I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around this.

I know so many good people — fine folks — men and women who would give you the proverbial shirt off their proverbial backs who cheerfully support the candidacy of a man who is actively fomenting violence against a group of people in a small Ohio town.

These are people I know. I went to school with them. I know them to be kind, loving people who would lend you a helping hand without waiting to be asked. For many of them (there are exceptions), an individual’s race, religion, sexual orientation would not stop them from being there to give aid where aid was needed.

Yet they give their wholehearted support to a man who gleefully lies about Haitians stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

The city’s mayor says it’s a lie. The city manager says it isn’t happening. The city police department has debunked the story.

But Trump says it is so. Therefore, to these people… these good and decent people I’ve known for years… it IS so.

The city gets bomb threats. The schools are closed because of the fear being spread by Trump and the good people who support him, these decades-long friends of mine.

People are going to get hurt. People are going to be killed.

But, apparently, that doesn’t matter to these gentle and decent people I went to school with, some of whom I went to church with.

Trump said it. Therefore, it must be true.

And you can’t tell them they’re supporting a decompensating, cognitively-deteriorating madman who employs the same tactics against immigrants that another dictator used against Jews in 1930s Germany.

Is it because they are nostalgic for an economy they have been bamboozled into believing was ever so much better than it is today? You can show them facts and figures that show that — in almost every area — things are even better now than when Trump left office. They make excuses for the fact that Trump and his supporters tried — almost successfully — to overturn the results of a fair and free election in 2020. And never mind the fact that he is awaiting sentencing for 34 felony convictions.

As a friend of mine wrote in a Facebook post, “I’m voting for the felon.”

How does one explain that to one’s children?

When the inevitable happens and some deranged MAGA supporter blows up a school or mows down dozens of innocent lives with an assault rifle to “stop those terrible people from eating people’s doggies and kitties”, how does one square that against the moral standards most of us have been raised to embrace?

Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler got the German economy up and running after the Depression.

What are we willing to sacrifice in our own souls to pay 20 cents less for a loaf of bread?

How much blood are we willing to splash onto the Altar of Trumpism?