June 4, 2019--Outraged By Trump

A friend mentioned he was "outraged" by Trump's behavior while on a recent four-day visit to Japan.

"What has you all agitated?" I asked.

"Did you see what his people did to that naval ship? A destroyer, I think."

"I assume you're referring to the USS John McCain."

"That's the one. How he had the crew cover the name of the ship with huge bolts of canvas. To avoid pictures of Trump visiting the troops with the hated McCain's name visible on camera. It would have been Trump's version of Bush's 'Mission Accomplished.'"

I said, "I doubt Trump needed to order anyone to do that. I assume some of his advance team know what he would want and on auto-pilot carried out what they assume to be his wishes. In a way that makes it worse. His silent wish is their command."

"And then," my friend said, "there was his speech to the troops. Did you see that maybe half the 800 sailors and marines he addressed attached patches to their uniform sleeves that said, 'Make America Great Again'? And how they chanted 'USA, USA,' like his people do at campaign rallies. I assume Trump's events staff also made this happen. There's no way military personnel would have done this on their own. Outrageous "

"I've got to be frank with you," I said, "I'm done with being outraged. Yes, every day he does something more outrageous than the day before. But by focusing on the outrage of the day I am concerned that it saps too much of our energy and takes our eyes off the ball. The ball being doing everything we can to vote him out of office in 2020."

I rattled on. "By now we should be frustrated enough with his doings that we don't need too much reinforcement about why he is a danger and has to go. Let's focus on mobilizing people to vote. Not just overloading people by spending so much time airing grievances. I am seeing much of that now to be counter productive. It may make us feel we're in the fight and that we're good at keeping score of his lies and outrages. We want to demonstrate that we're paying attention and intend to hold him accountable. To call him out. We obviously need to do some of that but not at the expense of organizing, raising and contributing money, and trying to persuade people still on the fence to consider voting for whoever becomes his opponent."

My friend came back at me--"It's more than a year to Election Day and so I disagree. We have to keep him off balance and on the hot seat. Taking note of his outrageous behavior is one way of doing that. We have the time to do all of this between now and November 2020 and focus on defeating him at the polls."

"Maybe you're right," I said, "I need to give it more thought."