Trump

So I’m nearly 30 hours into this never-ending project to re-stain my property fence and since it’s the sun’s anvil between 10 am and 8 pm down here in Texas the only time I can safely paint is in the early morning hours. Because of this we’ve been attending Saturday evening mass at 5 pm instead of our normal Sunday morning mass.

This past Saturday we came out of mass and we all felt like some Mexican takeout. In the parking lot before I drove away my wife took out her cell phone to place an order and exclaimed, “They shot Trump at one of his rallies!”

Literally as the opening prayers at our mass were being said, an assassin was firing at Trump from a rooftop 150 yards away. We spent the remainder of the evening searching various web sites to get more news as information was breaking. By the way, the fastest way to get breaking news is through Twitter, or X as it’s now called. The downside of that, though, is that a lot of misinformation gets through.

For instance, by 9 pm, I read posts accusing any of three different men of being the shooter: an Italian Antifa member, a man with Ukrainian credentials, and, later on, this Crooks loser. And I saw those iconic photos of Trump with fist raised and the American flag in the background. It should win a Pulitzer (but they won’t let it). Eventually by evening’s end I learned the timeline of events, knew that bystanders had seen the shooter on top of the adjacent building roof (and watched video of it) and learned of the identity of the father who died shielding his wife and daughter. The Mrs. and I donated to the family’s GoFundMe page.

The next morning, as I was painting my fence under the oppressive sun, I listened to further breaking news and opinion and podcasts. I heard dozens of clips from the Left, politicians, political shows, and entertainment figures, endlessly labeling Trump as Hitler, a Nazi, a racist, the end of democracy, the end of America if he’s re-elected (!), he’s a dictator, it’ll be a bloodbath, blah blah blah. I heard a man speak that, yes, the Right does spew hate also towards leftist political figures such as Biden, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, etc., but that the hate phenomenon skews about 6-1 from the Left. In my experience and reckoning, that sounds pretty much correct.

The man is not Hitler. He is not a Nazi. He is not racist. But if you ceaseless repeat these unfounded accusations over and over and over again, ad infinitum, is it any wonder that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later? It’s insanity, pure and simple. I’ve seen lovely people, friends and acquaintances, on Facebook and in person, go unhinged at the mere mention of Trump’s name. I seen them go unhinged at this Project 2025 as if it’s something out of Mein Kampf. But then I think back to something my father-in-law said to me way way back, something moderate, comforting, and quite true: We survived eight years of Bush, you’ll survive eight years of Obama.

I was always lukewarm on Trump. He was crude and vulgar and, yes, he’s not a Christian, at least in outward practice. Yes, he promised conservatives the moon and delivered somewhat less, in equal parts not wanting to do it all and coming against the power and will of the full apparatus of the leftist globalist Marxist military-pharmaceutical-industrial complex. In the first election with Trump on the ballot, in 2016, I voted third party. In his re-election attempt in 2020, as a result of the “swamp’s” never-ending attempts to remove and hinder the Trump presidency, I voted for him with my hand pinching my nose.

When they convicted him on those ridiculous charges a few weeks ago, I made my first ever campaign contribution, $50, to Trump. Yeah, now I have to deal with a dozen daily emails from all sorts of republicans in my inbox, but I feel it was worthwhile to do something. We’ve never voted down here in Texas (just passed our three-year anniversary) but I did start the registration process for the Mrs. and I and Little One back in 2022. I was toying with the idea of not voting again, since Texas is reliably red this go-round and my vote won’t make any difference, but as of Saturday night I have vowed to get all three of us fully registered and know exactly where we have to go and what we have to do to vote on Tuesday, November 5. You know, at the “battle box.” Er, ballot box.

The most ironic thing of all is that Saturday afternoon, after my fence painting session, Patch and I went on a few errands. We stopped at a library and I picked some random nonfiction off the shelves to see what might appeal to me to read in the quiet evenings. One of my finds was Plausible Denial by Mark Lane, a noted book (one of many) by a famed JFK assassination researcher. Should I get back into reading about the JFK assassination, I asked my wife earlier in the day. I haven’t read anything about it in a couple of years. She replied with a vigorous Yes.

So, possibly more thoughts when more new information comes to light. I do intend to write about the America of the 80s and 90s in the Tom Clancy books I’ve been reading since March, and how that America no longer exists in the 2020s. Sad, but true, unfortunately.