Over the years we’ve had dogs – 3 golden retrievers & a hybrid border collie- we’ve been going to our dog park and sit at the far end. During the hot summers, that area has the best shade and a breeze. During the winter, we sometimes move the benches into the part of the area with the best and warmest sunlight.
The group has varied. People have moved elsewhere, seasonal friends come for 5 or 6 months then gone back north in the spring. But for the most part, since trump’s first term in office, this group of dog owners often talks politics. No one likes trump or his administration this time around or the first time. When a trumpie joins the group because they figure we’re just dog people, they quickly leave when the discussions turn political.
We discuss, we speculate, we mourn what is happening to democracy. We talk about moving to Costa Rica. One day we speculated that trump might have been a totally different person if he’d had a dog as a kid or a teen or as an adult. Shortly afterward, I ran across an article that covered this very topic – trump’s hatred of dogs. It was in The Irish Star.
Trump is the first president since McKinley to not have a dog in the White House and joins presidents James K Polk and Andrew Johnson who didn’t have dogs, either. According to his ex-wife, Ivana writing in her memoir Raising Trump, the man hates dogs. And maybe that says a whole lot about why he appointed Kristi Noem – who bragged about shooting her puppy – as secretary of Homeland Security.In fact, he seems to have surrounded himself with people who are as cruel and inhumane as he is.
That’s not to say that all dog owners are kind, humane people. They aren’t. Just visit you local animal shelter and listen to some of the stories about why dogs are in the shelter. But trump, orange monster that he is now, might have not been so extremely repulsive if he’d liked dogs and had been loved by one.
Then again, maybe a dog’s love would not have made a difference in who trump is, a human being born from within the darkest part of the human psyche.
