I shared the post above recently on Facebook as but one example of just how low we have set the bar in our expectations of what we expect from those in leadership positions. As I said in the post (and many times in the comments as well), this was never any endorsement of Christie or of anyone else who Trump has targeted with similar personal and petty attacks.
I invite anyone to look through the comments under that post and then make the argument that we shouldn't be doing better than this as a nation. This goes far beyond any criticism of Trump. This is a criticism of US and what it is that we have become. My plea isn't for people to abandon Trump. My plea is for US to become better people. I fear we are becoming far worse than we once were and that we have lowered ourselves. Even more than that, I fear that many like it down in the mud and revel in it being so acceptable now to wallow in the nastiness.
As many have pointed out in the comments, it is by no means just Trump who engages in mudslinging in politics. But Trump is a leading candidate and many of the defenses of this kind of behavior from Trump are akin to the excuses of children who try to justify their own bad behavior by pointing a finger and claiming, "He started it!" Lighten up, they say. It's fun. It's funny. If the jabs (the insults, I mean--not the pharmaceutical jabs that Trump claims to be "the father of") were more substantive and less petty, perhaps I would agree. And if it weren't more important now than ever before that we choose wisely who it is that we champion to preside over our nation (the championing of candidates is all that will matter, for your votes surely will not), then perhaps I'd be less critical of Trump.
I think that if we were serious about abandoning the circuses of this kind of entertainment from politics and were sincere in getting down to the business of actually making meaningful change, we would be calling upon our politicians to speak more like J6 political prisoner Jeremy Brown, for Brown is a man who exemplifies what we should set as the role model among our leaders. The recording of Jeremy in the link below was from a call that he made from the prison that he now resides in, placed there at the hands of our own government.