Welcome To The Cult Of Trump
Well here we are! As of this
column’s posting date we are a little over one week into the presidency of
Donald J. Trump and the world has not been blown to pieces... yet.
Last year I said that I would give our new president a chance to prove
his critics wrong and I urged others to do the same. I wasn’t suggesting that we forgive him for
his past antics. I wasn’t saying that we
should forget what he said on the campaign trail. I was saying that we all should give him one
chance, just one, to do the right thing.
To prove that he really could be the president that we really need.
Yes, it’s a naïve dream that somehow a mystical transformation would
occur between Election Day and Inauguration Day with the person that won. But it does follow into the myth that we are
told about the people running for office; that politics is a win-at-all-costs blood-sport
and that the caricature that we see on the campaign trail is not an honest
indication of the real person that gets elected and inhabits that office. We saw that eight years ago when the “hope
and change” Obama that gave us Obamamania became the “jobless recovery” Obama
that let the rich criminals buy their way out of prison and stick us with a
health reform program that still found ways to screw us over.
We were hoping that the reverse would happen with Trump, that the
orange-skinned-wacky-man would be the leader he promised to be after he won the
election.
Unfortunately, between Election Day and Inauguration Day, Mister Trump
has put that “one chance” to the test even before he put his little hand on the
borrowed bible. It was very hard for someone
like me to tell others to give him that chance when he continued to hold
pissing contests with people on Twitter.
I know we’re used to incoming world leaders being stoic and noble,
accepting victory with grace and humility.
Not rubbing it into the wounds of others who still have a hard time
digesting the loss. That kind of antic
is not how you unite people. That’s how
you aggravate and agitate and divide them.
But I suppose that is to be expected.
We have all been immersed in a political death-cult for a while now, and,
like any cult, it feeds off conflict and paranoia and divisiveness. As the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini
strongly believed and incorporated into his principles of fascism, a nation is
defined by its wars. So too has been not
only the man that is in the White House today, but also the people that follow
him, the party that supports him, and also the belligerent masses that voted
for him. It is the very polarization
that I saw creeping in way back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that has
led us to where we are today. They live
by polarization and confrontation and agitation. They know nothing else.
And now, here we are just one week-plus into Trump’s reign, and I cannot
say the word “Administration” when it comes to the man. I had hoped that I would after eight years of
Barack Obama’s failure and after eight years of George W. Bush’s neo-Roman
Imperium and eight years of Bill Clinton’s Regime. I really wanted to refer to a president’s
tenure in the White House as an “Administration” after so many years of not being
able to say it honestly and truthfully.
That’s why I try to give each incoming president since the end of the
Clinton Regime that one chance to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s three-ring White House clown act didn’t
even make it through twenty-four hours in charge without pissing away that one
chance.
When it came to the size of the Inauguration Day crowd in the Washington
Mall, the
media pointed out that the attending crowds were fewer than those that
showed up for President Obama’s first inauguration eight years earlier. Two
photographs taken from the same vantage point atop the Washington Monument
shows this. The day after his
inauguration, President Trump declared that the media was somehow lying about
those photos, and, not long afterward, the brand-new White House Press
Secretary, Sean Spicer, showed his gross incompetence by attacking the very
media assembled in front of him and pompously declared that Trump’s
inauguration was the largest assembled in person and online “period”.
Twenty-four hours.
That’s how long Donald John Trump was able to piss away my optimism for
his presidency.
It took Barack Obama six months before I dubbed his tenure as the “Obama
Fail”.
It took George W Bush four years - four years – before I dubbed his tenure
as the “Bush Imperium”, and that was taking 9/11 into account.
Donald Trump and his lackeys pissed away their one chance in not even twenty-four
hours.
Now there were a few ways the Trump gang could have walked back their
asinine declaration. They could have
said that it was just from the president’s perspective, and that it’s hard to
look beyond the big white tower in the middle of the Mall that blocked much of
the view. They could have said that they
meant the numbers of potential viewers online and through the various
international media outlets. They could
have said those white spaces in the Mall as seen from the Washington Monument
were tarps because it was raining that day.
But, no, Il Trumpe’s declaration stands, and to make matters worse, we
actually have Kellyanne Conway telling the media that Hack Spicer wasn’t
“lying”; he
was giving “alternative facts”.
“Alternative facts”. Because we supposedly
can’t call people “liars” anymore.
Except when Il Trumpe refers to the Senator from Texas as “Lyin Ted
Cruz”. Or says that Hillary Clinton lies
and lies, and the Democrats lie and lie, and that liberals lie and lie, and
that the media does nothing but lie. But
Trump and his people and the GOP cannot ever “lie”… they can only give
“alternative facts”.
And even before the term “alternative facts” was invented by the
three-ring White House Circus, we have editorial staff of the Wall Street
Journal declaring
that they will no longer accuse people in office of “lying”. Because lying involves intent and supposedly
you can’t accuse people if lying if they don’t know that they’re lying. And this was before Trump even put his hand
on Abraham Lincolns bible and desecrated Lincoln’s memory. I should point out that the Wall Street
Journal is owned by the same News Corporation that owns Fox News, which helped
Trump get into the White House, so no big surprise there.
It’s scary when you have read the works of George Orwell, with all of the
references of “doublespeak” and “thoughtcrime”, and then have those things
being carried out right in front of the world.
It’s no wonder why his books are
now soaring in popularity again.
And I haven’t even gotten to the other things that happened this past
week! I haven’t even mentioned the
infamous wall that Il Trumpe promised that we would never have to pay for…
until he got into office and now we are going to be paying for it now and, at a
later point, somehow Mexico will compensate us for it. Boy did we get Trumped on that!
I haven’t gotten into his gross religious bigotry by giving preference to
Christian refugees over Muslim ones and then putting in a blanket ban on all
Muslims coming in from certain countries, including those that were previously
allowed in. The carnage just yesterday over
the airlines and airports trying to enforce that blanket decree should give
anyone pause over what kind of person we’ve elected.
And the insane part about this is that he believes that what he is doing
is not only right, but it’s the greatest thing that could ever happen in human
history. And how does he know this? Because he’s
regurgitating polls conducted by the biased Fox News – the very Fox News
media outlet that helped propel him into office by giving him trillions in free
publicity – and those polls claim that “the people” love him and support him.
I haven’t gotten into his picks for his cabinet, which look more and more
like an exercise in how not to govern.
We have a nominee for Education Secretary whose qualifications are almost
out of a TV commercial with someone saying they can perform brain surgery
because they stayed at a brand-name motel.
We have a nominee for Labor Secretary whose experience is that he is the
CEO of a fast food burger franchise. We
have a Treasury Secretary nominee that came from Goldman Sachs. Remember the last Treasury Secretary from
Goldman Sachs? Hank “Too Big To Fail”
Paulson! And how about the Department of
Energy being led by failed presidential wannabe Rick Perry? This is the same Texas Governor that previously
wanted to eliminate that very department, when he could remember what that
department was, and who also believes that rain comes from Christians praying
really, really, hard! No, I
am not making that up.
Then there is Trump’s continued assertion that he was the victim of
“voter fraud”, even though he won the election.
Most people would simply take the win as that, but not for Donald J.
Trump. No, he demands that the public
accept his delusion that he didn’t just win, but that he won by such an
overwhelming majority that nobody would ever question his legitimacy. While his Trumpets were pretending to be
history teachers and bringing up the number of times presidents were elected by
the electoral college but lost the popular vote, Il Trumpe is
demanding a full investigation of the very election he won to find those
mythical “two-to-three million” – now “three-to-five million” – illegal voters
that supposedly only voted for Hillary Clinton.
Movie buffs should remember this kind of antic. It’s almost straight out of the 1954 motion
picture “The Caine Mutiny”,
with Humphrey Bogart as fragile Lieutenant Commander “Old Yellow Stain” Queeg
and his search for missing strawberries and a duplicate key that did not exist. Only it took a while before Queeg’s crazy
began to surface, and Trump’s crazy was showing even before he took office.
Oh, and I should point out that Trump’s pick for Attorney General has
a real “winner” of a history finding voter fraud that did not exist. I guess in Trump’s world, guys like “Yellow
Stain” Queeg would be the Secretary of the Navy.
Let’s get brutally honest here… the whole world, not just America, is in
the shadow of the Cult of Trump. Because
that is the only way to describe his kind of leadership. It’s not an administration that earns
respect, but one of a cult that expects and demands praise and compliance.
I’ve said before that the man in the White House is a narcissist. I don’t make that claim lightly. And that’s not to say that we haven’t had a
narcissist in the White House before.
I’m sure history will pull up a few names like Teddy Roosevelt or
Richard Nixon. But previous presidents
have had the benefit of staff members and cabinet members serving as a buffer
from their more dangerous sides. Trump
has direct access to the masses through Twitter to say whatever he wants,
unfiltered, no matter the consequence.
That may be okay as a private citizen, but as president, he speaks on
behalf of the United States. A 4am
Twitter-tantrum, the kind that Trump is infamous for, could very well spark a
nuclear war depending on who pisses him off.
But what makes this Cult of Trump truly dangerous is not just the man at
the top of it. It’s not even the people
that he’s chosen to serve as his myrmidons and soothsayers and
propagandists. It’s the members of the
GOP, who originally vowed to keep Trump in check but
are now serving as toadies and lackeys, betraying their own words and
beliefs. But even more than those
people, the truly dangerous element in this Cult of Trump are the masses that
voted for him and who are now mindlessly supporting him.
And that’s where the real danger lies to freedom, because now we’re not
talking about the people on Pennsylvania Avenue and K-Street and C-Street in
the District of Columbia. We’re not
talking about faceless lobbyists and think tank “experts” and career
politicians. We’re not even talking
about state legislators and state-level lobbyists. Now we’re talking about our own neighbors and
co-workers. The people that we see on a
daily basis. People that we talk with
and work with that treat Trump as a great messiah who can do no wrong and say
only what they themselves believe as gospel.
These are the people that I’ve been seeing and hearing all the way back
to the late 1980’s. The ones that used
to be written off as a few kooks and crazies.
The ones that made talk radio the influence that it is today. The ones that made Fox News the influence
that it is. The ones eager to push Bush
Junior’s “War of Terror” into country-after-country without end. The ones that bought into every manufactured
lie about Barack Obama for eight years, even made up a few about him, and are
now telling us the orange-skinned-wacky-man they religiously support should be
obeyed without question.
These are the people that put Trump in the White House. And now that he’s there, they’re operating on
the belief that they can do anything they want, just like him. A community center that gives aid to refugees
is
threatened. A mosque in Texas is
burned to the ground. One
Trump supporter disrupts an air flight demanding to know who doesn’t
support his personal messiah. Another physically
attacks an airline employee at JFK Airport for no reason other than she was
wearing a hijab. A whole
town in Montana was being threatened by the “alt-right” community!
We’ve seen this before, people.
Not just in Germany or Italy, but also here in America. Fascism and their bullying tactics know no
bounds or decency. America is shamed by
these kinds of people, and the insane part about it is that they are so wrapped
up in their own cultish devotion that they will never see what they are really
doing, never mind own up to it.
The only thing I can tell these Trumpets is that they better pray that
the atheists are right about the afterlife, because, if not, they will never
enjoy the kind of “reward” they see themselves getting when they die. Even the Old Testament talks of “the chosen”
suffering for forty years in the desert for their sins of hubris, and that’s
being lucky. And, news flash, Trumpets:
you’re not even close to being “the chosen”.
For the rest of us, we have no choice but to put up with the Cult of
Trump until those in power decide they’ve had enough of the self-appointed
political messiah of the masses. That’s
not to say we need to be silent or compliant.
The January 21st Women’s March in Washington and around the
world was a good start. We have all spent
eight years putting up with the GOP and their death-cult games. Eight years of obstructionism and insurrection
and shutdown threats and fake birth certificates. Eight years of being told “no” and “hell no”
and “drop dead”. It’s long time they get
back exactly what they’ve been dishing out.
The Cult of Trump is really not Trump’s creation. Like a few other things that he takes credit for,
he simply affixed his name to the death-cult mentality that as always been
there. Most of us can only hope that
there will still be a country left when this cult is finally out of power so we
can clean up their messes.
