Bottom of the barrel

Trump’s surviving impeachment has caused some of his supporters to break free of the Fox News force-field long enough to express their views about impeachment and the current state of political discourse in America. Many believe that impeachment was a political stunt undertaken by House Democrats to please the liberal left, that Speaker Pelosi was in it for the “thrill,” and that the whole process was a waste of time keeping Congress from doing the people’s business.

If Congress had not been involved in this historic and solemn process, Republicans would probably be working to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to terminate the last remaining protections of Obamacare, and roll back environmental regulations protecting the safety of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. They would be doing corporate America’s business, resulting in prosperity for the rich, economic stagnation and financial insecurity for the middle class, and destitution and despair for the truly needy.

Some think that liberals view all Trump supporters as “deplorables.” That is certainly not true. I have friends who support the president and his policies. They are not deplorable, simply misguided.

However, there remains, it seems, a core group of Trump’s base whose views on race and religion, cultural separatism and economic isolation are deplorable. That doesn’t make the people who hold these views deplorable, but it tips the scales in that direction. Evangelicals and other self-professed Christians who vote for Trump solely because he supports their efforts to eliminate a woman’s right to choose have sunk beyond deplorable and plumbed the bottom of the barrel of hypocrisy.

DAVID ELI COCKCROFT Little Rock