A direct consequence of the T-Rump code:

A brightly-nauseating example of the open nastiness of the T-Rump era. On Friday, a bunch of young, high-school assholes from Kentucky, wearing MAGA hats, accosted Native American veteran Nathan Phillips. The video is all over the InterWebs. In response, the mother of one of the kids claimed “black Muslims” created the incident, plus her boy was provoked.
A piece published this afternoon at Newsweek has the drama, first the mom’s grasp of the situation:

“Shame on you! Were you there? Did you hear the names the people where (sic) calling these boys? It was shameful. Did you witness the black Muslims yelling profanities and video taping trying to get something to futher (sic) your narrative of hatred??,” the mother wrote in an email to news site Heavy.
…
The group of students from the all-male Covington Catholic High School was in Washington on Friday to participate in an anti-abortion March for Life rally when they came across a march for indigenous peoples’ right.
The teenagers were filmed and went viral as they jeered at Phillips while he sang a native chant and beat a drum.
In response, the boys chanted “build the wall, build the wall,” a phrase that has become a catch-all for Trump supporters’ dislike of darker-skinned or culturally different Americans.
In a separate video posted after the incident, the veteran pointed out the disturbing irony of the boys actions.
“This is indigenous lands, we’re not supposed to have walls here,” he said, showing visible emotion after the confrontation.
“We never did.”

And mother as so the son — at the end of the Newsweek story:

When told by Heavy that her angry email would be reported as part of the story, the mother lashed out with another angry response.
“I want nothing to do with helping perpetuating (sic) your hate. I do not want to be a part of your story. You are ruining a boys life for fake news. Hate spreads like wildfire. I pray for you,” she wrote.

Oddly-cruel to actual reality — -opposite In an op-ed in the LA Times last Tuesday, Jonathan M. Metzl, author and director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, noted the real-bottom line to the horror-movie phenomenon of the T-Rump — an ignorant meanness.
Of course, starting at the top and pure-cretin T-Rump, all the way down the ladder to his supporters.
Metzl writes:

I’ve spent much of the last seven years studying voter responses to Republican policies and positions in Southern and Midwestern states.
Many of these policies upended government services and economic stability, leading to disastrous real-world effects for many people, including many GOP voters.
Time and again, I found that support for GOP politicians deepened, even as the policies these politicians implemented made the lives of people in their own states — including those of their core supporters — dramatically more dire.
…
Politics, of course, is often messy and confounding.
People identify with particular politicians for reasons that don’t make sense to outsiders who don’t share their politics.
Sometimes one priority overshadows another.
Yet several themes emerged from my research.
One was an ability of GOP voters, especially those who mistrusted the government, to hold seemingly conflicting thoughts about government services.
“I’d be dead without my Medicaid,” one man told our focus groups,” and next said, “The ACA is socialism in its most evil form.”
…
It’s important for Democrats to understand why some Trump supporters back him even when they are hurt by his policies.
With government shutdowns, stock market plunges, Cabinet defections, or presidential lies, Democrats can’t expect Trump supporters to see the light simply because his policies negatively affect their lives.
They should respond to events such as the shutdown with reasoned critiques and pose concrete alternatives.
But they should also understand that the chaos Trump creates serves his larger political aims by tapping into deep American fault lines of race, class and ideology.

And repeated by three letters to the Times, published this morning:

Those of us who are sociologists, social workers or in other helping professions have said it for some time: America is loaded with racists and others who are impractical at many levels.
It is understandable that these people support the president under any circumstance.
— Ralph Mitchell, Monterey Park

As a young sociologist some 80 years ago, E. Franklin Frazier stated that racism is a form of insanity. That comment got him fired from Morehouse College.
As I contemplate Trump supporters going against their own interests as detailed in Metzl’s opinion piece, that quote came to mind.
If Metzl is correct that Trump supporters will cut their own wrists as long as his policies create chaos and further fracture the deep American fault lines of race, class and ideology, then indeed racism is a form of insanity.
— Philip S. Hart, Los Feliz

The last one a real-good bit of wisdom about our democratic future

Metzl’s piece is more evidence that the Democratic Party needs to find a candidate that will unite the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voters and remind them 95-percent of their political goals were and still are the same, and that they are 100-percent the opposite of Trump supporters.
This candidate does not need to attract any Trump voters.
Trump is not a president who was elected by a majority of American voters; he is rather the choice of the electoral college, which gave him power partly because of the Sanders-Clinton divide.
— Alan Segal, San Diego

If…

(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Agonizing Horse,’ found here).