I’ve had to consider for some time now why it is that Trump keeps hanging on with a vast array of supporters after all the drama and bad press.

I look at women my age and wonder over and over again. Recently, I saw a Facebook posting by an acquaintanance of mine. Again, a woman my age who should know a thing or two. It was a painting depiction of Trump, walking toward the camera, in a heavy leather overcoat, in the rain, with a legion of followers walking behind. Suddenly, it all fell into place. Hero worship.

Trump was her hero and he was going to ‘solve it all’ and ‘get things fixed.’ This is about as unrealistic as thinking we can undo Colonial Imperialism or send Christopher Columbus back to where he came from. Someone recently made the comparision in time and place that really made sense. The current population of Phoenix, AZ is approximately two million people. That was the population of the entire Continental America at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Thinking that we can go back to ‘a simpler’ time where one silver bullet takes care of everything is extremely wishful thinking. I think the song was “We Don’t Need Another Hero,”. If you were a fan of Ronald Reagan, you would remember that as a seasoned politican when he got into the White House, he surrounded himself with a lot of very smart people. It takes a village or something like that, and it certainly takes an organized, educated, competent staff to ‘run’ the White House and help make a lot of extremely difficult decsions. Trump is not that guy.

(Oh, by the way, the hero worship thing is certainly not limited to women!)

https://www.reformer.com/opinion/letters/letter-believing-in-trump-is-hero-worship-at-its-worst/article_3edd7130-a363-11ee-bf43-9f15e3efacb1.html

Letter: Believing in Trump is hero worship at its worst

BattleBoro Reformer

To the editor: Watching history sadly repeat itself, I recently had the following scary thought: It wouldn’t take a huge leap of my imagination to envision the Republican Party being willing to run Adolf Hitler as a presidential candidate if that would give them the power that they are so desperate to seize. Being that scientific studies have apparently shown that the human brain operates on a negative bias in order to survive, it’s an easy political card to play to get the scared, angry masses stirred up … find and blame a scapegoat. Pretty obvious.

As a person without a college education who has made my living with my hands (now missing two fingers), I understand (to whatever degree I can) the need for someone to represent the common disenfranchised person in this country whose life and livelihood has been gutted by what I see as a capitalist system that lacks adult supervision.

Since the era seems to have passed where America no longer has a John Wayne to believe in, yet still clings to the notion that we need a hero to save us, many have, out of desperation chosen just that… a false god in Donald Trump. History shows that people will choose a strong appearing person who is wrong over a weak appearing person who is right. Perhaps that comes from the same inability for an individual to choose the vulnerable path necessary to grieve and be honest about one’s own internal pain. To say to ourselves that “this hurts” and feel it instead of believing what we think of as our thoughts, when the stories our thoughts create are actually cultural programming spawned from the same negative got-to-survive thinking that leads to wars.

I wish that there was an honest hero that everyone could believe in in this country to unite us. Sadly, I can’t see how they would gain traction. It appears that there’s too much corporate power that would drive them into the ground.

T Breeze Verdant

Williamsville, Dec. 25