When she was running for president Hillary Clinton used the term "basket of deplorables" to describe some Trump supporters and although it may not have cost her the election it certainly didn't help.
It prompted numerous poltical cartoons from both sides:
And despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.
Unfortunately she was wrong when she said this. Some people have neighbors who would stand in their yards rooting against the fire fighters and hopign for the fire to burn the house to the ground.
Are they good people?
I am not going to get into what makes someone a good person and what makes someone a bad person. I'll leave it to the clergy and to philosophers to go into depth about this, but basically these are the qualities possessed by good people: honesty, integrity, courage, self-awareness, and wholeheartedness. There are articles about what charaterizes bad people like this one in BuzzFeed: "These Are Red Flags": People Are Sharing "Dead Giveaways" That Someone Isn't Actually A Good Person
The Democrats at the DNC are walking a fine line between making it clear that Trump is a bad person and that those who support him are - at least at their core - good people.
As Trump famously, or infamously, said after the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, "there were very fine people on both sides, & I'm not talking about the Neo-nazis and white supremacists because they should be condemned totally." While the first portion of this was taken out of context and used against him we can only make an informed guess as to what he was thinking. After all, we know that also he told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by."
Trump will not convincingly condemn Neo-nazis and White supremacists because while he considers them to be "basement dwellers" (see article in Axios) he wants to be sure they don't sit out the election in their subterranean abodes and vote for him.
Trump is a bad person who endorses the actions of bad people and empowers them to do bad things. What does this make him? You can come up with your own term or chose from these.
Aside from the subscription New York Times and Washington Post I also read Salon and RawStory which are free. The later has some opinion essays on a subscription version. Here of some of my recent blogs:
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