We’ve normalized Trump. Despite every warning when he was initially elected, the American media and American public shrug at behavior that should be cause for dismissal from office. Certainly, his actions should make him unelectable. That they don’t says a lot about who we’ve become as nation and how far we will have to go to recover.
Yesterday, Donald Trump called for a boycott of a manufacturing giant that employs more than 60,000 people in this country, including about 2,500 in their Fayetteville plant. Trump responded to a Goodyear company policy that bans employees from wearing campaign gear, including MAGA hats—the ones made in China. In the midst of global pandemic when unemployment is at Depression levels, Trump put American jobs at risk. The announcement got barely a blip.
Five years ago, nobody could have imagined the President of the United States calling for a boycott on an American company. Republicans would have told you that any president who did that would have deserved to be run out of office. Today, they either defend him or ignore him. The press covered it with a slightly bemused approach, like just another nutty presidential proclamation, assuming it will blow over in a day or so.
MAGA sheep, though, will listen to him. They follow his every directive, justifying his bad behavior by referring to some perceived slight from some Democrat sometime ago. They will scratch Goodyear off their list of tires to buy because they are now the enemy. Goodyear stock took a nosedive after Trump’s attack and, I suspect, sales will slump slightly as MAGA puts the company on the Enemy’s List. The real impact will be in the jobs lost.
So where are the Republicans who represent these Goodyear workers? Senator Sherrod Brown, the Democrat from Ohio where Goodyear employs 3,300 people, called Trump’s boycott “despicable.” In North Carolina, Senators Thom Tillis and Richard Burr said nothing. Rep. Richard Hudson, who represents Cumberland County where the Goodyear plant is located, stayed silent. In doing so, they show their true colors. They are not going to stand up to Donald Trump and they are not going to stand up for their constituents. They are going put their own political careers ahead of what is right. In doing so, they are telling us it’s okay to boycott America.
That’s what happens we normalized Trump and that’s what’s wrong with our country.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Last night (8/24/2020) I believe we saw what the republican party has become. A cult of personality based on the truths as revealed by their stable genius, supreme leader Trump. At a time when this country is faced with one of the highest unemployment levels in its history, economic failure, millions losing their health care during a pandemic, the party of Trump is lauding their leader as a great man. This political rally did not offer up a conservative platform or address solutions to these problems or even mention they existed. Anybody, who in good conscious could buy into this nonsense, has got to be a sheep.