Donald Trump and Harper Lee ~ wearing the shoes of an American

Donald Trump told a frenzied Trumpzi white supremacy audience in Florida that people need an identification card before shopping in a grocery store! In other words, Trump wrongly assumed, if people must have a valid ID to buy groceries, then they should also produce a voter registration card before they can be allowed to vote. Obviously, it's painfully evident, that Donald Trump has never purchased groceries.

Mark Shields, the pundit and TV journalist, wrote in the Northern Virginia Daily, that it's also a a safe bet that, when Donald J. Trump was a younger man, he never read “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s American classic about a young child’s awakening to racial prejudice in a sleepy little town in the pre-civil rights South. In the classic, the admirable Atticus Finch teaches his young daughter, Scout, about empathy, saying: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Otherwise President Trump would have been able to put himself in the shoes of the more than four dozen Republican House candidates who, because national polls show an overall advantage to Democratic challengers for the 2018 midterms, are nervously running in the four dozen House districts that have been rated toss-ups or worse, trending from Republican to Democrat.

If you’re a Republican running in one of those battleground races, you want the 2018 campaign to be about how you and the GOP, over the opposition Democrats, continue to do such an obviously great job as stewards of the booming U.S. economy whose unemployment fell to an 18-year low in May and whose second-quarter growth, powered by a comeback in consumer spending, grew at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 4.1 percent. You want to be able to taunt your opponents who remind us that the current economic expansion that began in mid-2009 under then-President Obama is probably a lot closer to its end than its beginning: “Cheer up. Eventually, things will get worse.”

But if you’re a Republican on the ballot in 2018, you don’t always get what you want from Donald Trump. For some irrational reason, Trump selfishly wants to make his dubious relationship with Russia and President Vladimir Putin the October non-surprise, thereby putting Republican candidates squarely on the political defensive, forced to explain and justify why their president continues to be such an unassertive and deferential wooer of the Russian dictator’s approval.

Trump cohorts with access to the Oval Office and some steel in their backbone could tell the president about the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, which asked voters to rate how positive or negative feelings their feelings toward prominent individuals are with the categories “very positive,” “somewhat positive,” “neutral,” “somewhat negative,” “very negative” and “don’t know name/not sure.” Somewhere in these United States lives the 2 percent of Americans who give Putin a “very positive” score and their soul mates, the 3 percent of us who give the Russian boss a “somewhat positive” score. On the other side, 19 percent of voters rated Putin “somewhat negative,” and 46 percent gave him a thumbs-down score of “very negative,” for an overall total of 5 percent positive and 65 percent negative. Sadly, that means that approximately 30 percent of those interviewed do not know who Putin is or have no opinion of the man.

It was obvious from the publicly cold shoulder House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave to Trump’s initial autumn homecoming invitation to Putin that they know another summit of sorts this fall is bad news for their embattled Republican colleagues. 

Yet, as one wise GOP wise man explained: “Trump has spent more than seven decades thinking first, foremost, and uninterruptedly about Trump. It is unrealistic to think he would begin thinking about others.”

Maine Writer post script ~ Donald Trump has never shopped for groceries or read a book. Therefore, Trump is incapable of leading America and it is painfully evident that he is destroying the American dream. Sadly, Donald Trump has never chosen to walk in the shoes of real Americans.  He's a failed leader and a deeply flawed human being.

Michael Gerson speaks truth to fear about Trump GOP impact

"This is crossing a lot of lines in the Republican Party. I think it’s quite serious and I think it could damage the Republican Party for decades to come to be associated with this approach," Michael Gerson, The Washington Post.

Michael Gerson

Michael Gerson is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post
Republican pundit Michael Gerson gave News Hour's Judy Woodruff a noble headline. He gave her a quote that's probably going to be overlooked by zealots, particularly those who cringe in fear of Donald Trump's  vitriolic retaliation.

New Hour interview, Friday August 21, 2015 with Michael Gerson and Mark Shields

JUDY WOODRUFF: So let’s talk about Donald Trump. 

As we said, he’s holding up in the polls.

Mark (Shields), now that we’re a couple of months into this (GOP campaign). Do we know more about who Donald Trump is as a candidate, about what he really believes? Do we understand better what’s going on here?

MARK SHIELDS: 

I’m not sure, Judy, to be very frank about it, how much we know about him.

We know what he’s publicly emphasizing. I mean, there’s a strong sort of Howard Beale cast to his — Howard Beale being the anchor in “Network,” the movie, played by Peter Finch, who coined the phrase “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” — there is a lot of that to him. And he is to an electorate, particularly a Republican electorate, but electorate in general, that by a 2-1 country think the country is headed in the wrong direction, thinks their children’s future is not going to be as bright as their own, and many in the base who are concerned about the changes in the country, and its racial composition and its social mores, the acceptance of same-sex marriage.

There is a dissatisfaction, an anger, an unexpressed anger. And I think Donald Trump has — is addressing that. And he does it in a flamboyant, sort of unbossed, unbought way that is beholden to nobody, seemingly, no interest groups, except his own interests.

So I’m not sure. There is a lot of sense — the perception is there, but I’m not sure there’s a core.

JUDY WOODRUFF: 

Do you feel, Michael, we have got a better handle on what he’s trying to say?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, what we have seen is his first policy initiative. He set out an immigration policy. It was thin, six pages. It was not very detailed, but it included changes to the protections of the 14th Amendment on birthright citizenship and mass deportations.

So this is a person, Trump, who, three years ago, which is not very long ago, criticized Mitt Romney’s self-deportation plan as maniacal and mean-spirited. And now we’re going to from self-deportation to forced mass deportation.

This is crossing a lot of lines in the Republican Party. I think it’s quite serious and I think it could damage the Republican Party for decades to come to be associated with this approach.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Does he explain how he’s made that turn?

MICHAEL GERSON: I don’t think he — there’s no explanation

In other words, from Maine Writer, the Republicans have allowed the rise of Donald Trump "the Chump", nurtured by the toxic political environment they've created to destroy voter confidence in our government. Now, the mainstream Republicans are "shocked-shocked!" to see how Donald Trump "the Chump" is continuing to build political momentum in his campaign to become (God forbid) President of the United States.  

Michael Gerson is brave to speak truth to the fear created by Trump, who verbally attacks his critics by demeaning their inflated egos. Nevertheless, in fact, it was right wing Republicans who gave rise to the unpredictable Trumponian vigor.  

If the Washington Post had been more aggressive questioning the logic of right wing racism, anti-immigration phobia, stupid "birtherism" theories and other creationist craziness, maybe the nation would be in a better position to evaluate the Trumponian phenomenon. Although I'm sure The Washington Post would object to being accused tangentially  of exploiting right wing paranoia, the fact is, there has been no credible leader to push back on all their government conspiracy theories.  

Hopefully, Michael Gerson's thoughtful, reality check, quote with Judy Woodruff, can help to turn the tide on Trumpmania and bring some sense of sanity back to Grand Old Party politics.