Richard Bausch Speaks Out
Exclusive Interview by Karen Beishuizen
Richard is 78 and lives in California. He is a novelist and story writer.
KB: Why do you dislike or even hate Trump?
I loathe what he stands for—the purest kind of sick power lust. I hate his lies and his hypocrisy and his dripping, obvious contempt for the people he is supposed to be trying to help and the total lack of regard for the constitution he once took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend. He is a criminal.
KB: How do you view his supporters?
I have come to see that there are really only two categories of supporters: the greedy and the ignorant, both groups infected with perhaps the central unifying thing among them: conscious or unconscious racism. People in this country almost never vote from reason; they vote from feelings, and the two things chief among those feelings for all his supporters is xenophobia and racism. I naively thought when Barack Obama was elected that we had at last got beyond Jim Crow and the shameful past of slavery—but that election only opened the scabrous, thin membrane that had grown over the abscess, the still suppurating sore of our national original sin. And with the Maga crowd and the help of the Russian trolls over the net, it is once more a gaping maw of blood, hatred sorrow.
KB: Why should Trump never be President again?
Because he tried to destroy the constitution to remain in the presidency and created—and sat through—the insurrection that ensued, and then made a speech thanking the mob (“You’re very special”)—which had injured people and caused several deaths). He is, as his first Secretary of State remarked, “A moron”—who suggested injecting insecticide into Covid patients, or ‘Shining a bright light inside the body’ to stop its spread. He is a pathologically vain, cruel and ignorant sociopath, and an absolute horror of a human being who shouldn’t have been allowed near the presidency in the first place.
KB: Why is America better off without Trump?
The answers above, I think, cover this.
KB: Why should people vote for Joe Biden?
Because he’s none of the above; he’s sane, and smart. And effective. And he has vision.
KB: Why are you a Democrat and how do you view the Republican Party?
I’m a Democrat because these days it’s the only sane party. I have always been a Democrat: they have better ideas–as Bill Clinton put it once, “We keep stumbling in the right direction.” Today, I view the Republican Party as utterly bankrupt morally, full of people who would sell the country to anyone for their own gain, and who still –STILL–in their cowardly fashion cow-tow to this preening bully, this weird simulacrum of Mussolini, this infantile megalomaniac who speaks in dog-whistles and sometimes in outright ranting to the worst elements in the troubled soul of this sadly drifting country. The country I love enough to say this to.
In 2016, 500 writers signed an open letter to stop Donald Trump. You were one of them. Why did you sign that letter? Would you do it again this year to stop him?
I could see what a racist vainglorious unfit ass he is. And nobody seems to be willing to point out the fact that he was claiming ‘rigged election’ if Hilary Clinton won THEN.
It’s so completely appalling.
Yes, I would sign it again.
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