George Schultz, former Secretary of State and many other Federal roles, just wrote a letter at the age of 100. He said a very important thing that explains just about everything you need to know about government, and life itself:
“Trust is the coin of the realm.”
“When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details."
This explains the politics of today. Democrats have thousands of reasons not to trust Trump, and his Republican Party - from trying overturn the will of the people in the Presidential election, to putting out over 25,000 lies while in office, to literally trying to increase the number of COVID-19 infections to create "herd immunity", to refusing to lead and coordinate a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to openly courting racists and white supremacists, to betraying American allies while pandering to Putin and other authoritarians around the world. Democratic distrust of Republicans who knew better but afraid to stand up to him, and worse yet, distrust of Republicans who agreed with him, has been well earned.
And Republicans seem to be lost in a reality distortion field of right wing media paranoia so they literally do not know the actual news, but only believe ridiculous and endless stories that play to their grievances and paranoia, so they don't trust the news, don't trust the Democrats, and don't trust the truth.
This is the result of the handiwork of America's enemies, led by Putin's Russia. Russia's poisoning of the information that spreads through America is having the effect that he desires - we don't trust each other, and without trust nothing is possible.
