Imagine your best friend: a regular guy with a wife, a few kids, and a steady job. You've known him for years; you love him as a brother; you thank God everyday that he's in your life.
But let's say he comes to you one day and says he's going to get a tattoo. Not just any tattoo, but a large one on his face cheeks. Yogi Bear dunking a basketball over Shaquille O'Neal. He's wanted to do this for a long time, and he thinks it's a great idea.
Of course, as a friend you try and talk him out of this crazy idea. How can this look good? Is this really how you want to present yourself? Are you mentally ill? But your friend is adamant. He's gonna get this tattoo, and if it costs him your friendship, that's your problem. He knows who he is, a Yogi-Bear-lovin' hoops fan. Nobody can stop him.
He gets the tattoo...and for awhile you still love your friend. You have gone though enough stuff together that you won't give him up that easily. But everytime you look at him you see this tattoo...and it really is the very worst thing you've seen, something you can't unsee. It's not just the idea of a tattoo, but that he chose the worst tattoo artist in the county to get it. The characters are all wrong, the placement is off-center, and there's not a soul out there who would think that this was done while somebody was sober. He continually defends the tattoo, of course...if people don't like it, well they are just stupid. They have been brainwashed by the anti-tattoo lobby. Only he knows the real value of this art.
Slowly but surely, over time, you stop hanging out with your friend. You will always love him, but your respect for him has suffered immensely. You longingly wait for the day where he comes to you and recognizes that the tattoo was a stupid idea, can you help him find a plastic surgeon to remove it? But that day never comes. And you continue to drift apart. It's hard to respect somebody that delusional.
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Over the past decade I have had a lot of people in my life who have their own tattoo: the imprinting of Donald Trump on their hearts. No matter how terrible an idea it is, no matter how badly executed it has been done, they defend their devotion to him with their very being. Even as you bring up his incompetence, his venality, his corruption, and even his immoral depravity, all things that are so obvious that anybody should be able to see them, it's never Trump's fault. It's Obama's fault. It's Democrats. It's the mainstream media. It's Hunter Biden's laptop. It's Hilary's emails.
Rather than admit the ridiculous nature of the Trump tattoo, they flaunt it and celebrate himwith their red hats, theirs cheap (and quickly dissolved) flags, their Facebook memes, their devotion to a MAGA echo chamber that always points fingers in another direction. And so they learn to hate windmills, hard-working immigrants, random members of Congress that their lord and savior has decided are the enemy. There's nothing real about most (if not all) of his grudges, but this doesn't matter...the Trump Tattoo tells them what to think.
I will continue to love these people as I slowly and depressingly wait for them to wake up from whatever zombie virus they are under. But I can't really keep respecting them. When they speak, even as it's not about Trump, I look at them and all I can see is that terrible tattoo on their face.