When last I posted my Friends-Lost-Because-of-Trump Counter, we were up to seven. Two of them have since apologized and patched things up but recently, another acquaintance got furious with me for that Tweet I tweeted when it was announced that Michael Flynn had resigned. To save you the trouble of scrolling down, here it is again…
Hope there's video somewhere of Trump telling Michael Flynn, "You're fired!"
This brought me a vituperative e-mail laced with personal invective from someone who I guess never liked me as much as I liked him. Essentially, he called me a scumbag liar (he used nastier language) for saying that Flynn was fired when in fact he quit because Donald Trump is loyal to his people and would never in a million years actually fire someone. Sure, he'd do it on a "Reality" Show but never ever in real life.
I was accused of spreading "fake news," which is the new term folks use for any news story they don't like, even if it's true. By the time I read this crazed message, Trump's official spokesguy Sean Spicer had already said…
The evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable instances is what led the President to ask for General Flynn's resignation.
I sent that link to the guy who shot back a new round of insults and the claim that it proved I was wrong because asking for someone's resignation is not the same thing as firing him. Maybe in a microscopic sense he's right but it's kind of like the scene in The Odd Couple where Oscar demands that Felix remove a plate of spaghetti from the poker table and Felix laughs disdainfully and says, "It's not spaghetti! It's linguini!"
Well, now it's garbage.
Looks to me like something ain't working for the Trump people, which was this idea that if they stay on message — insisting that every single thing he does is a huge, smashing success and every report to the contrary is a lie — they could get enough of the country to buy it. It's the old trick we've discussed before of thinking that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. There's always a point where that stops working.
Despite the loss of a "net" six friends who back Trump, I still have quite a few. The dividing line between the two groups seem to be that the ones I've kept believe that he's preferable to the alternative and/or he'll change things in this country that they think he should be changed…but they aren't willing to believe all the bullshit. They don't believe he got the largest electoral landslide in history and that he really won the popular vote…or would have if those millions of phantom illegals hadn't voted.
They don't even think he's a good human being who knows what his administration is doing. They just think they'll like most of what he does. I can kinda respect that even if I think they're wrong about what should happen…and maybe even whether Trump will do what they want. I think I can stay friends with these people just so long as they don't tell me I'm horribly wrong if I confuse spaghetti with linguini.