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    The Trump Movement
    The Trump Movement
    The Trump Movement
    Ebook107 pages7 hours

    The Trump Movement

    By Don Baxter

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A concise and definitive guide to understanding Donald Trump's stunning victory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 9, 2016
    ISBN9781483589008
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      Book preview

      The Trump Movement - Don Baxter

      CUBA

      CHAPTER 1 WHY NOT?

      I became a part of the Trump Movement shortly after the presidential debates began. I’m not an American. I’m Canadian. And maybe that was a good thing. It gave me some distance that I came to see as quite healthy. Either way, I had a lot of time on my hands and I found Donald Trump to be an intriguing character and I like intriguing characters.

      I love history. I’ve read a ton of history books. Biographies of great characters. A lot of historical fiction, where someone else goes through the endless process of reading all of the factual documents and historical interpretations, then spins it all into an historically accurate drama. I love that stuff. Swashbuckling pirates. Mystical Aboriginals. Romance on the high seas.

      Last year, wanting to be warm, I spent most of the winter in Cuba and, loving history, read all of Fidel and Che’s major speeches about the Cuban revolution. I had the idea that Donald Trump had the potential to be as great a mover of history as those two were.

      So I paid attention. In the process of paying attention, I watched the debates. I was staying at a friend’s house, he was away and the living room was available. Otherwise I might have missed them, since I don’t own or watch a TV.

      In those debates, I heard Hillary Clinton, over and over again, blame Russia and Putin for every conceivable problem.

      Who’s responsible for the problems in Syria? Russia and Putin. Who hacked into her email? Russia and Putin. Who’s obviously helping Donald Trump in his campaign? Russia and Putin. Constantly. Obsessively. I became afraid of her and started to realize who was at the heart of the current cool relations between Russia and America, two large countries with lots of nuclear weapons. After about the tenth time I heard her say it, I was in a cold sweat. I have never been so afraid of anything in my life as I was of Hillary Clinton being put in charge. I knew, in my heart, like I have never known anything in my life, that she was going to start a shooting war with Russia and Putin and blow up what she could of the world and poison the rest. Kill my children. Kill my grandchildren. Kill us all. As far as I was concerned, this was a global issue, not just an American one. It certainly was my issue.

      And then I heard Donald Trump saying, along with other things that the press were branding as outrageous, She wants to go into Syria and start a shooting war with Russia and start World War III. I knew then I was not alone, that others had seen this too. A colder chill came over me. I came to believe, and still believe, that all of humanity was at stake. That all of humanity stands at a crossroads.

      If you read enough history, you can’t help but see that there is some fundamental power that drives us. Something that puts creatures like us into these moments of choice, where there is some intense struggle, where a person, a family, a nation or a species has to sink or swim. It’s completely up to them. Their choice. Like Neo said in The Matrix. Choice. The problem is choice.

      I also came to see myself in an incredibly unique position, as a chronicler of these events with, as far as I could see, a relatively unbiased opinion. I looked around me and saw lots of people passionately, vehemently, opposed to Trump. I wasn’t sure why they were when I wasn’t but it certainly gave me the advantage of being able to see and hear things that many others apparently could not.

      I saw myself like a foreign observer in some war that no one believes any one can win, some useless prince who’d been sent by his King to observe and then report back but don’t get involved. Except that became impossible. I became a Trump supporter, in the beginning because I was so mortally afraid of Hillary, then more because I was reacting to the distorted reporting in the press and then more still because I started really hearing his message. And his message was so very different from what was being reported in the press that it defies definition and imagination.

      I’m not even going to pretend to tell you that, in the beginning, this was an unbiased report. I hope it got more unbiased as it went along, but that initial bias gave me even more reason to pay attention. So, in that respect, it’s still good reporting.

      And because I paid attention, I was witness to, and part of, one of the great Democratic movements of modern history. I was witness to one of the truly great public speakers the English language has ever produced, raising up a bruised and battered working class and, using nothing more than pieces of paper, saving humanity from what he, and I, saw as certain annihilation.

      In the process, my eyes were opened, not only to the unbelievable power of Mass Media Manipulation, but to the far greater power of love. Love for ourselves. Love for each other. Love for our country. And to the indescribable power of the people. Nothing will ever be the same for me.

      In that respect it’s also a good story. I’ll try to do it justice.

      CHAPTER 2 ME

      I’m a poet. A writer of rhyming verse. And a musician of sorts. I started out as a drummer. I went around the house tapping on anything and everything until my mother finally got me into some drumming lessons and a cheap set of pawn shop drums.

      I played those drums into pieces and eventually got good enough that I played in some bar bands and dance bands but, while I enjoyed the music, I didn’t really enjoy the life. The road. Long hours and days with people I did not really like in a cramped van or sleeping two to a room in some dumpy hotel. Snoring. Farting. Little to do to occupy the time but playing pool or cards, drinking and getting high, telling stupid stories, chasing skanky women.

      I dropped it as a full time pursuit, got myself trained as a car mechanic and had myself a little family. Music was always there and I found the occasional weekend bar band to play in and eventually started playing guitar as well. Not well, mind you. Guitar has been and probably always will be a giant struggle for me. But I can play well enough to strum the chords that I need to get my point across in the songs that I write.

      Writing songs was a natural progression of writing rhyming verse. I think I’ve always been attracted to rhyming verse. Who isn’t? What little kid doesn’t like Doctor Zeus? But after my mother died I went through a period of intense poetic expression. And I began communicating that expression through the songs I was writing. When I wasn’t writing songs I tried to keep myself in shape, poetically speaking, by writing little four line verses, eventually putting them on my Facebook page.

      They dried up. Both the songs and the little four liners. I went into a slump that lasted quite a while.

      Then, last winter, I went to the library and picked up a book of quotes by famous writers. Except they weren’t quotes from their books but rather statements about writing itself. What motivated them and such. And everyone said the same thing. Forget about inspiration. In a way, inspiration is your enemy. Sit down and write.

      So I did. I went back to the library and picked up a book of clichés. I think there were a thousand or something. All organized into categories. And I started writing a poem, a four line rhyming verse, every day, based on one of those cliches, putting it on Facebook. Only the kindest of souls gave me any likes for any of these offerings, but the poems that people respond to are

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