The optics of Trump holding court for the press in his country club, with his rich buddies cheering him on as he attacks the very fiber of America, is stunning and should tell us everything about where we are and how we got here. /1

Starting with Reagan's 'trickle-down' scam, the Republicans have been actively brain-washing the former middle class into believing their demise was the Democrats' fault, not the GOP. They use the lure of ostentatious wealth as a golden ring. /2

They lie: Play your cards right and you, too, could be where they are. Only the Dems stand in your way. Oh, and those 'others' whose skin pigmentation makes them forever suspect. They take away jobs, they overburden our social and health care systems without giving back. /3

They're poor!
It's good to be rich. The rich hold all the power. The Republicans want you to believe that's the way it should be, but America has always worked better when the wealth was distributed more evenly. We had a vibrant middle class and the economy soared. 4/

We had usury laws.We had strong unions representing millions of blue and white collar workers. We looked down on CEOs demanding millions of dollars to run corporations. We didn't reward them when they ran companies into the ground. We didn't let them buy our elected leaders. 5/

Presidential elections didn't cost millions of dollars. We expected government officials to behave like public servants, beholden only to those of us who paid their salaries, and when they didn't we booted them out.

Every political effort is controlled by money now,and we're in gridlock because of it. We can't take money out of our elections this time, but we can expose the many attempts to wrongly influence our elections. We have to be loud and undeterred.

We know we can never let this happen again. The damage is startling and tragic--far worse than we could have imagined--but it's not insurmountable. We won't survive another fiasco like this one. We have to win against them. And we can. /End