LETTER: Give up the Trumpian rhetoric, trust your fellow Americans

To Ozaukee Press:

Dennis Gasper, chairman of the Sheboygan County Republican Party and writer of a letter to the editor in last week’s Ozaukee Press (“If you don’t like Trump, you deserve socialist government”), and his fellow Republicans are unable or unwilling to understand their Democratic neighbors, who are larger in number and consume more varied media than they seem to assume.

Anything we tweet or say gets interpreted through the eyes of a gang of Trump fans that control the dissemination of information on the right-wing cable news programs and blogs in which these Trump loyalists have siloed themselves. We rarely get the benefit of the doubt.

Trump is now bringing to the forefront the anti-American rantings of the one person who is president and saying what only people who cannot think for themselves think. According to Trump and Gasper, the ideas of minority women or anyone else who dares to dissent can be dismissed out of hand as “socialism.”

If Gasper believes his ideas are so great, then he should prove it in the same country we both love by trusting his fellow Americans to come to their own conclusions. He also should update his playbook. We didn’t prosper in America because we made condescending, age-old, bad-faith, one-hit-wonder arguments like his.

If you don’t want to understand your Democratic neighbors, you never will.

If you are too closed-minded to recognize what inspires the Democratic base of support, you could get the so-called “conservative” government you deserve: one with compassion for no one but the most sycophantic of Trump worshippers. If that happens, we will be just another fake populist country where everybody will be destitute except, of course, for the palace thugs, like your beloved Donald Trump.

Matthew Webber
Cedarburg