My neighbor’s recent admission to “having made a gross error” in voting for Trump brought to mind Thomas Hobbes’ quote, Hell is truth seen too late,” (although Hobbes would have likely supported a Trump administration following his beliefs in Leviathan where he argues in favor of a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign.)  Yet my neighbor’s admission was hollow and I asked myself how someone could have believed that Trump would make a good, competent, and just leader of this country after having listened to his campaign rants; his early morning Tweets; his out-and-out lies; his misogynic utterances?  How could anyone trust him when he refused to show his tax returns and openly thumbed his nose at our Constitution?  How could he have accepted someone who gets his advice from Steve Bannon?  And that was BEFORE Russia was implicated as his co-sponsor.

It appears this change of heart is based more on self-serving as opposed to philanthropic issues:  ‘Oops…II may not be able to afford my healthcare anymore!’  ‘Uh oh…what about my federal disability check?’  ‘Hey, wait a minute…you’re going to close the waste water treatment plant where my daughter works?’   ‘Okay…I agree you need to eliminate immigrants taking our jobs…but, Golly…will that raise the price of tomatoes?  Will my grocery bill go up?’  ‘And I’m just not too keen on a nuclear war, even a “limited” one and it never occurred to me you were REALLY going to do all those things.’  ‘And BTW, does it really cost taxpayers 3 million every time you go to Mar Lago (5 times in the past 6 weeks)?’  ‘And to keep Melania and Barron in New York costs us $300 million a year?  That’d sure help fix a lot of infrastructure.’  ‘Wow!  I guess I just wasn’t listening close enough.’