Five principles for fighting the toxic President
Rolf Auer, Tuesday 20 June 2017

US President Donald J. Trump is toxic because:
• He is anti-democratic. He claims massive voter fraud in the election which made him President, while there is no evidence of this. He incited his followers at his rallies with chants of “Lock her up!” implying that jail with no trial is perfectly acceptable.
• He is anti-environmentalist. He refused to sign onto the Paris Accord, a plan designed for Western countries to save Earth.
• He is anti-social. His misogynist comments about women, his xenophobic policies towards potential immigrants, and his racist comments during his rallies all highlight this observation.

We cannot let Trump’s continuous attacks on everything we perceive as good and decent go unanswered. Trump cannot be allowed to continue to set a moral example for the young as President, because he represents a deterioration of long established and proven moral values, and the end result can only be that a person worse than him becomes President.

Here are five principles for fighting the toxic President:

1. Refute his lies immediately and repeatedly. Trump makes good use of the maxim of Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, that “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” A variation of this is the desensitization of repugnant phrases or descriptions of acts by repetition (“I moved on her like a bitch, grabbed her by the pussy” etc.) until they no longer evoke outrage and are accepted as normal. This is a variant of buying “the big lie.” By repeatedly shocking peoples’ sense of proper morals, this in turn leads to the acceptance of other equally despicable events.
2. Place his anti-democraticisms in an historical context. Trump tried to incite violence against dissenters at his rallies. This is the exact same tactic used by Hitler to provoke harm to the Jews and other Hitler-designated “undesirables.” Don’t be afraid to draw such comparisons; think of what happens next if you don’t.
3. Highlight his anti-social behaviour. Trump is setting a bad example for those seeking to emulate him. By playing up the benefits of being rich (Trump cut taxes on the rich) and putting down the poor (Trump ended the Meals On Wheels federal government funding), Trump sets back social progress already painfully made. Fight his attempts to take the world backwards in time to the bad old days.
4. Try to use social media as effectively as Trump does. Twitter is Trump’s chosen vehicle of social media. Take his tweets apart and put them back together to show how idiotic these are.
5. What if everyone did as Trump did? A favourite refutation might start, “If everyone did as Trump did…”

It’s going to be a long fight. The power-grabbing plutocracy under Trump won’t relinquish power easily. Instead of reinvigorating America and making it great again, it is as a blight upon the great dream envisioned by America’s founding fathers. It can only fail and take all America down with it. Fight the good fight!—at the least, you’ll be able to sleep easier in your senior years, knowing that you did everything you could to combat the primordial predatory evil that is Trump.

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