I wasn’t always on the liberal side. On one of my most recent Facebook posts, in which I shared a post from Occupy Democrats, I got a comment from one of my former high school teachers asking if I ever criticized Barack Obama when he was president. I was about to reply back, but it couldn’t let me, because the person that started the comment thread blocked me. And then I realized that there was so much that I’ve been itching to say for a long time, so I’m going to use this opportunity to put in my response.
I haven’t always been on the liberal side. And yes, I have criticized Barack Obama in the past. I’ve had Timehop remind me about those times that I have criticized Barack Obama on Facebook, which sometimes makes me wonder why I criticized him in those statuses in the first place. But believe it or not, there has been a factor that tied in to all of that. In 2008, I was at the legal age of voting, and I got to vote for the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. When I finally registered to vote, I decided to vote register myself into the Republican party. To tell you the truth, I kind of did that in vain. I only registered as a Republican because a lot of my good friends in high school were more on the Republican or conservative side, and I just wanted to fit in. My faith in God was getting stronger as I was going to a non-denominational school, and I thought being a conservative Republican was something that a lot of Christians like to do. And besides, I’m a resident in Louisiana, one of the most conservative-leaning states in the United States. We have college football tailgates as the center of our city. We blast country music through our speakers, even though nowadays, it’s hard to consider it all country music. We go on fishing trips, even if it means going to another state to do it. We have a very strong passion in the food that our state is known for. We drink alcohol way more than we should. We fear that the repeal of the Second Amendment is going to put a damper on our upcoming hunting trip. That’s how much Louisiana is a conservative state. Thus, on Election Day, I voted for the Republican candidate John McCain.
But in all honesty, not only have I rooted for Barack Obama more than John McCain, but I’ve always been more of a Democrat-leaning person. I believed Barack Obama was a better candidate for the Oval Office. I was a strong supporter of Al Gore, that I got my mom to vote for him in 2000. I even voted for Barack Obama in 2012 while still a registered Republican. The only time I truly rooted for a Republican was in 2004, when George W. Bush was up for reelection. I mainly wanted to see a current President keep his seat at the Oval Office, but I felt that for the mistakes that he made, he did have a few moments that he did right. And if I’m being honest, Howard Dean kind of made the Democrats look bad that year.
So, back to Barack Obama for a minute. I have criticized him in the past for reasons that I wish I could remember. However, I still liked the guy. Sure, he didn’t always succeed, but not one time did I think he was doing a bad job. Remember, a President’s administration is, more often than not, only as good as its Congress. Barack Obama was dealing with a Senate with a Republican majority that really had it out for him. And it didn’t help matters that he once had a blubbering mess like John Boehner as Speaker of the House. So during the first few years of Obama’s administration, I was concerned that he was going to let me down, as well as most of us that believed he would provide that hope. Looking back on it now, he really did do a lot that delivered on that promise. Sure, we expected him to fix everything with a quick snap of the fingers. But when Osama bin Laden was finally caught and killed, it clicked to me that no one, not even a President, can change things overnight. It has to take some time to get there. He even said on the night that bin Laden got killed that, “The cause of securing our country is not complete. But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.” In a way, that’s the biggest part of his legacy. He couldn’t get there overnight, but with the time he needs, he could get there, and he eventually did. Most of the times that I criticized Obama was just to fit in with the people that I knew, but not one time did I hate him for being an African-American. Sure, I’ve had a few racist moments at a young age, but I was not in the right environment at that time. I never thought that Obama shouldn’t be President because he was an African-American. I think people of any minority can be President as long as they’re truly American.
In the next couple of years, I tried going a more independent route, because at the time, the political environment got a little exhausting. The two parties each had their own opposing beliefs, and it was hard to tell which side was right or wrong. The Republican party was turning into a joke, and while I became 100% on Barack Obama’s side toward the back half of his term, I was skeptical of what was going to happen with Hillary Clinton coming back for another shot at the presidency in 2016. When it came to the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was 100% for Obama and 100% against Hillary. My biggest turnoff with Hillary was that she was too polarizing of a character. I felt that she was way too strong of a personality and way too power-hungry. It didn’t have anything to do with the controversies that surrounded her (or even her husband). So I had no idea where my vote was going to lean for in 2016, and yet, I still maintained my status in the Republican party.
Then, in 2015, Donald Trump announced, after years of teasing everyone about the idea, that he was going to run for President of the United States. I am not a fan of Donald Trump, and I haven’t been for quite a while. My first opinion of Trump as a kid was that he’s a rich schmuck, and nothing else. I did take a liking to Donald Trump when he started doing The Apprentice. Back then, he was calm, he had a sense of humor, he was a pretty humble, and he cared a lot more back then. I remember during that time, I bought one of his books and read more than the part where he talked about The Apprentice, I watched several entertainment specials about his life that painted him in a deceptively positive way. I repeated the phrase “You’re fired!” at least once a day. This was an odd period in my life, but I thought there was a lot more to like about Trump than I assumed. Once we got to around the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, though, I saw the real Donald Trump stand up the moment he attacked Rosie O’Donnell after she mocked him on The View. The hosts were talking about him letting Tara Conner maintain her role as Miss USA following her addictions came to light. All Rosie did was imitate his voice and mocked his hairstyle, and Trump decided to call her “fat”, “unattractive”, and “a loser”, all over a simple parody. While at the time, I did think Rosie’s imitation was a little extreme, the truth is that he was already a very easy character to joke about. He has a ridiculous combover, he obsesses over gold, he puts his name on a lot of things, and he has had more bankruptcies and divorces than I can count on both hands. As with a lot of jokes made about Trump pre-2007, Rosie’s imitation was just all in the fair art of lampooning. The way that Trump took it showed that he is too thin-skinned and vindictive. After that, my interest in him started to decrease. He continued on about his hatred towards Rosie. He started more rivalries with others. He said outlandish things. He ruined The Apprentice, then cancelled it, then said that it wasn’t cancelled, then said that it’s going to be revamped with celebrities. The further that it went, the more I felt that he may not be a good person. It’s tragic to think about how Rosie suffered during that time, because the reason so many of us gravitated more to Trump’s side was that he had the bigger amount of wealth, fame and power. If the media were more open to call out Trump on his vicious tactics, he never would’ve gotten away without suffering any consequences. And my main problem with Trump from 2007 to 2015 was that he was doing and saying all these bad things, trying to pick fights with some people and making questionable decisions (such as starting a debate on Obama’s birth certificate), and the majority of America let him continue on without any repercussions.
So now, we come to 2015, as he announces his presidential campaign, and all the problems immediately start in that announcement speech when he called Mexicans “rapists” and wanted the country to pay for a wall that he would build on the border. Now, I’m not fully aware of the crime going on in Mexico. There could be some that are doing what he thinks they do. But in his wording, he was indicating that all Mexicans were rapists that bring nothing but drugs and crime. The likelihood of every Mexican doing just one of those things is realistically impossible. But with Trump, when he sees just one person do that, he’ll take it out on the rest of that demographic. Back in my middle school and high school days, I was very drawn into American History and World History. I picked up on the wars, the tensions, the conflicts, the slavery, and the tyrants at a very young age, and I could easily see Trump’s presidency getting grouped with those stories in the textbooks. And as a person that has struggled with anxiety in the past, I didn’t like where Trump was going with his campaign. I wanted to be on the side that guaranteed that Trump would fail his campaign. But it got worse. In the first Republican primary debate, he made a sexist comment so disturbing that it put me in the unforgiving position of taking the side of a Fox News anchor. He proposed a shutout of Muslims in the United States over a belief that may be less completely accurate than his belief about Mexico. He bragged about not losing supporters if he were to shoot someone. He made inappropriate, inaccurate comments about his competitors. And as someone living with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is one of many disabilities, I did not appreciate his mocking of a disabled reporter, which definitely makes Rosie mocking a rich, overweight, self-centered man look like a roast given by a friend. And yet, his campaign didn’t end. He won most of the primaries, insulted his opponents out of the race, brainwashed so many people even outside the Republican party, and just rode his way to the nomination, as well as the presidency.
Even as his campaign prospered, I still didn’t change my party affiliation, because there were still some good Republicans in that party, and I still truly believe there are some good Republicans out there today. There were definitely some that didn’t approve of Trump and didn’t want him becoming the Republican nominee, let alone the President. The only reason they settled for that compromise was for the party itself. They wanted to take the White House back from the Democrats. They definitely had vendettas against the people in that party. And it did pain me to see some people who apply to that conservative ideology choose Trump. It did hurt to see most Christians and evangelists buy into Trump’s Christian beliefs, even though I could challenge Christians to name at least one of the Ten Commandments that he’s kept or at least one of the seven deadly sins that he hasn’t committed. It did hurt to watch some of my friends lean toward him, even though they are way better than that. And it did hurt to see my family members not follow my pleas to choose someone else. Trump was so toxic to the political field that, as someone leaning toward an independent stance that year, I wanted to root for and support any candidate other than him. Of course, when he slowly became the Republican nominee, I looked at the Democratic primaries. With my feelings about Hillary Clinton in 2008 still lingering, I supported Bernie Sanders through and through, as I didn’t think that Hillary stood a chance against Trump. Of course, Hillary became the front-runner. But as the primaries went on, and they went into countless debates, I saw some of Bernie’s ideologies start to rub off on her, and it made her a better, more-trustworthy candidate. Say what you will about how the Democratic primaries went down in 2016, but Bernie and Hillary were uniting over the fact that they both had a common enemy, and they agreed that Trump was going to be a disaster. When Hillary did that pitch about Trump’s ideology being a disaster to the country that was founded on beliefs very opposite from his, I knew that I could vote for her in the election. Whether you agreed with her ideas or not, they were way better than what Trump had in mind. Whether you believed the “controversies” surrounding her or not, it didn’t make me more angry at her than him. And the difference between Hillary’s controversies and Trump’s controversies was that no one could provide legitimate proof linked to Hillary. With Trump’s controversies, he could not only brag about it like an mindless idiot, but someone could trace back to a past situation that would prove him guilty. Heck, even though George W. Bush wasn’t the brightest bulb, he had way more class and integrity than this guy. The way that I saw the 2016 election, it was never an unlikable candidate versus an unlikable candidate. It was an unlikable candidate versus everyone else. So once the two main candidates were confirmed, I was ready to stand with Hillary no matter what. And even with that, I still didn’t officially leave my affiliation with the Republican party.
So when did I do that? It was after the Access Hollywood tapes got leaked, where in 2005, Donald Trump bragged about sexually advancing himself onto women to the point where, because he was a star, he could inappropriately touch them in sacred areas. That was the tipping point, because as someone that is 100% against misogyny of any kind, this was not something that you should do as a man. Whether he did it or not, just bragging about having the ability to do it crossed a line. And sure, I haven’t been mistake-free when it comes to women, but I care about wanting to fall in love with a woman so much that I always learn from those mistakes and avoid repeating them. The Republicans had the opportunity to disqualify him in the race and cut all ties with him at that moment. They even had way too many opportunities to do that before that. But the fact that they didn’t confirmed which side of the line that they were going to stand on. Donald Trump lacks all morals, cares about very few things other than himself, has been dishonest, has been greedy, has been insulting toward many people, has been unafraid to cheat and manipulate his way to power, shows no compassion, has done very bad things, and has proposed an ideology that not only goes against the purpose of America, but has every founding father rolling in his grave right now. I could not, in my good conscience, remain registered in a political party when I refused to vote for someone like Donald Trump.
Looking back, the only explanation as to how Donald Trump became President of the United States is that he’s a businessman who figured out a way to apply a marketing approach to his campaign. He figured out his demographic audience like a business figures out the field of consumers who would buy their products. He pitched his campaign to them like a door-to-door salesman pitches his scam of a product. He took the money from innocent people that believed him and just laughed all the way to the bank. The White House is not Wall Street. Politics isn’t supposed to be a place where you can profit off a deceptive deal, dismantling medical aid, or pulling out of international agreements. You need to find ways to keep up with the changing times, improve life for the citizens that live in this country, and have a friendly connection with the rest of the world. Donald Trump either failed to know about it, or he just ignored it all completely. He may get politics, but he doesn’t understand it.
Currently, I’m an independent voter with no party affiliation, although I’ve leaned more to Democrats as a result of the 2016 election. For me, this isn’t about liberal versus conservative. It’s about right versus wrong. If there’s a good Republican candidate in the future, I’ll consider voting for them. To really describe how I turned out this way, it’s really came down to growing up and developing a better sense of wisdom and knowledge. When I first became a Republican, I was becoming a devout Christian. Nothing changed in my religious beliefs. They actually became stronger, because I understood the bigger picture. Believing in the word of God is only half of Christianity. You also need to understand how Jesus lived, because God didn’t just send his only begotten son to die on the cross. He sent him to share the Gospel and the Scriptures, teach people how to love one another as neighbors, and let people know that your sins can be forgiven as long as you believe that Jesus is the Savior of your sins and everyone else’s. I feel that those lessons are more relevant to the Democratic ideology than they do to the Republican ideology.
Like religion, politics is a topic that’s too touchy to talk about without getting into a debate about it. I hate having to lose friends over it, even though it inevitably happened in some cases. There are unfortunately some things that I can’t avoid keeping silent about, because these are things I strongly believe in. You don’t have to agree with me on it, but I’ll always love and care about those that I personally know in my life, whatever they believe in, even when it comes to politics. With the situation that our society is in at this time, the last thing I want to do is to lose a friendship over opposing views.
Warren Mitchell 