'HOW CAN ANYBODY SUPPORT THIS?????'

Still looking for an answer to the most asked question in American history ...

I don’t like these polls that ask if we simply “approve or disapprove” of the job Donald Trump is doing. These words just seem wildly inadequate in this case.

So today I’d like to speak to (and for) the 60 percent or so of us Americans who not only “disapprove” of Trump, but see him at bare minimum as dangerous, grotesque and revolting.

We have our reasons, and they have merit. We refuse to be gaslighted and still know good from evil.

Before I climb on my soapbox and preach a bit more deeply about this, I wish everybody could understand just how difficult it is to share our country with the 40 percent or so of Americans who “approve” of this one-man plague on the world.

This still positively blows our minds, and is why we ask this question all the time:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

This has been going on for 11 years, and I bet I ask myself that question 13 times a day. I know that some people ask this question hundreds of times a day, because there is no way this makes sense to any rational, caring person.

It’s also a little confusing to the rational thinkers why our legacy media spends so much time with MAGA and so little with us. They write stories like this: “We visited a Pennsylvania diner and talked to 13 people who voted for Trump, and this is what they are telling us now.”

I hate these stories, but I admit I sometimes read them. Many of the people featured in these cheap pieces are ignorant, uninformed, and complete strangers to the truth.

I’m not being mean here, I’m just being accurate.

And these people are never asked the right questions that might help the rest of us understand their derangement, and lust to vote against their interests like this one:

“What does it say about you that you support, and in many cases, love such a provably vile, and disgusting person?”

We need to hear the answer to this question.

And why don’t they come to my hometown in Madison, Wisconsin, and interview 13 of us who didn’t vote for Trump? That would make for some colorful copy.

I guess this fixation on talking to Trump voters originated in 2017 during the first year of his first term when the entire country wasn't completely gaslighted yet, and it was fair to wonder how a man who is so singularly racist and vile had captured a political party, and won the presidency.

Leading up to the vote, most of the Republican Party was wondering the same thing. Right, Lindsey Graham?

This was Sen. Graham (R-S.C.) in 2016:

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it."

After all, Trump had mocked the disabled, openly asked for Russia’s help and got it, spoke about women in disgusting, degrading terms, denigrated Gold Star families, called for his opponent to be locked up, and had his racist dog whistle replaced 123 times on the campaign trail, because it kept clogging with his never-ending stream of hateful bile.

Ten years later, this has all been normalized, even as it has gotten so much worse — so bad in fact, that a lot of that very same legacy media now work for Trump.

We are now into the stage of our transformation from Democracy to fascism where the media who don’t work for Trump are being arrested.

This would have been impossible to imagine 11 years ago.

So …

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

I am being driven mad by this question, and if I can’t get an answer to it, I want the vulgar people who do support this heinous man to know why we will never stop asking it.

Because at the end of the day, it’s really not Trump who is the problem, it is his disgusting supporters. Without them, he’s nothing, which might be the most maddening thing of all.

Just this morning I learned that the newly released Epstein Files contain more than 4,500 documents that mention Trump in an investigation where children and young woman were brutalized, raped and tortured.

That number is climbing by the hour and is absolutely staggering.

Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s torture ring makes him at best a lowlife who repeatedly rubs shoulders with the very worst people among us, and at worst a violent pedophile.

We already know that Trump is a serial abuser of women, which in one case a judge called rape. We already know that he has slept with many women while married and used campaign funds to pay for their silence. We already know he has called women all manner of vulgar names.

We already know that Trump doesn’t respect women, he positively hates them.

So I’ll ask again:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

And before I keep going, here’s another question the 60-percenters wonder about: Why do all these so-called Christians love him so? I mean gobs of them.

I haven’t been to church in a while, but I am certain Jesus didn’t call women vile names, or hurt and grab them wherever and whenever he wanted simply because he thought he could.

It really bothers us that people who throw the Bible at us support a man who should be rotting in hell.

And what about all his lying? Again, not something Jesus endorsed the way I understand it.

As I type this, Trump has told in the vicinity of 100,000 lies since bursting on the political scene in 2015. The Washington Post had it at 30,573 after his first term alone.

Can we pause for a second and at least consider this prodigious number?

He somehow lies more each day than we ask the question:

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

Consider George Washington chopped down his father’s beloved cherry tree as a child and couldn’t live with himself, because he couldn’t tell a single lie.

Well, Trump has singlehandedly clear-cut a 10,000-acre swath of the Allegheny National Forest with his forked tongue, and never apologized for any of it.

So another question: Why, after Trump says anything — anything at all — aren’t we reminded that he is simply incapable of telling the truth?

Seems important. It’s good journalism. Context. A guy who never tells the truth can never be believed. Readers and viewers should be reminded of that all the time.

It was all that lying after all that led to his casual stroll with treason ...

After losing the 2020 election by 7 million-plus votes, he lied that he won. This is now known as The Big Lie.

That lie got so big and bad that it led to violence and an attempted coup. Law enforcement officers were beaten to a pulp, our Capitol building was pummeled and damaged, his vice president threatened with hanging, our Speaker threatened with murder, and Trump told the people who did all of this that “he loved them.”

Somehow, Trump was not convicted for the worst assault on our Capitol since 1812, for reasons that make my blood boil, but that still makes him at best the most dangerous liar in American history, and at worst a stone-cold traitor.

These days, he is raiding election offices in Georgia, just to let us know, that next time he will find enough votes, by simply incinerating the ones he doesn’t like.

“How can ANYBODY support THIS?????”

Which takes us at long last to the never-ending racism, and what may well be the answer to that burning question ...

I have theorized for some time now it is his not-so-secret poisonous sauce — the glue that holds it all together for the diehard 40-percenters.

Trump says and does the awful things they think, so they don’t have to, and they positively love him for it.

He’s their garbage man.

In exchange for their abiding love and money, he collects the very worst inside them, and dumps it all over the rest of us. There is nothing he won’t say and nothing he won’t do.

Innocent people are being shot dead in our streets by his masked government agents, and children are being rounded up and shoved away in God knows where.

Except Trump and his supporters’ bigotry is not going unanswered.

Thousands are in those streets bravely defying these blood-thirsty scoundrels, and standing up for what is most certainly good and right.

They are peacefully pushing back in the bone-chilling cold, and letting the entire world know that America the beautiful is not dead yet.

They are the very best of us, and as we battle our way through this, and try to hold onto our democratic freedoms, maybe a different, more proactive question needs to be asked over and over again:

“How can ANYBODY not support THEM?????”

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)