Trump may be crazy, and his policies stupid, but we do live in a democracy and sooner or later some real nutjobs will be constitutionally able to rise into power. We have to be honest with ourselves, Donald Trump could have just as easily have been a Democrat. In fact, at one time, he was.

People (of all ideologies) have a tendency to tolerate outrages from their own side that they simply will not accept from the other. Liberals in the past have made excuses for Lenin, Stalin and Mao long after the horrors of their regimes were well-established. In my own time, I have seen the blind acceptance of
Jane Fonda, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers and Fidel Castro, and there are still misguided assholes out there wearing Che Guevara’s image on their clothing.

But I have never witnessed the blind acceptance of the stupidity and malevolence of any political figure like the support from Conservatives that they have lavished on Donald Trump. Even those few on the Right who have gone on record as being opposed to him have for the most part failed to work actively against him, or to alert their fellow Conservatives of the profound malevolence and incompetence of this man, the brutality of his policies. The few who have have been attacked and savaged, not by just Trump himself, but by his unforgiving followers. This is a cult of personality, it is terrifying and I have never seen anything like it in American politics.

And I fear it will be with us long after Trump is gone.