Trump is Not a Problem

Okay, here's Mad Dog's forecast:  Donald Trump will not become President. 
In fact, he will not get the nomination. 

He will  simply lose interest.

For the Donald, running for President has been like opening presents on Christmas day for the average four year old: The real fun was in the wrapping and once he's got that off, playing with the boxes the toys came in, but the actual stuff inside, not so much fun.

My over riding read on the man is he is really just doing this because he enjoys the attention, but he really does not want to be President.  
He may not have realized this yet, but sooner or later he'll sit down and watch a few episodes of "West Wing" and he'll realize he really is not interested in the actual problems of governing.

He'll arrive at the convention and he'll look for a way not to win which will be maximally dramatic and the most fun. 

Then he'll go home and throw a party for himself, maybe on some roof tops in New Jersey.

He could, of course, storm out and run as a third party candidate, saying the Republican Party done him wrong, but on some level he'll be relieved he doesn't have to take the job and he can play the Sarah Palin card, and simply grab the limelight whenever he wants it because as a potential future candidate, people will still be interested in him.

That will mean he can continue to be as outrageous as he pleases and 40% of the American public will continue to love him, which would never happen once he actually became President, because as soon as you become President you will start disappointing people.

So that's Mad Dog's take, and he's sticking to it. 
No Trump.

That's the good news.

The bad news is we may well have to deal with President Cruz.  

Dirty Secrets: Corruption and the American Way

When Bernie Sanders rails about our "rigged" economy,something deep inside me  resonates with that, likely for reasons Bernie cannot know, except in the general sense, but from the specifics of my experience, a rage wells up. He has tapped into that.

The best Congress money can buy

When I ran a small business (a solo practice of medicine) I tried to buy health insurance for my secretary.  This was an eye opener into the deep seated corruption/perversions pervasive in the American way of doing business, a corruption abetted by the government agencies we would expect to restrain misbehavior.  

As we tried to choose among the different health insurance companies (back in the early 1990's) we tried to be intelligent consumers, and we read through the thick directories of participating physicians and saw her doctors listed in Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital area,  and we thought, great, she can keep her doctors if we go with this plan. 
But then we phoned the doctors' offices listed, and one by one it turned out her physicians no longer participated;many had stopped accepting this company's insurance years before.  So we went on to the next company and then to the next: same story with each.  

"This is false advertising!" my secretary said. "They tell you if you buy this insurance you get this benefit, care from Dr. X or Y or Z but you do not. You actually have only three or four choices and none of them are doctors I'd want to see on a dare."  
When I phoned the insurance companies they said, well, those doctors once did participate but have stopped and the companies said they  simply hadn't had a chance to update their catalogs of participating physicians. No chance, you understand over the past 10 years.  They did not update their catalogs every year because it was too expensive, they said. But clearly, when they did, they never bothered to delete physicians no longer on their "plan;" they only added names.

It isn't your father's healthcare any more

It was institutionalized bait and switch.  Every health insurance company in the Washington, DC area published bogus catalogs of participating physicians which listed every doctor who had ever had a contract with those companies, even though those doctors had bailed out years before. Every company, in effect, was claiming it offered you wide choices while in fact offering only very narrow choices.

So I called the department of Health and Human Services to protest this was a form of deception and all the companies seemed guilty of it and I was bounced around various agencies and none of the government employees wanted to hear about it. It was like talking to cops who didn't want to take the rape report because it was just so much paper work for them.

Only one thought counts

Corruption is not new

Another instance:  Examining my 20 page office phone bill I discovered a $15 monthly charge from a company I did not recognize. Calling the number provided, it turned out to be a company which was charging me for internet services to the office, and this fee  was part of my phone bill. 
Trouble was, we did not have internet services in those days and I had never purchased this, never authorized it. 
Calling the company collecting the charges they claimed my secretary "Donna" had approved of the contract.  Donna, of course denied every having talked to them and said she would never approve such a thing and would have put that on my desk. "Oh, but we have a recording!" the company man said and he played back a recording, obviously doctored,  in which you hear Donna's voice saying, "Donna," and then the company man asking if she wants to approve this contract and then you hear Donna's voice, shopped in, saying, "Yes." Of course, what they had done was to call the office and ask who they were speaking to, and recorded that and then some other "yes" and there you had it.

So I called the FCC and a variety of government agencies and they said that the phone company was powerless to remove the charge from my phone bill and there nothing anyone could do about this case of fraud. In effect, the government, the phone company, a utility, were complicit in the scam. They knew this company was engaging in theft but wanted nothing to do with the complaint. 


More recently, I confronted  a more complicated but no less noxious example of how the rich bilk the poor and good people just stand by and let it happen.

I sent a patient to Walmart with a prescription for insulin. There are only 2 companies who make insulin: Lilly and Novo. Walmart has done a huge service to the nation by buying insulin, pasting the Walmart label on the bottles and selling the insulin deeply discounted.
  But recently, Walmart switched from buying from Lilly to buying from Novo. When you write a prescription with your electronic medical record program you cannot order insulin as just "insulin." You have to order it by the brand name, Lilly insulin called "Humulin" or Novo insulin, called "Novolin." 
It's as if you send your kid to the grocery to buy milk and he calls back and says, "They won't sell me milk. They insist I pick Hood Milk or Stoneyfield milk."  
"And you say, 'Any milk will do.' And the clerk at the register says, "You have to choose a brand."
For some years I had written "Humulin" because I knew that's the brand Walmart sold. But I forget Walmart has switched to Novolin recently, and write for Humulin and when the patient arrives at Walmart, she is handed her two bottles of insulin and she has her precious $50 in her hand, but she is handed a bill for $300, which is about half of her monthly rent. 

The fox is very clever and knows many things

I get a frantic phone call from the patient . I call the pharmacist and the pharmacist says, "Well, you ordered Humulin."
 I say, "But until today that was $25 dollars a bottle." 
"Well," the pharmacist says. "We switched to Novolin, and you didn't write for that."
"So you couldn't just give her the Walmart insulin you knew I wanted and she wants?"
"Not if you wrote for Humulin."
"And you know they are exactly the same insulin, just made by different companies. It's like Market Basket milk vs Hannaford's milk."
"They are not designated bio-identical by the FDA. We have to follow FDA rules."

So I phone the FDA and I'm told:
1/ In the first place:
The FDA has not determined the two are "bio-equivalent" or "bio-identical" whatever that means.  The FDA spokesman would not comment on my assertion there's not a whiff of difference between the NPH insulin made by each company.
 Insulins do differ by "type" depending on how fast the insulin works, how fast it dissipates: R insulin starts working quickly and disappears quickly; NPH starts slowly and hangs around all day. But both Lilly and Novo make NPH and R and they are exactly the same.  You can use a 1/4" wrench and whether it was made by Sears or Home Depot, it works the same.


2. In the second place, the FDA lady tells me: 
"The state of Massachusetts writes the applicable laws which prevent the pharmacist from substituting,  so stop phoning the FDA to complain. This is a state issue."
"But the pharmacist told me it was an FDA rule."
 "Well, the pharmacist was wrong. Everybody blames the federal government for everything."

Tea party Republicans in charge: You're on your own

"This is what makes people angry about government," I told the FDA lady.
"Well, I can't help that," she said. "Anyway, it's the companies who make the insulin."
"And it's the companies who make the rules, apparently," I said. "And the FDA hasn't stopped the states from screwing things up."

A hedgehog

So Bernie Sanders is on to something when he talks about how what is "legal" in America is all too often,  immoral.
 It used to be legal to refuse to serve a Black person who walks into your restaurant or who tries to sit at your soda fountain. 
It used to be legal to own another human being.  
Those laws never made it right.

She fights alone

Did the cream rise to the top or was the game rigged?

Elizabeth Warren has tried to make an issue about what is done to "consumers" daily by big corporations but she cannot change things from the Senate. And she cannot change things alone.

The image of the executive offices at Lilly and Novo, lined in mahogany, occupied by men in thousand dollar suits, who have second homes in Hilton Head or wherever, who live lives of luxury, while my patient stands at the counter at Walmart, clutching her $50, which is a lot of money to her, and suddenly, she is faced with a bill for 6 times that amount, which is half a month's rent, because of some "rule" which was made to protect the profits of drug company executives, just makes my blood boil.

Big guys sucking the blood from the little guys, draining them pale.

Doesn't bother me to see our country go from white to brown. Doesn't bother me to hear a cacophony of languages around me at the mall or on the street. Diversity is just fine with me. Makes us stronger.

What bothers the hell out of me to see people who were born poor and who stayed poor but who worked hard and did the best they could to be treated this way by rich people.

Pretty clear who the cops work for and who the law does not protect

These are just three instances in which corporations injure the little guy and the government stands by like cops watching protesters beaten to a pulp by thugs.


You just want to say, "At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency. Have you no sense of decency at all?"

The hedgehog knows only one thing, but he knows it very well

Demographics are Destiny in New Hampshire

Plaice Cove

Tomorrow, I will participate in that peculiar  New Hampshire rite called the "warrant vote," which involves walking into Winnacunett High School, where an election worker will hand me a paper package no thicker than the Encyclopedia Brittanica and I will get to vote on whether or not Mrs. Lamprey should be allowed to plant mums on the other side of the sidewalk in front of her house, which is actually town land. 

In the Live Free of Die state I seem to have more say over my neighbors than I ever had in the anonymous environs of Montgomery County, Maryland, where none of my neighbors seemed to care what I planted or where and where my neighbor demolished his house and erected a McMansion which towered over my house and cast it into shadow over mine and I never got to vote on that.

New Hampshire's demographics tell a lot about what ails the state. There are 1.3 million people living in the state.  It's population is the 2nd oldest in the nation and its rate of aging is tops.  Of that 1.3 million people over 500,000 are over 50.  Many of these people are making less money than they did 5 years ago.

A State Rep Who Knows What Good Is

In Montgomery County, Maryland, there was one school district. In New Hampshire there are 289.  In Montgomery County a single police force policed the 1 million inhabitants. In New Hampshire, Rye, Hampton, North Hampton, Stratham, Exeter each has its own police force. Towns so small you hardly know you have driven through them have their own police and fire departments. 

There are 54,000 people between 15 and 17 in New Hampshire. There are 110,00 people between the age 50-54 and 95,000 between ages 55-59. 

Which is to say, there are a lot more folks around or approaching retirement than there are high school age kids in the state. People over 65 are 150,000 which is roughly three times the number of high school age kids.

Where there's art, there's hope

The wonder is that high school kids get any money at all in New Hampshire, and yet New Hampshire spends $15,283 on each student while Montgomery County spends $15,421, which does not sound like much of a difference, but that places Montgomery County 3rd in spending behind only New York City and Baltimore. What all this means is the dollar amount spent in New Hampshire is not all that different from other municipalities around the country, but the resources available to a kid at Winnacunet or Exeter cannot compare to what kids at Montgomery County schools have. Which is to say, the money somehow seems to buy more outside New Hampshire.

The hedgehog knows one thing, but he knows it very well

The public high school down the street from me in Montgomery County was built 50 years ago, then demolished and rebuilt 25 years later. Nobody bothered to ask the taxpayers; the county has a schedule for infrastructure.   Now there is a warrant article about refurbishing the middle school in Hampton and the town gets a vote.

The high school in Montgomery County has courses in music theory, a jazz band, an orchestra, a wind ensemble, a marching band and a music program which might match up with Julliard in ambition if not realization.  There are advance placement courses taught by recruits from the Bronx High School of Science faculty and 97% of graduates go to college.

When my son went there,  roughly a third of the teachers were uninspiring and just waiting for retirement, a third were stars and the rest somewhere in between. The curriculum was increasingly directed and delivered from the central planning and curriculum office in the County.  It was by no means a perfect  school system, more competition than cognition, but it was a system which delivered a lot more for the buck than we see here locally in New Hampshire, likely because sometimes economies of scale work, but mostly because the demographics of the county are much younger and the citizens fully committed to the idea of bragging about what great schools they have.  It is true ads for real estate feature the phrase, "Whitman School District" or "Churchill School District." 

I am not sure why New Hampshire prefers to atomize government. Does having a local police department, fire department and high school actually improve quality or does it mean that local selectmen or school board members can distribute favors with more discretion?

I do know that even in a senescent state, still, one of the most important things going on is the care and feeding and education of its young. I suspect local government with local control is not always better. Sometimes, it means local parochialism can be enforced to the detriment of kids who have to go out and compete in a more global world. 

In the South, local control wasn't such a good thing.

Spotlight

Thomas McCarthy in "The Wire"

Keeping the line between fiction and non fiction clean is hard to do in the 21st century of electronic reality. 

When Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, he claimed he had developed a new genre, the non fiction novel, using the "techniques" of the novelist in reporting a real story. Of course, he did nothing of the sort; he simply interjected himself into the story of the murder of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.  He did not, as far as I know, actually change or fictionalize what happened, nor even construct imaginary scenes. He simply spent enough time with the murderers to get their side of the story in a way which allowed for more details to emerge than one ordinarily gets from murderers. 

Emerging from this came two astonishing films: "Capote" and "Infamous," both realized oddly at almost the same time, decades after Capote wrote his book. Both are well worth seeing. 

In "The Wire," David Simon and Ed Burns fictionalized true stories and circumstances as they knew those stories through long years of seeing these events  unfold, for Simon as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun and for Burns as a street cop and detective.  Watching "The Wire," you knew the characters were fictional, but you also knew they were real, amalgams of real people Simon and Burns had known, their language, the rhythms of speech, the humor, the settings all conveyed a truth which non fiction can never approach, when you are trying to get details right rather than the stuff which you know has to be happening underneath, which is what fiction can reach. Movies which depict real events and real people cannot go to motivation the way non fiction can.  Capote, in the end, could never really understand the murderers he got to know, because he never knew them the way Simon and Burns did.

Arguably the most detestable character in all five seasons of "The Wire" was not a drug dealer or a street thug or even one of the derelict mothers, but a white reporter for The Sun, who was detestable because he chose to be morally bankrupt, where most of the other stained souls drifting through "The Wire" were reacting to the very poor hand they had been dealt. The character of the reporter was played so well by Thomas McCarthy, just looking at him, at his naked ambition and his cowardice and his emptiness, you came to loathe him.

Oddly enough, it is Thomas McCarthy who wrote and directed "Spotlight."  Maybe not so oddly. Maybe he learned something from David Simon and all the folks, the refugees from The Sun who populated the cast of the 5th season.

"Spotlight" is extraordinary in its verisimilitude. You quickly stop thinking of the actors on screen as anything but the actual reporters. It's so much more gripping than "All the President's Men" with Redford and Hoffman.  In that Watergate film, the editor presiding over the mission is Ben Bradlee. In "Spotlight" it's the editor's son, Ben Bradlee, Jr., but the real conflict belongs to the editor who runs the Spotlight project, who has missed the signs of the infection 20 years earlier and now has to face his own culpability. 

The most extraordinary  moment in this extraordinary film comes at the front door of a priest's home, when Sacha Pfeiffer interviews a priest who admits he abused young boys, but he explains earnestly, trying to make her understand, it wasn't so bad because he found no pleasure in it and it wasn't rape and he should know the difference, because he had been raped himself, presumably by a priest, when he was young, so he is not so terrible and in fact, should be pitied, not condemned. 

Shacha Pfeiffer

I've heard Sacha Pfeiffer interviewed about that moment and she said that was the epiphany for her, when she understood just how sick these priests, and there were 249 of them in Boston, really were. 

Of course, "Spotlight" is not "The Wire."  In "Spotlight" you never actually see the priests--apart from that one at the front door, and apart from Cardinal Law, who protected them.  You never understand what made them so depraved. In "The Wire" you see life from the point of view of the street thugs, the murderers, the drug lords and the hoppers and their actions make perfect sense.  "Spotlight" does not attempt to explain what made the priests the way they are, other than by clinical testimony about the prevalence of their disease, the "what" of the disorder, not the "why."

The art of the Spotlight movie makers allowed making something engrossing out of  the sheer drudgery of compiling evidence, getting lists of victims, documenting and confirming their stories, identifying the hundreds of priests who fondled, engaged in fellatio, preyed on young boys from poor, damaged homes.

They also managed to get across the points that:  1. The rule for celibacy was the necessary if not sufficient condition for this phenomenon. By mandating priests be celibate, the church in Rome virtually created a magnet for men who had significant pathologies connected to their own sexuality.  And, of course, the attitude of the church toward sexuality-- that it is God's intent that sex be for procreation, not for pleasure--has cemented the mold which churns out perversity.  2. Throughout the United States and worldwide, priests either simply find willing adult women (about 50% do this) or prey on children, mainly boys (about 6% do this.) They choose boys, not always  because they are homosexuals, but because boys are less likely to talk. 

It is a wrenching, exhilarating film, full of anger and pathos. But it is more than Best Picture. It is an important social document, an important truth, about the Church, the relationship of the church to the legal system, the role of a free press and the virtues of a motivated group of reporters. It is a document about how dogma and practice can debase an institution which purports to embody the Holy Spirit. If ever there were an argument that it is hubris for any human being or any work of human beings to be the vessel for the Word of God, this is it. People are simply too human, too weak to be the container for the Word of God.

One of the most affecting scenes occurs when one of the reporters in the Spotlight organization (and they were all raised Catholic, if not currently practicing) says he had stopped going to church, but when he was a child, he actually liked going to church and somewhere in the back of his mind, he always thought he just might return to the church.  But now, seeing what the church has become, this lapsed Catholic really has lost his faith, and it makes him sad. 

Of course, there is the statement that the church is composed of fallible human beings but nothing they do on earth can change the sanctity of the faith.  As a priest tells his congregation: "There are facts in this internet age, but does that threaten my job security? No, not really. Because there are facts and there is faith."

Of course, the irony of this film is the facts as they are revealed destroys faith, at least faith in the church, if not in the Holy Spirit.

Spotlight Crew/Cast

One of the nicest touches is the arrival of a new publisher, who is not from Boston, not Catholic--Jewish in fact.  His arrival is set up, not just in this film but in all the films about the news business from "Newsroom" to "The Wire" in which the guys at the top are always sleazy and concerned about the bottom line and not threatening the relationships which protect profit. 
This new guy holds his cards close to his vest, but when it comes right down to it, he insists on not just getting the priests but exposing the system which protects them, on going after the head of the snake. He is the outsider who comes to town to clean up a mess which were fetid and allowed to fester because everyone in town looked the other way.

 And it is this man, who saw immediately the connections,  who ultimately tells the Spotlight editor who missed the story for 20 years, "We are all of us, most of the time, stumbling around in the dark. But eventually, something shines a light on the truth and you guys did some very fine work here."

Hillary Wins in the Deep South: Is that a Problem?

Must be I'm behind in my reading of Politico, Salon and Reddit Progressive, but am I the only one to notice that while Hillary piles up delegates to the nominating convention by winning in South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Bernie keeps winning in places like Kansas.?

What I am asking is: Is this not a problem for Democrats in November? 

There is no way Hillary Clinton will win any of the Southern states she has won in the primaries this  November. What she has proven is she has great loyalty from oppressed, ignored and politically powerless and politically irrelevant Blacks in the deep South. It's nice she has the loyalty of the disenfranchised, but they cannot put her in the White House, not this election, not while the Electoral College winner take all system is in place. It was put in place for this very reason, after all, to be sure this nation does not have too much democracy and elites in power locally can manipulate the outcome of elections to their pleasing.

You will say, well, Bernie has no more chance of winning Kansas than Hillary has of winning South Carolina, but somehow the fact he has appeal in places like Kansas suggests his appeal is broader than hers. You know the group she appeals to, and it's less than 12% of the population, at least in the South, where she is currently winning.  But Bernie is appealing to some other groups, presumably white, rural and who knows who they are?

I don't know what that means. As we say in New Hampshire. I'm just saying.

Finding Courage by Remembering the Past

"Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

--Beryl Markham, West With The Night


"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
--H.L. Menchen

Whenever my friends and neighbors express trepidation about current conflicts, about the demagoguery of a Ted Cruz who tells us as President he will begin every day by praying to God, who wants to carpet bomb unspecified parts of the Middle East just to show somebody over there they should fear the United States, that we can make the sands glow, or Donald Trump, who says, some days, he wants to round up 11 million illegal immigrants and forbid Muslims from visiting the United States, I simply take a deep breath and say, "This, too, shall pass."

Those words, of course, from Lincoln, were spoken in the midst of a real tempest, when the fate of our nation was actually in doubt, when traitors from Louisiana through Mississippi and Alabama, to Tennessee and Georgia really were trying to drive a blade through the heart of this nation.  What Americans faced in those years, less than three lifetimes ago, was the prospect that this continent would be divided between at least two states, one slave and one free and with that likely more divisions, as the West Coast, the Southwest and the mountain states territories were brought on line. The American continent would look like Europe and likely with the same result: recurrent if not eternal war between nations continuously invading and violating each others borders.

Those were perilous times.

We don't have to look back to the 19th century to see nasty, perilous, distasteful times: In the middle part of the 20th century, with the Fascist hosts vanquished, and America reinvigorated by the return of the flower of its youth, now back and going to college, re-entering the work force, starting families, building futures, life should have been sweet, and it often was. But there were storms brewing, squalls disturbing the sunny days, as Joseph McCarthy led a trumped up hysteria into a full fledged witch hunt, thus confirming H.L. Menchen's observation that democracy is susceptible to con men cum politicians who seize power by whipping up fears we are facing great peril, when in fact, times are good.

Looking back through youtube, you only have to type in "Joseph McCarthy" to see a demagogue who makes even Ted Cruz look like a boy scout.  In his heyday, McCarthy cost hundreds, perhaps thousands their jobs, destroyed promising careers and exposed the cowardice of executives in industries from journalism to entertainment to academic to the professions, especially law.  It was a mini reign of terror. 

Somehow, during the Army-McCarthy hearings a mild mannered lawyer named Welch finally snapped and asked, "At long last, Sir, have you no sense of decency?"

Looking at the video now, it's hard for me to understand how or why this exchange unmasked the monster for the American public, but I am told it worked. 

Compared to the threats of these past national traumas, the spectacle of Republican party Family Feud episodes seems pretty tame. 

The nation will survive. 

One thing which Mr. Trump has demonstrated:  He can bring out people to the polls who have previously stayed home, who have heretofore shown no interest in politics.  For years, the fact that less than 65% of Americans exercise their franchise has been decried as evidence of dysfunction in the American body politic. What we can now see is what a good thing it has been to have only 65% of eligible voters actually showing up and pull levers on election day. 

Just look at the knuckleheads who are showing up now, mostly voting for Mr. Trump. Until Mr. Trump, the knuckleheads didn't read newspapers and they still don't but at least before the Donald, the knuckleheads weren't likely to express their ignorance by voting.

Trump: Telling It Like It Is, The GOP and the NY Times

Pogo

When he was in his 80's my father no longer went to the gym. He sat home in his leather chair and spread out the New York Times and the Washington Post before him and he read the papers.  "This," he said, "Is a fine life."  

I thought there was more to life, but he was never into hiking or fishing or baseball. And this morning, reading my on line copy of the New York Times, I could appreciate what he was talking about.  Some days reading someone who speaks the truth, who distills it is just such a pleasure, a high really. There's some connection there. It's lovely.

Today Paul Krugman and Timothy Egan each commented on last night's Republican brawl with great clarity.

If she were in Flint drinking water, we'd remember lead fondly

Krugman:
"The truth is that that party died a long time ago, that these days it's voodoo economics and neocon fantasies all the way down...[Trump] promises to make America white again--surely everyone knows that's the real slogan, right?--while simultaneously promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and hinting at (though not actually promising) higher taxes on the rich...As I see it, then, we should actually welcome Mr. Trump's ascent. Yes, he's a con man, but he is also effectively acting as a whistle-blower on other people's cons. That is, believe it or not, a step forward in these weird, troubled times."

Making America Great Again

I knew, somehow, on some level, I wanted Trump to be the nominee; now I can understand why.  He's just so much better than Cruz, whose fondest fantasy seems to be inaugurating a new Inquisition and Rubio, who promises a huge military build up while balancing the budget, lowering taxes without cutting benefits all while standing on his head.

As for Timothy Egan, in a wonderfully titled piece called, "The Beast is Us," he reminds us:

Republican voters remember happier times

"He is saying how the people really feel...They're saying it now. So more than a third of Trump supporters in South Carolina wish the South had won the Civil War, and 70 percent think the Confederate flag should be flying over the state capital. And 32 percent  believe internment of Japanese-American citizens was a good thing--something that the sainted Ronald Reagan apologized for...'Voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,' said David Duke, the former Klansman...With media complicity, Trump has unleashed the beast that has long resided not far from the American hearth, from those who started a Civil War to preserve the right to enslave a fellow human to the Know-Nothing mobs who burned Irish-Catholic churches out of fear of immigrants. When high school kids waved a picture of Trump while shouting, 'Build a wall' at students from a heavily Hispanic school during a basketball game in Indiana last week, they were exhaling Trump's sulfurous vapors. They know exactly what he stands for."

Build A Wall! White kids chant in Indiana 2016

White girl in Alabama circa 1962. Spiritual forbear for Indiana

Oh, we got trouble in River City and that's spelled with "T"...

Actually, while I agree this is the meaning of Trump in the eyes of his supporters, I am not so sure Trump actually believes all this. I suspect he just says stuff to see what gets a rise out of his customers, and tries, like the huckster he is, to play to the response he gets, but he would drop it all tomorrow and advocate for admitting a million refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and opening the border with Mexico if he thought that would make the sale. He has the moral center of a hungry salesman--anything to close the deal.