Trump is the whole political package

Yes, Trump is a madman and a lackey of Putin. But to his supporters, that's all right. We of the red-hat persuasion can distinguish fact from fabulations. Woody Allen once spoke of writing a "nonfiction version" of the Warren Commission's Report. In the same way, conservatives can read the mainstream news and hear the ceaseless chatter of political punditry masquerading as journalism, and know, reflexively, that it's all hogwash. Trump supporters rely on a nonfiction version of the news.

For example: The media portrays the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination as a horse race. Republicans see rather a potato-sack race. Biden has the career experience but not the money or the message. Bloomberg has the money but not the charisma or the right (meaning, sufficiently left-leaning) experience. Buttigieg possesses Obama's intersectionality and talent for disingenuous rhetoric, but he lacks Sanders' gravitas. Sanders has wild-eyed passion and the credibility of long consistency as well as the correct message, but his message, when decoded by the DNC, turns out to be SOS, followed by the syllables "i-a-lism."

These candidates, bumping and tripping over each other, make a comic and sorry spectacle.

Trump, by contrast, is the whole package. He has incumbency, campaign resources, an action-hero personality and a message only deplorables can love. Trump, like Hammerstein's Maria, is "a will-o'-the-wisp, a clown" - a problem Democrats don't know how to solve.

Trump is like Dennis Rodman, of the late-nineties Bulls. Rodman was vulgar and colorful too, but as long as he grabbed 15 rebounds a game, we cheered him on. As long as Trump appoints two conservative Supreme Court justices per term, and adds five hundred points a year to the stock market and extends the southern wall by another hundred miles, we will vote for him.

We're deplorables, but we're not dummies.

Patricia Gbur

Wood Dale