Below is only a part of our conversation. There is much more to hear in the full audio. Note that the sound gets a bit rough at 6:30 when a large group of teenagers surround us at the restaurant. We head to Mark’s office, and the audio gets much better at around 8:30.
Mark Fury is a criminal defense attorney and the former mayor of Plainfield, New Jersey, serving for a single term during the latter half of the 1990s. After losing his reelection, Mark left politics for 20 years. The drama and urgency of this election is what brought him back. We met at the November monthly meeting for Our Revolution: South Jersey.
Mark voted for Hillary Clinton during the democratic primaries, “because I know her friends” and, “having been the victim of the Democratic Party myself, I didn’t think [Bernie Sanders] could win,” adding that the “Democratic Party is sometimes hard on newcomers.”
[Hillary] is a flawed candidate, but [Trump] is a walking disaster.” He is “clearly unqualified, clearly unprepared, two faced, inconsistent, outright lies, and has fairly dangerous policies–if he believes what he says.
I never thought much of Hillary, but at least I know who her friends are… As a human being, I would pick Bernie over Hillary. The choice that I made was strictly based on the political likelihoods. That’s why I sit here with the degree of outrage [I have] because maybe I should have looked at it differently… [Things] were wired to defeat [Bernie]. They cheated him. There’s no doubt about that… In the five months of posts in conversations [that I have had on Facebook], I don’t think I’ve said ten words positive about Hillary. It’s just too much of a battle… She was a really hard candidate to advocate for. Her negatives were huge…
Turning to Trump:
I have trouble convincing [A friend who supports Trump] person that the world is not flat… Half the conversation [is spent] debunking plainly false things… It is extremely difficult to win an argument on reason when the people you’re talking to are unfamiliar with reason.
Before this election, Mark speculated that around 25% of the electorate was this way. Now he worries it is much higher.
What do I do with the person who doesn’t believe evolution is a real science? What do I do with the person who doesn’t believe global warming is a real problem? … They’re unreasonable… I’m coming up on 60 years old… I don’t have the same time or patience for what is patently false… That is not a reasonable person. That’s not somebody you can talk with…
Over the past 25 years, the number of people who have turned their minds off to the progressive agenda has grown. That’s the issue I’m troubled by. And right now, those people are being appealed to buy [some] very dark forces. I don’t think Donald Trump has a master plan to wipe Jews or blacks or gays or anybody else out of America…but unfortunately he has surrounded himself with people [who might].
Yet here we are, at the beginning of at least four years where a significant amount of the population–not to mention the president himself–that has these beliefs, has a much larger voice. So what do we do? Does Mark worry, as an African-American, that he will be especially affected by a Trump presidency?
Me as an American will be affected. The only way my African-American status plays in, is on the daily, face-to-face interactions with human beings. I’ve been negotiating that field my entire life. The day after the election, the week after the election, when I would go in my normal haunts and I would see white Anglo-Saxon males, they greeted me the same way they did before the election. Maybe a little bit more generously. Almost like they were saying, “Well, I know you can tell that I voted for Trump, but I’m not a racist.” I’m like, yeah, we’re cool. We can still sit down and have a beer, right? The race issue isn’t going to get any worse. The civil liberties, social justice, educational policies, urban policies, economic policies. That’s the stuff that’s going to get worse.
Donald Trump is the P.T. Barnum of his time. He is the best salesman of his generation. He had 14 years to practice how to talk to the American population on television. And for that 14 years he sold himself as the ultimate executive… and now he is taking that show to the White House… this is not a man who wants to be president. It’s a step down in lifestyle for him. What does he get out of it? Except to grind the news of those folks so he doesn’t think gave him his proper respect. We have an annoyed bully in the White House.
Proud Bernie Sanders Democrat 