www.ditl.org

Well, you have all heard enough from me about my distaste for the policies and rhetoric of Emperor Trump the Nothingth, but he has truly gone beyond the pale. I am finding it difficult as I write this to actually find words to express my disgust with him, but I'm sure you will all get the idea. During a bipartisan(!) effort to reach an accord regarding protecting young immigrants previously covered by Obama's DACA act, Trump asked (while among other people!) why we would want people immigrating from Haiti or "shithole" African countries. Yes, those are quotation marks, because that's really what he said. The elected chief executive and figurative international representative of my country, the once-vaunted United States of America, actually and publicly referred to other sovereign nations as shitholes. He had recently met with Norwegian PM Erna Solberg, so he went on running his gibbering pie-hole to ask why we don't let in more people from Norway, as opposed to the "shitholes." The simple answer, Don? Because you have turned this country into a shithole to which people from enlightened nations like Norway, with no pressing needs of violence and starvation, don't want to come.

Awful as Trump is, he's simply a symptom of a larger disease in American political life. Saying crap like that is exactly what powered him past all mainstream Republican challengers and (electoral college foibles notwithstanding) into the White House.

Now I'm reading of the danger that the American people at large become sufficiently inured to Trump's hideous brand of conduct as to gradually normalize it, outside of Trump's own base.

I think I've been more embarrassed/ashamed to be an American in the past year than i was the previous thirty-eight combined.