It was all a lie

I'm coming towards the end of this book.

I wouldn't say I have enjoyed reading this because inside are many stories and insights that are ugly and shameful.

I do highly recommend the book though. It's already on my recommended reading list.

I bought the book because I wanted to better understand how someone like Donald Trump could get elected and even more, stay in office. I also wanted to read something by an insider rather than someone outside of the Republican Party.

It's no secret that I am appalled by Trump and everything he seems to stand for. I've been saying so regularly since before he got elected.

Here are some sobering lines from this book:

NB Book written well before 2020 election.

"... the court concluded: there is almost no voter fraud in American elections." 

"The Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud."

"Watching the Republican Party is like watching a friend drink himself to death."

"The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial  equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial."

"Family values" was never a set of morals that the Republican Party really desired to live by, instead "family values" was useful in attacking and defining Democrats."

"The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as "normal" and everything else as "not normal"".

"The embrace of Trump by the Republican party is a repudiation of everything we claim to believe."

"One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embraced stupidity."

"Republicans live in a world disconnected from reality."

"Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies. It is an industrialised sort of deceit that is unique to the Republican Party."

"Conspiracies are dominant realities in the world Trump and his followers inhabit."

We live in troubled times politically.

I have the same despair for the Liberal National Party in federal government here in Australia as I do for the Republican Party in America.

I'm not confident in the Labor Party here in Australia or the Democratic Party in America either.

I feel politics is broken.

I do feel that President Biden and Vice-President Harris are the kind of decent people who might lead us to a peaceful world. We all have to be better for this to happen.

I'm impressed that Mr Biden already has an approval rating that Trump never reached.

I'm confident in business people who have integrity and who get that truly valuing people, living values and exchanging and delivering value is the way forward. Such people are taking the issues like equality, climate change and aged care seriously. This is despite that fact that the federal government is out of touch and out of step. 

We can solve our problems and meet our challenges in civil and innovative ways despite the Trumps of this world who believe it is all about them.

Who will you become? What will you do next?

Become the wise leader you want to be.
Ian

PS If you know of a good book written by a Democrat insider about the Democratic Party in America please let me know. I'm always keen to understand all sides of the story. I see them as a political party in deep trouble too.

PSS I read Heather Cox Richardson's Letters From An American every day. I'd say she is a Democrat yet she gives a very balanced view of the truth of what is going on it seems to me. Her 28th January post where she quotes Former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier as follows:

 “I watched as enraged crowds in the streets of Algiers, as in most Arab capitals, melted away when Saddam Hussein was ignominiously defeated in the Persian Gulf war,” Grenier wrote. “Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after Sept. 11. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump’s veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed.”

In all my years of studying U.S. politics, seamy side and all, I never expected to see the name of an American president in the New York Times in a list comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But then, I never expected to see an American president urge a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election, either.
Heather Cox Richardson