Confessions of a Trump Republican, by Frank Miele

Over at MSNBC, they are calling those who think like me “Dead-Enders,” people who will follow Donald Trump into the bunker and die with him. It’s supposed to be an insult. That’s all right. I’ve been called worse — domestic terrorist, white supremacist, racist. None of those slurs are accurate, but they sure do hurt.

Which is the point.

My smart-beyond-her-ninth-grade-education mother warned me about the power of political name-calling a long time ago. Back in the 1960s when I was a precocious ninth-grader myself, my mom told me never to join the Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing antiwar group that kept sending me mail asking for a donation. If you do send them money, my mom said, then you are going to have a target on your back. Sometime, maybe years later, powerful people will come after you, call you a communist, and try to punish you.

She knew all about name-calling because she had lived through the Red Scare of the 1950s. People lost their careers for joining the wrong group, for attending the wrong rally — for having the wrong beliefs. Lives were ruined. Blacklists kept people in fear. It was hard to believe for a young man like me who loved his country that there would ever come a time again when Americans could be marginalized and have their livelihoods threatened just for taking a political stand.

But here we are again. Today, you can’t be a Trump conservative or, heaven forbid, a Trump Republican without having not just your patriotism questioned, but your very sanity.

Over on CNN, folks like me are targeted as the Republicans trying to “roll back your right to vote.” John King, who was once a real journalist, should know better. But there he is, telling the useful idiots who watch CNN that defending against election fraud is somehow an attack on voting rights. This kind of loose talk legitimizes attacks on people like me since he states as a fact that we are working to undermine democracy.