term that makes time seem interminable, without even allowing ourselves to imagine the horror of Republicans somehow sneaking and cheating their way into a second term. With that in mind it must be ages ago that we all were arguing on social media about who was more pure evil, Trump or Clinton.
I remember those days. As someone who takes the term “friend” fairly seriously, even on social media, I was a good example of the Bubble attached to debating politics in that forum. My “Friends” were actual friends, which meant they were people I like, therefore when I made my political leanings rather obvious, I was preaching to the choir, mostly. In fact, I only had one friend that I de-friended, both on Facebook and in life, a scene that played out across the nation at that time and to some extent, the world. Friendships were destroyed, and even family members stopped talking to one another. It sucks to end a relationship of just about any kind. I had a long history with this guy. We had made movies together, written scripts together, and fought with the intensity of brothers about some of the concepts of those scripts among other things. But was this really “brotherly debating”? Or was it missed signs that we were two different people who were only “friends” through shared particular experiences and otherwise had little in common? Being so far apart on what has to be some of the most important political news of our lifetime was a wake-up call as to just how incompatible we were as friends. While the specific details may have been unique to our situation, the general pattern was something that was playing out on computer screens across the Nation and beyond. My friend had admitted to another of our circle that he hadn’t actually had much interest in politics until this cycle. In fact, he had never registered to vote before. But if he knew one thing it was that Hillary Clinton was evil. The Clintons were a pair of corrupt politicians trying to create a modern-day Dynasty. My friend was a big fan of conspiracy theories. This fit right in to Trump’s approach, branding the “dishonest” media and treating them with blatant animosity during his rallies. As such, it became increasingly impossible to discuss any developing news with him as his answer to anything was that the “mainstream” media was all compromised. According to him, most of the major media groups were in some way part of the Time-Warnerconglomerate. Time-Warner had contributed to Hillary’s campaign, therefore, any subdivision of Time-Warner would only report pro-Hillary news and all articles defaming Trump were false or at least biased. Even comedians were in Time-Warner’s pocket. I tried logical arguments, such as “follow the money”, which usually appeals to the conspiracy folk. I noted that publications like The New York Times and Newsweek and The Washington Post still derived a lot of money from subscriptions. That in those cases, reputation was a huge factor. Imagine if The New York Times was caught peddling falsehoods to put their preferred candidate in the White House? That’s a huge risk to take. If the truth got out, NYT would be done, finished. Likewise with just about any other news source with a long-standing reputation. It’s not to say that none of these organizations could possibly get a story wrong, but when they do, they print retractions. Breitbart.com has a completely different business model. These Internet “news” sites just need to get clicks for their advertisers. Being accurate is a deep second to drawing traffic to your site. And what better way to draw traffic than to print exactly what your fan base wants to hear, even if it isn’t true?
Of course, logic didn’t convince him. Any debates on social media got more and more frustrating because my friend’s method of arguing was designed to win, technically, without ever having to be accurate. As someone who prided himself on not being a “slave” to TV, he was unaffected by the sheer volume of stories that painted Trump as bigoted, vain to a fault, a poor businessman etc. This was all Big Media out to get Trump. Trump was, by his estimation, a smart guy (IQ apparently 156) and someone who never was characterized as racist, not until he went against the “Clinton Machine” and then he was suddenly Hitler. I pointed out that the Newsweek article based several incidents of Trump’s racism on court records. That wasn’t good enough. I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with him. On various feeds I saw mutual friends, his ex-girlfriend, and at least one person who may have been family (they had the same last name at the very least), all arguing that he’s got it wrong, that Trump’s a dangerous man to get behind, but (as Mitch McConnell might say) he persisted. In fact he dug his heels in despite the fact that everyone you’d think he respected was saying the same thing. Granted, there were people on the feeds who supported him, read the same websites, had the same obnoxious attitude that they knew more than everyone else, not in spite of but because they were ignoring all formally trusted sources of news. He began dismissing arguments with comments like “do your research”, which it turns out meant: only quote from sources that tell the story I want to hear.
These kind of discussions were flying across social media in probably record numbers, and I’m sure most people had the same thought: “I can’t believe I know one of these people.” As time ticked away towards the election, my friend got worse and worse, blaming most of the evils of the world on George Soros, who apparently had a lot of money to burn for paying off protestors and funding kiddy porn rings. I had long since written him off as having mental or at least emotional problems. This didn’t make any sense. He was of course ecstatic when James Comey announced they were looking into more of Hillary’s E-mails 10 days before the election. As with most rabid Trump fans, he was convinced this was going to reveal all the sordid details of Hillary’s evil doings. He started posting memes of Bill and/or Hillary, behind bars, with a big “Tick Tock” at the top. Time was running out for these felons, and after the angel-like Trump took control (nope, not making that up) the Clintons would both go to prison where they belonged.
By the time Trump won, my friend was, of course, insufferable. Claiming that the win proved he was right about everything, my former friend suddenly was labeling me and other friends of his “Liberals”, a distinction he had never made before. By the time he posted a long piece on Facebook sarcastically suggesting that Liberals go to a Westworld-style amusement park where they can beat on conservatives to their heart’s content, I was done. I was gaining nothing from this relationship other than being consistently annoyed and fluctuating between wanting to arrange an intervention for the poor deluded fool, or just plain ripping his head off. There was nothing to be gained by staying friends with this person. I de-friended him and haven’t heard from him since except through mutual friends who say he’s still as alt-right as ever. He’s now a big supporter of Marine Le Pen. I hate losing friends in general, but this decision made sense, and I don’t regret it. In fact, I think I learned from this experience that I should have bailed on this relationship years ago. There is one thing I might change though, looking at where we are today.
Typically, the end of these back and forth battles was the hardest part. Nobody wants to show any indication that they’ve actually learned anything from the other side, and everybody wants to have the last word in the conversation, because that makes you the winner. My former friend and I treated each other with a relative amount of respect. We were friends after all. Realizing that these back and forths would never end with me just saying “you’re making a mistake” or whatever, I tried to end on a vague and semi-respectful note. I remember saying, more than once “This is one situation where I hope neither of us gets to say ‘I told you so’”. The idea behind that being that if either candidate was as awful as people say, the only definitive way to be able to say “I told you so” and have the opposition hang their head in shame and grumbling agreement, is if their candidate wins, and then goes on to destroy the country. We’re not quite there yet, although we’re getting dangerously close, but there’s another thing we’re getting close to, and there’s more reason than ever now to resolve this, get to the truth and hopefully avoid a nuclear war with North Korea.
The threat of nuclear Holocaust aside, there’s been a slowly developing story that may end this National nightmare before it gets out of hand: Trump’s ties to Russia. It may be unfolding slowly, but it is unfolding steadily. Little by little, Trump’s layers of protection are disappearing. First it was Michael Flynn, who was fired for “lying to the Vice-President”. Yeah, uh-huh. Even after that line of horse puckey, Trump made a point to announce Flynn had really done nothing wrong, a statement that simply proves that the Trump administration would have been happy to keep Flynn on board if only he hadn’t committed the sin of getting caught. Next: Jeff Sessions. As Attorney General, he was in a key position to kill investigations, or at least mess with them. Democrats were pretty vocal about not wanting him in the position in the first place, then after losing that battle, they proclaimed that he should recuse himself from any Investigation regarding Trump’s team and Russia. Sessions said he was not aware of a basis to recuse himself from such matters. In other words: Fuck you. But conditions changed when Sessions made news for lying under oath about having met with Russian officials. Soon after the public outcry, Sessions agreed to recuse himself from investigations into Trump/Russia connections. Trump was furious. He was not consulted on the matter and clearly didn’t want this to happen. Of course he didn’t, Sessions was probably his most powerful Get out of Jail Free card. Next was Devin Nunes. As the Head of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was a key member of one of the ongoing investigations into Trump’s dealing with the Russians. An odd position for him to be in given that he was a member of Trump’s Transition team, who are under investigation. If that seems like a conflict of interests, don’t worry, it was, as Nunes proved himself by holding secret meetings with the White House to review documents he had yet to share with the rest of the Intelligence Committee. Instead, he held a Press conference to announce he had news that proved Trump was right about Obama wiretapping him, except Trump wasn’t, and Nunes’ actions brought more attention on himself than helped the Geppetto to his Pinnocchio. Now Nunes has recused himself from the investigation due to being under investigation himself by the House Ethics Committee. Yet another layer of protection pulled away for Trump. Trump is running out of high-level Republicans to fall on their sword for him. Foreign agencies with no loyalty to the GOP are involved in the investigations, more information is leaking out and none of it is good news for Trump. The truth is we may be very close to seeing a sitting President be accused of Treason. It’s tough to look at that sentence and realize that, that’s the good news, but this is where we are now.
America was littered with people like my former friend, smug with pride that they had the inside scoop to “the real story”, the one that the mainstream media wouldn’t tell the rest of the world. And yet, time has gone by and none of those scoops have turned out to be true. Recently, Trump buddy Alex Jones had to publicly apologize for his part in pushing the Pizzagate story which influenced a nutbag to enter D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza with a shotgun. Neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton seem to be on their way to jail anytime soon. If anyone should be featured in a picture with the words “tick tock” on it, it should be Trump. Yet, there are still people hanging on to every flimsy excuse they can find to justify this horrible decision they made a few scant months ago. To those people I say “We told you so.” And I’m not going to feel bad about it. “We told you. Again and again we told you.” Satirists blasted him, Hollywood made commercials with great production values and big celebrities saying, “don’t do this!” Every trusted news source in the history of our country said this guy Trump is bad news, and the “alt-Right” ignored it and decided to throw a monkey wrench into the whole system just to see what happens. So, I may have to go back on my parting shot to my former friend: if Trump goes down for Treason and brings damn-near the whole republican party with him, it’ll feel pretty good to say “I told you so”, providing we all survive the aftermath long enough to have a conversation.
