STOP TRUMP -- and the rest of the current Republican Party. There is no other way.

Historically -- and I mean in the span of my near-80-year lifetime, at least -- the Republican Party (despite whatever it may have been at its birth) has stood for the white, the wealthy and the powerful over the weak, the working class, the poor and the non-white. This attitude has not changed but has simply grown stronger and more obvious as decades passed.

Now, with the ascension/devolution of Donald Trump, a man who, during his entire career, has proved himself a bully, bigot, coward, crook, fool and fraud, along with the hypocritical help of the Republican-led Senate and Supreme Court, the USA has hit the nadir of its very checkered, two-centuries-plus past. Prior to our current Corona-virus era, we had already reached a point at which full-time employment for the masses did not ensure anything close to a living wage.

This current time of lockdown, sickness and death provides an even greater opportunity for the members of the Republican Party to increase their wealth and power, and of course they are going at it like wild dogs in a feeding frenzy.  U.S. citizens can vote these worthless (except for their wealth, of course) sleazebags out of power only if we actually have an unfettered right to vote, which is looking less and less likely with all the voter restrictions now in place, with more being added ASAP.

If we cannot vote them out, they must be thrown out by any means necessary. The New Republic magazine features a most interesting article by Osita Nwanevu in its March issue. The article is titled MAKE IT STOP, accompanied by the following description: In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the GOP -- we have to abolish it. That was how the print version of the magazine put it. Interestingly, the online version, which is all that's available now, plays the description in this abbreviated form: In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party. Did someone at TNR get cold feet?

In any case, the article is worth reading, and what it says is quite true, though I wish Mr. Nwanevu had come out more strongly for progressive Democrats over those of the "centrist" persuasion -- who have done the country and the party more damage than good over the past decades since the Reagan administration, leading us -- thanks to the centrists' refusal to stand up to corporations and Wall Street/Banking -- into such frustration and anger (along with stupidity) from the populace that we now have Trump to contend with.

OK: TrustMovies realizes that never in our history has a genuine progressive Presidential candidate -- from Henry A. Wallace through Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren -- been allowed to run for that office. Corporate power, Wall Street and the banks simply will not tolerate this. (Barack Obama and Joe Biden are about as progressive as my Republican uncle, which is why the former was allowed to run, while the latter is actively encouraged to do so.) Concerned citizens keep trying, but an electorate that has, at this point, been turned into little more than consumers of entertainment (never more so than now, during this pandemic) is no match for the nastiness and cunning of the Republican right.

The current demonstrations against the ending of black lives by police, once these devolve into looting, are less than worthless politically (I have updated this post as of June 22 to say how thankful I am that the looting has stopped and was only a small portion of the current ongoing protest), while the effort to somehow separate black protesters from white seems utterly pointless. Identifying ANTIFA from fake-ANTIFA is well-nigh impossible, too, given the current state of news reporting in print, on TV or via the Internet.

So what do we do? If enough of us are not allowed to vote, then we either go sheeplike to our very slow slaughter, or we rise up and take power by force. How? If I were younger, braver and smarter, I might have a clue, along with the strength necessary to put that into action. But surely some folk out there have one. If so, please use it.

What I can do at this point is use my blog to make a statement. It may be paltry but it's all I have. So there it is. And, yes, I'll be back to movies and entertainment tomorrow or maybe the next day....