I recently had an online discussion with someone who believes that Trump is an utter failure and a cautionary tale because he "betrayed his supporters" by not pardoning the January 6 prisoners.
He had written the following:
Donald Trump squandered his shot. Now he’s paying for his failure. Many of the people who put their faith in him already are.
That last point is why Trump has proven unfit to lead and why no rational person should support him, even if he somehow makes it out of this mess he made. Trump has insufficient loyalty to his followers. That is not a momentary lapse of judgment. It is a persistent character flaw. When the chips are down, he will abandon his people again.
Barring some road to Damascus moment, that is. But even if Trump has a profound change of heart, he will need to prove it with concrete results before anyone should consider trusting him again.
Like all tragedies, Trump’s negative example can be an occasion for greater good. Otherwise smart, well-meaning people in positions of influence can take Trump’s removal from the board as a valuable lesson. There is no voting our way out of this – not with the electoral system totally compromised. Nor do we need a Boomer TV daddy to swoop in and save us.
In the discussion between him and me that followed, he wrote this as a response to one of my comments:
As for Trump’s loyalty, tell that to the hundreds of his supporters imprisoned in his name for January 6. He could have pardoned them before leaving office but left them to rot. Instead, he released thousands of black felons onto the streets.
I responded:
Pardoning them would have removed even the limited Republican Congressional and Senate support that he had during his impeachment trial, which was already barely enough to prevent him from being convicted. He would have been convicted in his impeachment and sent to jail for inciting an insurrection. The intelligence agencies would have tracked down thousands of other Trump supporters who were at the January 6 rally (using cell phone data) to arrest in retaliation for the ones that would have been pardoned. It would have been a suicide move; sometimes it’s necessary to live to fight another day.
Him:
That’s the problem with parroting talking points you hear online without stopping to think first. If you had, you’d have seen how the argument negates itself.
If a system is corrupt enough to tell the President “We’re illegally imprisoning and torturing these 300 people, and if you pardon them, we’ll imprison you and thousands more,” it is too corrupt to be bargained with. There are no checks to prevent it from prosecuting the President and his followers anyway.
Which is what we are seeing happen now. The FBI raided an ex-president’s home. Then they stopped a sitting congressman in transit and seized his phone. Leftist influencers are now calling for ordinary Trump voters to be arrested and crushed and their children orphaned. Who’s going to stop them? The same Republicans who threatened to convict Trump if he’d pardoned those same people?
The day the system proved itself illegitimate was the day Trump should have stood and fought (peacefully). Running to fight another day turned into just running. Now he’ll be jailed anyway. And so will many of his supporters.
Defending him now requires the same rationalization battered wives use to justify their abuse. It serves no one.
Another person in a follow-up discussion wrote this;
I can only speak for myself, but that is when he lost me. The Qult, as you call it, can torture language and logic all they want to rationalize this, but it’s betrayal, pure and simple. No good and decent man would have done this in the face of what Trump stood against.
If he was smart enough to be 10 steps ahead of the Deep State, or play the imaginary 4D chess at master level, as the Qultists frequently claim, he would have easily been able to predict the results of this betrayal.
What are your thoughts on this point of view?
Wow what a wonderful post. Thank you for giving your account of what happened there, as an eyewitness who experienced the events in person and had no difficulty at the time or since.
Maybe you've hooked on to what we obviously aren't seeing from our viewpoint on the sidelines. It was actually a very great day and showed how amazing, smart and concerned that a great number of everyday Americans truly are. You and probably 95% of the attendees are great folks that spent time and money to get there and represent an even larger cross-section of American patriots, that had one or another reason keeping them from attending. I would wager for each person in attendance there were 100 people who didn't show up physically but agreed with everything the J6 rally represented and were asking our Government to do for us, at least in principle.
I know I watched intently on various livestreams the entire time and I would like to personally thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there to represent me and my feelings about the events of the 2020 Election. Listening to your account and the many others gives me a sense of what happened that day, and there were good and bad things done by both sides that day, people on our side who made mistakes and did not represent us well, but also a lot of confusion and chaos comes any time there is a mass of humanity so large that is all pushed together inside of an area like that. Thank you for being there to represent kind and honest people and thank you for staying out of any kind of trouble while you were there! You're the average person at the J6 rally that OUR MEDIA DOESN'T TELL US ABOUT.
The whole problem with the story from the press since the rally is that people in attendance like you NEVER GOT TO TELL THEIR STORIES. I know in my heart that you are among the majority of folks who were there and I know that only a few meant to start problems and that it was a small minority that the media uses to represent MOST OF J6 when any reporting is done about it ON EITHER SIDE. Even those who were improperly treated by law enforcement were in too close to the whole problem areas unfortunately, but I've always believed most people stayed back at a comfortable distance and had no issues. As you said yourself, you hid your scooter and came back to it hours later! How exactly is that comparable to the average BLM event, where people frequently reported having cell phones stolen right from their pocket?
I think the reason most of us are so disgusted with the media and their subsequent representations of J6 is because somewhere deep down we know that people in attendance had experiences mostly like yours, and have been completely ignored in the retelling of the day's events. You were there to support Donald Trump and to let your voice be heard, and you accomplished that goal in spades!
Here's how you know: they are absolutely terrified of what J6 represents and means. A self organized collective of people who knew something was wrong and demanded that their elected leaders STOP for a moment and listen instead of carrying on right ahead as though everything that had happened were normal and not inprecedented. They knew each of one of you there represented 100 or more of us back at home that day and it shocked and scared them to their very core. Just the idea that people were awake, attentive and not kowtowing to their lies was way too much activity for them to bear, because an active electorate ALONE will prevent them from carrying on business as usual, and you saw that.
Unprecedented measures they used to back against Trump since then have become almost a normal part of our news cycle. It's getting worse and worse because they don't know how to stop US and they think that maybe taking him off the board will be just enough to shut us up and make us go home. Way too little and way too late. Personally I will never forget watching the events that day and how I felt after they resumed the session. It was like our betters were treating us all like children and giving us a punishment for misbehavior. The language from Republicans was utterly disgusting. We were spoiled children and they were going to elect Joe Biden and carry it through to discipline us for daring to yell and protest them. Just awful.
Once again thank you for your story!
Godspeed.
Thanks for the lovely reply and a lovely sentiments. Here’s my original post back when it all happened. Please excuse all the bad language, because I don’t use those words anymore. God is changing me every day, and finally getting all that garbage mouth out of me was a huge one.
https://patriots.win/p/11S0WzO6bJ/i-am-not-ashamed--i-share-this-p/c/