If I Lose Friends over Trump, So be it.

[Jazzhead]

If I Lose Friends over Trump, So be it.

By Tom Nichols, from The Federalist

  Yes, fellow conservatives: Trump is worse than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Their policies are liberal, even leftist, often motivated by cheap politics, ego, and political grandstanding. But they are policies, understandable as such and opposable by political means.


There are no real principles on the table here, only Trump’s demagogic stoking of incoherent and even paranoid rage.

Trump’s various rants, by contrast, do not amount to policies. They are ignorant tone poems, bad haikus, streams of words whose content has no real meaning. They’re not positions available either to the GOP or Democrats, because they do not contain a vision of the future over which those parties can fight.


In fact, Trump’s policies are not policies. They’re just feverish revenge fantasies. Trump, a scam artist whose entire career has been based on victimizing the working class, should be the target of that anger. Instead, he is encouraging Americans to turn their hostility away from him and against their fellow citizens, inviting us into a war of all against all over which he will preside as an amused dictator.


The division between Trump’s supporters and the rest of us is not about reconciling our political differences. It is not about opposing policies we hate. (Most of Trump’s policies are actually quite liberal, but that is irrelevant.) There are no real principles on the table here, only Trump’s demagogic stoking of incoherent and even paranoid rage.


Revenge Destroys Friendships

This is what destroys friendships. Trump’s supporters are now like roaring drunks in a bar fight, people who you might have tried to reason with five drinks earlier but now are just lashing out at everyone in every direction. Pumped up on talk radio conspiracies, overdosing on the venom of Sean Hannity and Judge Jeannine, comatose with irrational fury, they are no longer part of any sensible political debate in America.


This blind madness puts both political and emotional distance between Trump supporters and the rest of us. Most conservatives have already told Trump that we will not sell our character as Americans, and indeed our very souls, just to feel the pleasure of resentful anger for a few months. All we can do is to keep trying to talk our friends out of making that very mistake, or at best to hope that buyer’s remorse will set in.


Still, if anyone who knows me really believes I am now a traitor to my country because of the way I’m going to vote, then I can do without their friendship. If they end their relationship with me because Donald Trump has identified people like me as the source of their problems, then maybe we were not that close in the first place.


In the end, I can only say it again: if I lose a friend only because I am opposed to man who is, in my view, a mortal enemy of everything American, then so be it.

I have lost and will lose friends, too.   But Trump supporters are allowing this nation to be poisoned.   

[Fishrrman]

Jazzhead wrote above:
"Trump supporters are allowing this nation to be poisoned..."

Gee, ya think?

The same way that folks like YOU are poisoning this board with their insults ...?

[A-Lert]

With nearly half a million dead and U.S. proxies fighting each other, Syria represents a failure of U.S. strategy and a lack of presidential leadership.

By Tom Nichols | The Federalist

It didn’t have to be like this.

And you claim Trump is worse than Obama? For someone who is  a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, you seem to have lost your way.

[Chosen Daughter]

With nearly half a million dead and U.S. proxies fighting each other, Syria represents a failure of U.S. strategy and a lack of presidential leadership.

By Tom Nichols | The Federalist

It didn’t have to be like this.

And you claim Trump is worse than Obama? For someone who is  a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, you seem to have lost your way.

Trump is worse.  His health care is farther left than even Obama.  He is Amnesty and against human decency.

[A-Lert]

Trump is worse.  His health care is farther left than even Obama.  He is Amnesty and against human decency.

That half million dead doesn't seem to bother you Cruzaders the least bit. Hatred is bad for health.

[Frank Cannon]

This isn't an issue for me. I don't have any friends who are Trump supporters. I generally don't circulate with the uneducated.

[A-Lert]

This isn't an issue for me. I don't have any friends who are Trump supporters. I generally don't circulate with the uneducated.

I'd never have guessed from your posts.

[truth_seeker]

People that boast they would "lose friends" generally don't make friends well anyway.

I have been through many elections, with many family and friends. We talk candidly, and we agree to remain friends, despite differences over politics. That is what true friends are like.

Somebody that says he would forfeit a friendship, is not much of a friend, in my book.

[Mesaclone]

This isn't an issue for me. I don't have any friends who are Trump supporters. I generally don't circulate with the uneducated.

Then how are you able to keep up with the conversation?

[A-Lert]

People that boast they would "lose friends" generally don't make friends well anyway.

I have been through many elections, with many family and friends. We talk candidly, and we agree to remain friends, despite differences over politics. That is what true friends are like.

Somebody that says he would forfeit a friendship, is not much of a friend, in my book.

The only friendships that I've had tested were those with liberals. They just get nasty. Best to leave them stew in their bile for a few months. Most eventually come to their senses.

[ArneFufkin]

Jazzhead wrote above:
"Trump supporters are allowing this nation to be poisoned..."

Gee, ya think?

The same way that folks like YOU are poisoning this board with their insults ...?

There is an intriguing and increasing propensity for Trump advocates here to be thin-skinned whiners about anything intellectually challenging or lively where their lack of critical thinking skills and substantive debating case are exposed as non-existent.

Sorry, kids you don't have a CASE to MAKE.  You never have.   Oh, am I being mean?

Yet ... you admire a punk whose ENTIRE  campaign is predicated on his mean, vulgar, insulting persona.

I thought the Paulbots were idiots.  I had no idea ...

[A-Lert]

More spin from the crybaby Cruzaders.