I’m crying my heart out! Trumpsters please stay clear

Exactly!

Why waste (more) time with people who are hell bent on supporting a racist, misogynistic, hateful person and administration???

I will never understand how you've read this thread and claim not to understand.

Yes!!! This 100%

I so understand. My best friend of nearly 50 years has dropped out of my life because I don't worship Trump. We were kids together. I literally loved her like a sister. We are very different people, but have supported each other through many, many tough times in life. Our mothers died within months of each other when we were 30. When her husband died from cancer several years later, I drove up stayed with her for more than a week and supported her for as long as she needed support. I've emptied her drains after surgery and replaces SteriStrips on her coochie. I love her daughter like a niece. When she opened a business, I spent countless hours helping her do whatever she needed, working events, etc., for free (of course) because I got to hang out with her and her success made me happy. I'd never, ever imagined a world where we weren't friends.

Then came the 2016 election. She and her (now adult) daughter were both vocally pro-Trump. When he won the election, I had a conversation with myself and decided that a political candidate wasn't going to destroy my long, long friendship. No way. We could just talk about other stuff, like we always had. But then... She started being cool toward me. We went on a girl's weekend at the beach with a bunch of people. She started hanging out with a fellow Trumpian. I walked into the room where they were and my friend said (about me) "She's a Hillary lover. She doesn't like OUR Trump." It just went downhill from there. She stopped coming to a monthly dinner with me and two other people (also not fans of Trump). Finally, she went off on me about some insignificant thing and that was it. I might as well have been dead. She's always putting pics of herself with her "dear" Trump-loving friend on Facebook. I guess I'm pain-shopping by not unfollowing her.

My DH says it reminds him of a bad marriage (he should know, since we had one for quite a few years until we wised up and fixed it). I just know that being dumped by a close friend because of Trump has been really, really painful, but I guess it's common nowadays.

ETA  I know she's a good person inside, which is why I hung on so long.  Maybe she's not, anymore.

Yes. Some people in our circles have shocked the hell out of us with their beliefs and complete adoration for trump and EVERYTHING he is doing.

Most people don’t go running around screaming “I hate black people! I hate Mexicans! I want their lives completely ripped apart because they came to this country and I don’t want them here!” They have hidden those beliefs really really well up until now. Honestly if it wasn’t for Facebook I robably wouldn’t know how some of my friends really feel. They NEVER express these things in person. But then I go to their page, and every other post is some awfully racist meme. Why else would you post it on your own page if you didn’t believe it?

I think some of it has to do with the fact that we now see certain beliefs and behaviors as racist when they were not necessarily seen that way before.

The thread about places to live or not live in Dallas set my teeth on edge. Quite often, when people talk about "undesirable" parts of town, what they mean is that the people there are poor, usually brown or black, and suffer from high levels of crime because people lack resources. I don't know the particular area of Dallas they were talking about, but having lived safely for the past 23 years in parts of Houston often described as "scary" by people in the suburbs, I find myself rolling my eyes. People send their kids to "better" schools in the suburbs, but what they really mean is that the families there are mostly white and have more resources. They subscribe to the "bootstraps" mentality without recognizing that our economic system is set up to benefit the already rich at the expense of the poor, and have no problem benefitting from the labor of undocumented immigrants, but pontificate that "those people" should come here legally without recognizing that for most, no realistic legal avenue exists. They roll their eyes and tell people to speak English if they want to live here. They deny the existence of white privilege and systemic racism. They insist that their confederate flag is "heritage."

Twenty years ago, to be honest, these were pretty mainstream views in both political parties. We see them now as racist, but some people are unwilling to learn and change their views based on a better understanding and more information. We also have a lot more open conversations about race and racism, and people have a wide forum on social media, where in the past people didn't talk about politics or race, or if they did, it was a very small conversation among people likely to share their views. So yeah, it's possible to have known someone for decades and only realize in the past few years or so that their views haven't progressed at all. They might have outed themselves during the Obama administration with birtherism or comments about an ape in heels, or they might not have really emerged until Trump came on the scene and started re-tweeting white supremacists and calling them "very fine people," and made it perfectly OK to refer to poor brown immigrants as rapists and murderers. He made it feel OK for those people who had perhaps started to feel uncomfortable about expressing their racist views to do so, loud and proud. And so we now know who those people are for real.

(bold mine)

And there are a myriad of reasons to oppose Donald Trump.
He’s not “just” racist.

He’s also damaged, dishonest, intentionally divisive, undereducated and underinformed, unwilling to learn, rude, presumptive, belligerent, dismissive, rage-ie, pathologically needy, narcissistic, selfish, arrogant, dangerously self-absorbed (and just plain dangerous), inappropriate, incivil, erratic, vengeful, threatening, provocative, pandering, nepotic, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, scornful of rules, contemptuous of laws, destructive, money-hungry and, you know, criminal.

(And those were just the things I thought of in the time it took to type...)

If someone hasn’t noticed even JUST ONE of these wholly-disqualifying-for-a-president characteristics because they want lower taxes or don’t pay attention to politics or parrot what everybody they know thinks, then what the hell else in life will they willfully ignore or not learn? 

Given his own words and actions, how do you not get there? At best they are willing to ignore it. And what does that really mean? At best they are willing to ignore that he elevates the primacy of white skin. How can we excuse ignoring that for personal motive as anything other than complicit racism?

I’ve heard a lot of them say the media is just making that up or the democrats have done much worse and they’re all just a bunch of hypocrites. Or they all just want to take our guns away and they’re making up lies.

Again... I know you mean well. It isn't just politics, though. It's morality. 

If you don't live in the USA or have people who do, who are directly impacted by it, it's hard to understand. I have friends who are very much impacted by the increase in racism & and intolerance. 

Trump is evil. 

To add, they don’t believe he is racist, he never said those things, he doesn’t think those things, it’s all lies, and they aren’t racists either. Or all people are racists, I’ve heard that one too. Everyone is a racist. The democrats are lying to gain power. Nancy Pelosi just wants in the White House.

Perception is reality.

Wow. She sounds like a true minion. 

Great post. But I have to ask, what are we going to do to the people that do shudder and drive by? Are we going to lock them up? Put half of the country in prison for crimes against morality? Give everyone a psych test and see if they have any views that conflict with thinking and doing the right thing? Are we going to hate them with a passion that eats at our souls? Maybe cut off everyone we know that is a “complicit racist,” our families, our friends, anyone who doesn’t think like us? How can we make everyone think like us, make everyone think and do only good moral things? Scream at them until we die? What’s the goal here?

  Yes, but many of us with acknowledged privilege see the injustice and want to challenge/fix it.