President Donald Trump has stirred up a hornet’s nest, as he usually does, with some of the most disparaging comments and name-calling, as he did recently with his reportedly having called U.S. war dead “losers” and “suckers,” but his supporters in rural America probably don’t know about his view of small farms and a hard-scrabble life.

His comments about veterans who lost their lives in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War were reported recently in The Atlantic magazine and he immediately went on the offense, claiming that he never said such things and that he has done more for veterans and the military than any other president in the history of the United States. Or some such nonsense as that. He did not have many come to his defense, including the high brass who were part of his administration...until they crossed him or tried to tell him something that he didn’t want to hear.

Everyone remembers what he said about U.S. Senator John McCain, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp and suffered the torture that they meted out as a matter of course. Trump said McCain was not a hero, just because he was captured. “I like people who weren’t captured,” he announced.

What is also well-known is that he escaped having to go to Vietnam, by claiming that he had his own kind of “suffering.” He told the authorities that he had bone spurs and, therefore, could not serve in that far-off land. In that case, his character was standing there in all its nakedness for the world to see and he never has been any different. By hook or by crook, he has escaped responsibility for just about anything he has ever perpetrated. He’s dealing with the loser-sucker report in the way he usually does, by calling names, saying that The Atlantic is a failing magazine, and denying he ever said such things.

When a Fox News reporter said she had unimpeachable sources that confirmed the Atlantic reporting, Trump went ballistic and called for her firing for doing her job. It’s something he would do without blinking an eye: destroy someone’s livelihood because the person crossed him or told the truth about him. Speaking of his lies, he is somewhere above 20,000 lies or intentionally misleading bits of information since he became president. That’s 20,000 in less than four years. And, he’s asking the world to believe that he didn’t call military killed in action losers and suckers. He reportedly had asked someone about those who went to war, “What was in it for them?” Certainly, there was no money.

Recently, though, there is one battle that Trump, his money, and his organization are not going to win. He has tried to bully a nonagenarian widow in Scotland into selling her small farm to him, so it would not provide an unsightly view for the patrons of his Aberdeenshire golf club, designed for the elite of the world as a playground. He is astounded that there are some things that his money (or anyone else’s) can’t buy. Plainly, the regular folk around his playground don’t want any part of him or his golf club. In fact, the son of Molly Forbes, who lives in a modest little farmhouse, has made it a point to make their farm as unsightly as possible, just to spite Trump. Even so, their farm doesn’t seem to be much different from untold numbers of small farms across the U.S., parts of the U.S. known as “Trump Country.” These farms and rural communities are vital to Trump’s base and he lies to them about supporting them and their way of life.

However, he has described places like the Forbes’ farm as “living like pigs.” That attitude should not escape the notice of the millions of Americans who live a similar lifestyle, with a tractor or two and various machinery sitting in the barnyard, and perhaps a four-wheeler or snowmobile sitting under a cover. He despises them and holds them in utter contempt, yet they faithfully support him, as if fulfilling his wild statement before his election in 2016: “You know what else they say about my people? The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible.”

What’s “like incredible” is that he still has that unshakable base, which appears to be blind to his dangerous flaws as a human being, flaws that become potential planet-killing flaws when the power of the presidency of the U.S. is beneath his hand, which hovers just above the nuclear button. There seems to be a Jonestown-like effect, in which his “base” has drunk the Kool-Aid and is willing to follow him to their own demise and, inevitably, the demise of life on the planet (see his positions on the climate and environmental crises).

There are dozens of books about the plight of the U.S. under Trump’s presidency and about Trump, but the book by his niece, Mary Trump, explains in deep psychological terms how his father and his family made him what he is. And, there is a documentary film about his forays into Scottish politics and his attempts to do to his Scottish neighbors what he does to anyone who get in his way in the U.S. It is called, You’ve Been Trumped Too, a film built on his first film, You’ve Been Trumped, both by Anthony Baxter. Baxter had trouble getting a showing for his films, because of the power of money and how it works in both Scotland and the U.S. But the Scots recovered from their initial belief in Trump’s lies about what he was willing to pour into the Scottish economy and realized that it was never to be, that he never delivers on his promises.

The Scots’ realization was summed up by a sports writer, Rick Reilly, who has golfed with Trump and in 2019 published the book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, according to a story in the current Mother Jones magazine. According to the magazine, “Reilly says Trump ruined any chance of getting the British Open with his racist and sexist conduct. ‘Of all the people in the world that aren’t going to put up with a fool, it’s the Scots.’ They’re just such a no-nonsense people and they see him for what he is: ‘He’s a big blowhard con man who is trying to tell them what they know isn’t true.’”

Trump’s voter base, a large percentage of which is of Scottish or Scots-Irish lineage, should take notice of the no-nonsense perspective of their fore-bearers and have a real look at what the word “phony” actually means and act accordingly. There never has been such a phony and deceiver sitting in the White House as Trump.

Above all, however, his base should never forget his view of rural people, in Scotland or in the U.S., is that they “live like pigs” and that he has shown his contempt for them in so many ways. Being a child of privilege and power (he reportedly has golden toilets in his residences) and never having grown out of that childish stage of development, he only has respect for those of his class, a very small group, indeed, and can’t understand that everyone does not live in his Land of the Golden Toilets.