DUPED

                            
Recently millions of you felt your guts twist. 

You realized you’d been duped. Catching on when being lied to can rock your world. 

It’s embarrassing. More than once in my life I’ve felt like a fool after being hoodwinked by a convincing liar. 

Donald Trump’s latest stunt, to continue his run for the presidency even after being indicted for 91 felonies, including inciting an insurrection, has a lot of you faithful no matter what believers, wondering if you’ve been duped?

You admired his take charge chutzpah for a time. But expecting you to support not only his innocence of the insurrection crime, but of the theft and sharing of Top Secret Classified documents, and decades of tax fraud, among many others, is, let’s face it, a lot to ask. 

Our country has been torn apart by the whopper he repeated ad nauseum, that he won the election despite losing by 3 million votes.

It was a lie. 

But hey, haven’t we all fallen prey to convincing liars before?  

How does that happen? 

For the most part, people are trusting. Giving someone the benefit of a doubt, I suspect, is in our genes. When confronted with a betrayal, it’s hard to accept your trust in them has been abused. 

Any of you who fell under Donald Trump’s spell can take some solace that this was no ordinary duping you’ve suffered. 

Our country elected as our President of the United States, The Crown Prince of Whoppers, The King Poo-Bah of Deceit, A Professional Flim-Flam Man, The Wizard of Alternative Facts, A Master Slinger of B.S., and, well, you get the idea. 

Donald Trump’s lies are delivered with a skill he’s honed with precision over a lifetime. By all accounts, just while in office he made over 35,000 false statements. Most egregiously he claimed he hadn’t lost the election. It was rigged he repeated over and over. 

His ‘Art of the Lie’ makes Pinocchio look like a rank amateur. 

Lots of other folks are queasy too, so don’t feel bad that it took this long to figure him out. Better late than never. 

Actually, you’ve got bragging rights. 

Someday, after he’s gone down in infamy, your grandchildren might ask you about him and who his followers were that got so duped by that con artist. 

And you can say, “Kids, I, was one of them. Then, when I finally caught on that I was being used, it was a terrible feeling, but I had to cut myself some slack. 

Because I, along with many, got duped by the most outrageous liar this country has EVER seen.”