JD Vance talking nonsense while drinking the Trump cult Kool Aid

Former Marine Corporal and now vice-president candidate J.D. Vance can’t go back in time — and neither can the rest of us- echo opinion published in the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness), by Megan McArdie.

JD Vance drinking the MAGA Kool Aid

The days of America’s manufacturing boom are gone for good.

For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, (former Marine Corporal) J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. 

His dull and retro-age convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong in wishing for things you don’t remember (or even have no experience with) — if they were really good, as many things were during the United States’ manufacturing boom: There were job opportunities, families formed easily and people felt support from society. I have sympathy for Vance’s desire to “put people to work making real products for American families.”

The problem is that Donald Trump cannot bring those days back. And I suspect Vance is too smart to truly believe the former president could.

It’s not just that economies have become too complicated to take apart and reassemble in some simpler, more desirable form. It’s also that American voters would never stand for it. To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator.

“The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”

During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” 

Yet, there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.

This complaint comes not only from MAGA America but also from left-leaning thinkers such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. It resonates on both the right and left because the government and corporations do pay more attention to prices than to other things that are harder to measure, but no less important. People also care about quality, about having things that last. And they care about their identity as producers, as well as consumers.

Forcing manufacturing workers to compete with lower-wage counterparts elsewhere not only reduced their earning power, but also destabilized their communities, a process that began in the 1960s, and ’70s, but accelerated with the “China Shock” of the past 20 years. Many have had to choose between moving for work, sacrificing essential networks of friends and relatives, or staying put and contending with community decline. This has been a real loss.

What’s more, some of the goods they could buy — including, yes, home appliances — did get worse in significant ways. Dishwasher cycles have lengthened into eons, which helps them reduce noise and save water, but wastes our time. Refrigerators come with internet connections but break more frequently (it’s not your imagination). And when an appliance stops working, repairs are so expensive, people often just give up and buy a new one.

It’s not crazy to want to return to the old ways, or at least try to create options for people who want more expensive but more durable goods, made by Americans living in prosperous manufacturing towns. It’s just impossible. Not just practically, but also politically.

Voters might care about the quality of the goods they buy, but they still care a lot about prices, as our recent bout of inflation has demonstrated. Indeed, this is the reason that Vance looks might have an outside chance to become vice president in January.

And prices would have to rise a lot to bring back the fridge economy of yesteryear. The 10-percent, across-the-board tariffs Trump is proposing would be only a down payment.

In 1966, Sears sold customers a 21-cubic-foot capacity, self-defrosting, side-by-side refrigerator for as little as $545. Today, the store’s cheapest equivalent model is more than $1,000. The bigger difference is that, in 1966, the U.S. median family income was $7,500, while in 2022 it was $97,750. 

Truth❗ If the price of fridges had held constant as a percentage of family income, that new one would cost more than $7,000.

Now, one can argue that higher relative prices were a good trade-off for supporting a stable manufacturing sector that provided high-paying jobs to men with no education beyond high school. Those workers had the satisfaction of making tangible products and also the wherewithal to create stable families, buy homes and grab a piece of the American Dream. 

J.D. Vance thinks he is a smart guy, so maybe, I’m not sure, I could win that debate with him.

But I don’t think Vance is smart enough to win his argument with a voter who just walked into Sears and discovered that new appliances suddenly cost seven times what they used to. 

Maine Writer- IOW, consumers are much better off than what J.D. Vance wants voters to believe and, guess what else?  My lettuce stays fresh for over a week in my Lowe's refrigerator. And wait, there's more❗ My home fridge also makes ice cubes and gives me cold water to drink at the push of a button.  Cost? $1,000 and still working like new.  

Donald Trump's obsession with sharks in Nevada- "Supdity cubed!"

Letter to the editor: We all live with electric submarines, published in the Brunswick Beacon in Shallotte, NC:

Speaking in land-locked Nevada, Donald Trump asked, ‘Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a 🦈shark?’

Trump hates sharks. Porn star Stormy Daniels, whose sexcapades with Trump brought him 34 felony convictions, said Trump “made me watch an entire documentary about shark attacks. He is obsessed with sharks…He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks.’”

Trump unintentionally confirmed Stormy’s account: “I’m not a big fan of sharks. I have people calling me up, ‘Sir, we have a fund to save the shark.’ I say ‘no thank you.’”

Trump told Nevadans that environmentalists are forcing manufacturers to build electric boats. Trump hates them, too. “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight?”, Trump worries. “You’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there? What I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark!”

Horror novelist Stephen King compared it to “listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.”

Trump was once Commander-in-Chief of our military, including the Navy. If Trump’s dinghy hadn’t slipped its mooring, he’d remember that every WWII submarine ran on batteries.

If Trump’s reactor hadn’t melted down, he’d remember that nuclear subs make vast amounts of electricity to power themselves in emergencies.

If Trump’s periscope went all the way to the surface, he’d remember that, while he was president, the Navy awarded its largest shipbuilding contract ever, $22.2-billion for nine attack submarines, to the Electric Boat Company.

No Commander-in-Chief could forget that. Unless, like Trump, you’ve lost the thread so badly you’ve finally jumped the shark.

Michael P. Rush,  Leland, North Carolina

Elon Musk $45 million Trump donation reports were premature- denies the Wall Street Journal article

Retraction about the false report is expected.

Echo report published in Fortune Magazine by Eva Roytburg

Elon Musk denies reported $45 million a month pledge to Trump, says he doesn’t ‘subscribe to cult of personality.

Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate, the billionaire told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson during an interview Monday evening.

During the interview, which was hosted on Musk’s platform, X, Peterson asked Musk if he had “shocked” himself by donating a substantial amount of money to Trump’s campaign. Musk – who has previously criticized Trump, calling him a “bull in a china shop” – paused to correct the “media.”

“What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,” Musk said. “I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the claim, citing sources “familiar with the matter.” The outlet has not yet issued a retraction or follow-up article altering its reporting.

Musk did note that he created a super PAC, called the America PAC, to help support Trump. A super PAC is a group that can raise unlimited amounts of money for a campaign’s independent expenditures—such as for ads, or for day-to-day operations— but doesn’t donate directly to the campaign. 

They have become prominent among both Democrats and Republicans since a 2010 D.C. appeals court decision that authorized the existence of the super PACS. For a normal PAC, donors are limited to gifts of only $5,000 a year.

Several tech company leaders have donated to America PAC, including Ken Howery, an early executive at Paypal along with Musk, Antonio Gracias, a private-equity leader, Sequoia Capital’s Shuan Maguire, and the Winklevoss twins.

The super PAC is also led in part by Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the software company Palantir and politically ambitious venture capitalist in Austin who is close to Musk, according to the New York Times.

The Austin-based America PAC “is not supposed to be a sort of hyperpartisan” organization, Musk said. He said that he isn’t part of MAGA—or Make America Great Again, Trump’s campaign slogan—but rather, his principles are aligned with “MAG”: Make America Greater.

“I don’t prescribe to [a] cult of personality,” Musk said. But, he added that Trump demonstrated “great courage” after being shot by an attempted assassin on July 13, and that strength helps intimidate America’s enemies.

Additionally, Musk spoke about the “core values” that make America great, which he thinks the Republican party embodies more so than the Democrats.

“One of those values being meritocracy, as much meritocracy as possible, so you get ahead as a function of your skill, and nothing else,” Musk said.

He also added that one of the principles the PAC aligned with was “freedom,” particularly freedom from “as much government intervention as possible.” The hand of government gets heavier every year, and if we don’t roll back some restrictions and regulations, eventually, “everything will be illegal,” Musk said.

When Peterson pressed Musk for why he was switching to Trump, after long voting Democratic, Musk said that Democrats had become the party of censorship.

He also criticized a lawsuit that the Justice Department—under President Joe Biden’s administration— launched against his company SpaceX, last year, alleging that Musk discouraged refugees and asylum seekers from applying to work at the aerospace company. A court order later blocked the U.S. from pursuing the lawsuit.

Editor’s note: The headline of this article has been updated for clarity, to reflect Elon Musk never personally confirmed the reported donation.

Donald Trump creates hate filled campaign against immigrants based on fake information

Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans- Echo opinion by Paul Krugman published in The New York Times.

Obviously, the big political news of the past couple of days has come from the Democratic side. But before last week’s Republican National Convention fades from view, let me focus instead on a development on the G.O.P. side that may, given everything else that has been happening, have flown under the radar: MAGA rhetoric on immigration, which was already ugly, has become even uglier.

Until now, most of the anti-immigration sloganeering coming from Donald Trump and his campaign has involved false claims that we’re experiencing a migrant crime wave.

Increasingly, however, Trump and his associates have started making the case that immigrants are stealing American jobs — specifically, the accusation that immigrants are inflicting terrible damage on the livelihoods of Black workers.

Of course, the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans, including native-born Black Americans, isn’t new. It has, in particular, been an obsession for JD Vance, complete with misleading statistical analysis, so Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate in itself signals a new focus on the supposed economic harm inflicted by immigrants.

So, too, did Trump’s acceptance Milwaukee speech, which contained a number of assertions about the economics of immigration, among them, the notion that of jobs created under President Biden, “107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens” — a weirdly specific number considering that it’s clearly false, because native-born employment has risen by millions of jobs since Biden took office.

What seems relatively new, however, is the attempt to pit immigrants against Black Americans. True, Trump prefigured this line of attack during his June debate with Biden, when he declared that immigrants are “taking Black jobs,” leading some to mockingly question which jobs, exactly, count as “Black.”

But the volume on this claim has been turned way up.

At the Republican convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, someone very likely to have a role in the next administration if Trump wins, spoke of “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.”

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published last week, Trump went even bigger, declaring that “The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country.” He continued, “Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.” He went on to say, “The Black population in this country is going to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs — their jobs, their housing, everything.”

Trump’s diatribe forced Bloomberg to add this, parenthetically, as a fact check: “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of employment gains since 2018 have been for naturalized U.S. citizens and legal residents — not migrants.”

There was a time when a rant like this would have signaled that a politician lacked the emotional stability and intellectual capacity to hold the highest office in the land. Alas.

Also, it’s hard to overstate the cynicism here. Trump has a history of associating with white supremacists, not to mention his longstanding obsession with crime in urban, often predominantly Black precincts. Still, he clearly perceives an opportunity to peel away some Black voters by playing them off against immigrants.

But again, even if we ignore the cynicism, this new line of attack on immigration is just wrong on the facts.

If immigrants are taking away all the “Black jobs,” you can’t see it in the data, which shows Black unemployment at historic lows. If Black wages have, as Trump claims, gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says that median Black earnings, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were toward the end of Trump’s term. (You should ignore the spurious bump during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than genuine wage gains.)

You might ask why, given we have indeed seen a surge in immigration, that we aren’t seeing signs of an adverse, let alone cataclysmic, impact on Black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, lack college degrees and maybe even high school education. So aren’t they competing with native-born Americans who also lack college or high school degrees?

The answer, which we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of skills to the table than native-born workers, even when those workers have similar levels of formal education. And yes, I mean skills: If you think of workers without a college degree as “unskilled,” try fixing your own plumbing or doing your own carpentry. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a lot of blue-collar work is highly skilled and highly specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to take a very different mix of jobs than native-born workers do — which means that there’s much less head-to-head competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think, or what Trump and Vance want you to think.

The bottom line is that the attempt to portray immigration as an apocalyptic threat to Black Americans is refuted by the facts. Will it nonetheless work politically? I have no idea.

Trump is an old man who cannot even give a teleprompter speech

Echo report published the Daily Beast by John Mulholland

Until the last part of the last day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the event could not have gone much better for Republicans. Then 🥱came Donald Trump’s boring speech.

Donald Trump’s Speech Wasn’t Just Bad and Mad. It Was Boring

“If Fidel Castro were alive today, he would have told Trump that it’s dragging on a bit long.” That was the view from a trenchantly anti-Biden, conservative publication, National Review.

After four days of an expertly choreographed and at times brilliant production—the presence of the Gold Star families on Wednesday was a devastating political hit on Biden—the wheels, as they do with Trump, came off.

He was the worst part of his own convention.

It wasn’t just the length of the speech. Yes, it was long (at a record-breaking 93 minutes), but it was also rambling, chaotic and, after some perfunctory remarks about uniting the nation, he went on to sow the usual seeds of division and grievance.

Worst of all, he committed the cardinal sin of being boring.

(Also, can we all now put aside the absolute nonsense that was peddled about a new, transformed Trump in the hours after Saturday's shooting? It always looked like disingenuous, political bullshit. Turns out it was 💩.)

Yawn! The Trump rapture fest in Milwaukee pointed out a tale of two speeches—the opening, scripted remarks, and then frequent forays where he veered wildly from the teleprompter into a stream of consciousness.

One’s heart went out to the teleprompter. On center stage, it had prepared all week for its big moment in the spotlight—and then was casually cast aside, ignored and eclipsed by the wayward ego that is Donald Trump.

Maybe expectations were set too high. Trump was touted all week as the headline act that would close the event on a high. He was paraded like a heavyweight boxer about to enter the ring. The knockout would come Thursday.

Only it didn’t. Trump ended up getting in his own way.

The ground had been prepared by his team: Expect New Trump. A changed man. A call to unity. On Monday, the man himself told The Washington Examiner that instead of a planned “humdinger” of a speech, he would rewrite his convention remarks to focus on unity and togetherness.

“He understands there’s a moment,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, told an audience in Milwaukee this week, “If there’s one person I know who’s capable of meeting the moment… it’s him.”

Only it wasn’t.

Donald Trump daunting hate filled speeches avoid discussion about policy issues- Social Security Medicare Project 2025

Donald Trump's hate and rhetoric filled "lie your way into an eletion again" campaign. Whatever happened to policy discussions? Echo opinion by Michael Gold and Simon J. Levien, published in The New York Times with editorial commentary inserted by Maine Writer....

Trumpzi Owellian anachronism:  “It was a bright hot day in July, and the Pennsylvania clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Trumpzism convention speech was "...merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another". (George Owell)

At the first campaign rapture rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week in Pennsylvania, former guy Donald J. Trump on Saturday July 20,  launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.

Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan., Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. 

He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.

Even as Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace President Biden on their ticket as an anti-democratic effort.

By contrast, Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020, election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.

“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”

The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.

The Biden campaign repeatedly tried to tie Trump to the Project 2025, effort, which involved Trump allies and former advisers.

But Trump on Saturday criticized the project as the work of the “radical right,” even as he acknowledged that he knew some of those involved. (Oh paleeeze❗😳😔 Donald Trump lies about everything❗) “They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said of Project 2025 — which he kept calling “Project 25,” even as he has previously referred to it by its full name. (There he goes again😕)

Saturday’s speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump had done little to change his political message. Though his closing convention speech on Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks and electric boats.

Saturday’s Trumpzi speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Trump had done little to change his political message.

Though his closing convention speech on Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks 🦈and electric boats.

Trump did discuss the assassination attempt, in which his ear was struck by a bullet at a rally last week in Butler, Pa., even though he said on Thursday that after his convention speech he would not describe it in detail again.

Sporting a light brown bandage on his ear, smaller than the large white gauze he had been wearing, Trump once again cited divine intervention, telling the crowd, “I shouldn’t be here.” He offered praise for Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and rally attendee who was killed in the gunfire, and thanked officials in Butler for their efforts.

But where Trump was somber and visibly affected in front of the Republican delegates and national network cameras, a moment of seeming vulnerability, on Saturday he at times struck a somewhat lighter tone discussing the shooting.

At one point, referring to a screen showing a chart on immigration that he was pointing to when the shooting began, Trump joked that “I owe immigration” my life and that the “sign was very good — I think I’m going to sleep with it tonight.”

Before Trump spoke, his newly chosen running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, took the stage and marveled at the former president’s resilience.

“I find it hard to believe that a week ago an assassin tried to take Donald Trump’s life, and now we have a hell of a crowd to welcome him back on the campaign trail,” Mr. Vance said, in his first joint rally with Mr. Trump since he joined the Republican ticket.

Though the security procedures at the rally were largely unchanged from past Trump rallies, the venue was held indoors after the Trump campaign had largely held events outdoors. There was a heavier police presence than typical inside and outside the building.

Sean Solano, a 22-year-old missionary to Nicaragua, said he had taken one extra precaution in light of the shooting.

(This is just radical opportunism. A self described missionary man had no effect or impact on the July 13, Pennsylvania Trump Rapture Fest tragedy. The shooting was the result of a 20 year old white male who had access to an AR 15 rifle, full stop.🛑 Praying over a building is engaging in sheer delusional fantasy.)

“On Wednesday, I prayed over the building,” Mr. Solano, of Cutlerville, Mich., said about the rally’s venue. 

Echoing several other rally attendees who spoke of Mr. Trump’s survival in religious terms, Mr. Solano added that he thought God had given the former president a chance and that now Mr. Trump would “fight with fury like never before.”

Trump’s dark message about the pernicious threat to the country posed by undocumented immigrants, Democrats and foreign adversaries, a signature theme from previous rallies, was largely intact. He broadly characterized those crossing the border as “prisoners and people from mental institutions,” whom he again likened to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And he promised once more the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected.

Trump also joyously mocked Democrats as they contended with the viability of Mr. Biden’s place as the party’s presidential nominee. Trump called his rivals “the enemies of democracy” because Democrats who called for President Biden’s replacement would have to answer to the millions of primary votes the president secured over other candidates.

“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we. That’s a problem,” Trump said in a tone that suggested he thought anything but.

Building on months of attacking Democrats as a threat to democracy, usually based on his false insistence that Mr. Biden has directed all four criminal cases against him, he argued once more that it was his political opponents who were anti-democratic.

“This guy goes, and he gets the votes, and now we’ll take it away,” Trump scoffed. “That’s democracy.”

Still, Trump showed little sympathy for Mr. Biden. After mostly, though not entirely, avoiding direct personal attacks against the president in his convention speech, Trump repeatedly called him unintelligent, saying that he had a low I.Q. compared with other world leaders and that he was incompetent. (Remember how Trump is reported to have paid for a surrogate to take his college entrance exams?)

He widened his focus to include Ms. Vice-President Harris, insulting her laugh and calling her “nuts.” He similarly called Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, “crazy,” and then mocked her over her having privately told Mr. Biden that he might not win in November, which he characterized as a sudden display of disloyalty.

“Crazy Nancy,” Trump said. “Did you see Nancy Pelosi is selling out Biden now? Did you see she turned on him like a dog?”

Republicans, he pointed out, were unified largely behind him. As evidence, Trump ceded the stage to a display of party unity: Sandy Pensler, a Republican running in Michigan’s Senate primary, took the stage to end his bid and endorse his Trump-endorsed rival, Representative Mike Rogers.

“Unifying the party,” Trump said as he took back the microphone, “it’s beautiful to watch.”

Michigan is seen as a critical battleground state for both Trump and Mr. Biden in November. It is one of several that Trump won in 2016, only to lose to Mr. Biden four years later.

The decision to hold Trump’s first joint rally with Mr. Vance in the state offered another signal of its electoral importance. Mr. Trump, when he announced Mr. Vance’s selection, singled out his ability to win over workers in the state, and Mr. Vance several times in his convention speech mentioned working-class people in Michigan as crucial to the nation.

J.D. Vance, on the other hand, gave a well-received 13-minute speech — a small fraction of Trump’s lengthy remarks — more than an hour beforeTrump took the stage. He returned later to introduce the former president to raucous applause, and the two embraced in front of the crowd.

“I chose him because he’s for the worker,”  Trump said after Vance left the stage. “He’s for the people that work so hard and perhaps weren’t treated like they should have been.” (Whaaadaya mean Trumpzi? Like hiring people and then not paying them, like you do❓)

God did not save Donald Trump's life and God did not take away the life of an innocent rally victim

As a woman of Roman Catholic faith, I am compleley confident saying that God was not in attendance at the outdoor rally in Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was injured on July 13, 2024, while an innocent bystander was murdered.  

Scripture 1 Thessalonians 5:22: "reject every kind of evil"

God was definitely not present at the Pennsylvania rally.  

However, what was evident to many alert rally attendees was their warning about a suspicious person who was reported to police. It turned out the suspicious person was a 20 year old man with a gun who shot at Trump, killed an innocent bystander, badly injured two other people while traumatizing the entire audience, somehow escaped the police and, yes,  stunned the Secret Service personnel (who obviously seemed to act like deer caught in the headlights before they took decisive action to protect the shooter's victim). 

Nevertheless, Republicans who spoke at the Republican Trump Rapture Convention in Milwaukee, seem to have developed some kind of mystical understanding about what God wanted to have happen during the shooter's evil intentions, when he aimed his A15 style rifle at his target. Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Tim Scott spoke like they had first hand knowledge about what God intended to happen at the Pennsylvania rally. Well, just so they both know.....with 100 percent certainty, I know God was not there and had zero to do with the horrible shooting. God is not the motivator of evil. Sadly, the innocent man who was murdered while attending the event with Donald Trump was the victim who experienced the evil intention of the shooter- a young man who had a gun. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:  

Dear Editor: Thanks to the Globe for the fascinating article by Emma Platoff and Jim Puzzanghera about the religious zeal and insane rapture atmosphere (ie, my editorial comment), at the Republican Convention (“For the faithful, it’s greatest story ever,” Page A1, July 17). 

Aenators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-Florida) in speeches ascribe Donald Trump’s escape from death by an AR-15-style rifle to the deity, who supposedly intervened to save Trump’s life.

Do Cruz and Scott and their audience believe that the Almighty also intervened to bring about the death of the rallygoer on the stage near Trump, who died protecting his family from the kind of weapon the Democratic Party wants outlawed for civilian use?

Have the Trump faithful noticed that the suspected shooter had not reached the age of 21? Should we be blaming God for circumstances of our own making? 

From Megan Brook in Cambridge, Massachusetts

P.S.  God did not save Donald Trump. An evil intentioned shooter with a gun was at the Pennsylvania rally and God was notwhere to be found.