They think they are respected and in the majority, so the majority should just shut up and respect them already

MELBOURNE, Fla. — Many of President Trump’s most dedicated supporters — the sort who waited for hours in the Florida sun this weekend for his first post-inauguration campaign rally — say their lives changed on election night. Suddenly they felt like their views were actually respected and in the majority. 

- Jenna Johnson and Dave Weigel, "Trump supporters see a successful president — and are frustrated with critics who don’t"

Washington Post, February 19^th, 2017

And here is where we wonder about Trump supporters yet again.  I mean, the guy lost the popular vote by three million votes.  He scraped through the GOP primaries with less than half of the primary voters' support.  Their views have never been actually respected and in the majority.

But there's no self-awareness here.  I mean, there are evangelical religious conservatives, f'r'instance, who understand they're a minority and milk that for all it's worth.  They take it as their mission to take up spiritual arms against an evil, secular majority that has strayed from God's path.  But Trump supporters?  They don't get it.  Hell, even if you accept their ludicrous premise that Trump would have won the popular vote but for the millions of chimerical fraudulent voters they've been told are out there somewhere, they're discounting the patently obvious fact that a lot of Republican voters in 2016 weren't Trump supporters, but decided to aid-and-abet or collaborate because they hated Hillary Clinton so damn much.

It is so hard to be nice about this.  And one feels like one should at least be civil, but this is ridiculous.  This is stupid.  The views of Trump's most dedicated supporters aren't even respected and in the majority of Trump voters.

"They’re stonewalling everything that he's doing because they’re just being babies about it," said Patricia Melani, 56, a Jersey native who now lives here and attended her third Trump rally Saturday. "All the loudmouths? They need to let it go. Let it go. Shut their mouths and let the man do what he’s got to do. We all shut our mouths when Obama got in the second time around, okay? So that’s what really needs to be done."

And then you get down the page, and there's this.  And the thing I'd draw your attention to is not how we're being insulted again (get used to that), but the sheer cluelessness of the last sentence.  Read that again: "We all shut our mouths when Obama got in the second time around, okay?"

I mean... really?  Seriously?  I would like to be civil and nice and not bluntly insulting about this, but even if I follow what logic there is in Ms. Melani's complaints, clearly I shouldn't be shutting my mouth until President Impeachment-Waiting-To-Happen gets re-elected.  If that happens.  And let's be honest, a lot of us won't be talking at that point because we'll be stricken by apoplexy or unable to talk around the gun barrels we've put in our mouths.  I sort of kid?  I'm not saying I'll kill myself if Donald Trump is re-elected, but I may not have to because, again, apoplexy.  Or heart failure.  Or stroke, if that's not the same thing as apoplexy.  Or possibly just fatally hitting my head on the corner of some piece of furniture when I get the vapors.

Whatever.  The point, naturally, is that these people can't even get through a single thought without pretzeling it.

Several people said they would have liked to see more coverage of a measure that Trump signed Thursday that rolled back a last-minute Obama regulation that would have restricted coal mines from dumping debris in nearby streams. At the signing, Trump was joined by coal miners in hard hats.

"If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work," Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. "I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were." 

Oh, thank goodness, yes, isn't that great and fabulous?  Some workers in a dying, dangerous industry have been given a few more years of dying, dangerous jobs.  And the best part is that maybe the Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act and possibly (maybe, maybe not?) replace it with the Unaffordable Voucher System, hooray!  So that when their drinking water is turned into heavy metal sludge, they can have fun with bankruptcy.  Or see what Trump's Department of Labor has for them behind door number 2.  (Kidding.  There's only one door.  Hey, look, somebody put a cemetery behind it!  Hooray!)

Anyhoo.

She and her husband were well-versed on hold-ups with the president’s Cabinet nominees and legal arguments for the now-frozen travel ban. But they didn’t know much about the resignation of Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn on Monday amid accusations that he improperly discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador — and then withheld that information from Vice President Pence and other top officials.

"See, don’t question me on that because I haven’t really been watching and listening too much on it," Melani said. "I think he kind of did it just to step away, a trust kind of a thing. And now, of course, they want to pull a big investigation and all of this stuff. And to be honest with you, I really think it’s only because of the way the haters are out there. That’s what I really think it is."

You gotta love it.  Arrested Development had a great phrase that came up periodically, "light treason" (as in, "I may have committed some light treason"), which is a pretty great way to describe misbehavior that maybe isn't technically giving aid and comfort to an enemy but seems spiritually akin to it.  And this seems like a fun and legit way to describe the contacts Trump personnel appear to have had with the Russians during the campaign and in the weeks before the inauguration.  But never mind that, because isn't the real sin that the media keeps reporting on this and people--including some Republicans--are kinda sorta just a tiny little bit upset about it?

It is so hard, it really is.  You want to be civil and kind, but how are you civil and kind towards adults whose reaction to something is to childishly stick their fingers in their ears and scream, hoping reality will abscond itself and leave them alone.  How do you treat that with any respect?  Honestly, what you want to do is you want to revoke their voting rights, since they clearly can't possibly be old enough to vote, and send them to their rooms without supper to think about what they've done until they're ready to apologize for being such fucking infants.