[This article is under construction as of Sunday 9/6/2020]

The GOP was able to allow Trump’s corruption to continue because the American people are too polarized to impeach a president. To impeach a president, you need to be able to get a majority of senators to think they will lose their job if they don’t impeach and will keep their job if they do impeach. To do that, you need to be able to convince the American people to first demand their senators demand a fair hearing with all facts and witnesses present and then you need to be able to convince the American people to pay attention to those facts and witnesses and make a decision based on those facts and witnesses. But the American people do not share the same reality.

The hard thing to deal with is the fact that Democratic voters are not nearly in the la la land that Republican voters are. How do you talk about that? How do you talk about the elephant in the fantasy room? Trump is a culmination of years of disinformation, of learning to prefer disinformation and to distrust any media that doesn’t give you the story you need. What do you do about this? There can be no shared democracy without a shared reality.

It is true that everyone has their bias and both sides have a tendency to look past the facts that impede their happy, “ah ha! we know what’s going on and what to do!” momentum. But there’s that common human failing and then there’s embracing a president with no interest in reality nor even an ability to notice it, narratives that spin his clear incompetence and corruption into amazing competence anti-corruption, and a general abandonment of facts.

I don’t know what to do here. How to help? How to bring reality to people who have decided to distrust all media that doesn’t tell them what they already believe?

It is hard to figure out what is going on and what should be done. How do you know who to trust? How can you be sure? And once uncertainty seeps in, then what is there for you but to believe your friends and your own general worldview, which has somehow gotten swept up in a political identity?

Also see this part:
The most fundamental need of human beings is to understand what is truly going on and how they should react to what is truly going on. This is a spiritual need. The longing for salvation: an aware connection with Reality, complete with insight into our place in that Reality (I say “our place” to communicate the fact that the salvation we most deeply long for leaves no one out). But then we mix that longing up with our longing for insight into what is going on in physical and mental worlds where humans spend their mortal whiles, and how we can be safe and snug and loved and held and praised in this great mundanity. The longings are legitimately interrelated; Wisdom is necessary for wisdom; and real success is at its core a spiritual success that radiates out into health thinking/feeling/living/acting. However, we get attached to our political narratives as if they were spiritual ones. And by “political” we here indicate every mental experience that is not pure delight in, gratitude for, and humility and dedication in face of the Joy That Passes Understanding.

I don’t know what to do.
I feel nauseous all the time.
Who will stop the evil?
We can’t even hear our own hearts beat, let alone remember that other people are inhabited as well, inhabited by conscious watching and feeling, and, at a little lower level, by the Light, by a kind, gentle Joy.

So what can we do?
You understand, I hope, that disbelief in the free press is a critical move in any autocrat’s playbook. If there’s no facts beyond swells of patriotic emotion tied to sound bites and myths, who can stop the King from being Right?

I don’t know what to do.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/17/kasich-cant-help-biden-win-over-republicans-but-trump-can/

Republicans and Democrats read a lot of the same news. What they do with it is a different question.

https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/04/about-one-fifth-of-democrats-and-republicans-get-political-news-in-a-kind-of-media-bubble/

https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/americans-are-divided-by-party-in-the-sources-they-turn-to-for-political-news/