Understanding
the Cult of Trump
I think a lot of people will tell you that the worst of the Star Wars
movies was Episode 3, “Revenge of the Sith”.
The one thing that would make the repulsive Jar-Jar Binks forgettable is
the transformation of Anakin Skywalker from potential hero into a whiny little
bitch just so they can then turn him into Darth Vader.
George Lucas took the most iconic badass villain of all time, his own
creation, and turned him into a whiny little bitch. And now whenever we see Darth Vader, we know
that under that black helmet and noisy respirator is nothing more than a whiny
little bitch.
But during that whiny little bitch period, there are a couple of scenes
that need to be pointed out. The first
is when Anakin tries to convince Padme, the woman that he loves and the mother
of their unborn children, that he can somehow “control” Emperor Palpetine and
that he can even overthrow him. Keep in
mind that Palpetine is Anakin’s mentor and the great mastermind that was
responsible not only for the grand takeover, but even responsible in an
indirect way for Anakin’s very birth. So
to say that Anakin can somehow overthrow Palpetine is delusional
arrogance. This is compounded when he
boasts to his one-time friend, Obi-Wan Kenobi, that he has brought peace, freedom,
justice, and security to “his” new empire.
Not Palpetine’s empire... “his”.
It’s this kind of blind arrogance that makes me think about the GOP
leaders during our national occupation of the Cult of Donald Trump. People keep looking at what President Trump
is doing and a lot of them are asking why the GOP leadership is tolerating
this. Why is Trump treating the GOP
leadership like employees of his failed businesses? Worse yet, why aren’t they correcting him and
reminding him that they were elected by the same voters that put him in the
White House?
And every time I hear that, I think back to those two scenes from “Revenge
of the Sith”, and of that whiny little bitch played by Hayden Christensen
who boasted that he could somehow keep his own master in check. No, the GOP leadership can’t remove Trump,
even if they wanted to. Even if they had
a solid, constitutional impeachment case against him, they cannot bring
themselves to do it. It’s not in their
nature.
Of course, President Donald Trump is nothing like the fictional Emperor
Palpetine. Palpetine was a master
manipulator who worked in the shadows to get himself in power. Donald Trump has been and still is a
self-promoting narcissistic clown act who can’t help but hog the limelight. The only thing that works in the shadows with
Trump is his gold toilet at Mar-a-Largo.
And Trump has something on his side that Palpetine never did... a cult
that he can unleash just as merciless as any clone army.
That brings me to something that bothers me as well... and that is the
continual call from those in the media to ask what will it take for Trump
supporters to somehow change their minds six months into this “grand experiment”. Oh they don’t like what Trump has been doing
with his Twitter-tantrums and his insane appointments and his embarrassing comments,
but they still won’t give up on him.
They can get screwed over with their healthcare, they can lose those
jobs that Trump promised to either “save” or “bring back”, they can watch as
the GOP takes money out of their pockets and hands it to the millionaires and
billionaires, and they will still support Trump and the GOP to the bitter end.
And that blows the minds of the liberals and their friends in the
media. It drives them insane! How? How
can that be? How can otherwise rational
people support someone who does everything in their power to screw them over
and betray everything they claim to support?
Well the answer to that is simple: it’s not rational. That’s what happens when you find yourself
dealing with a cult.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the secret behind Trump’s support is
that a good percentage of them have essentially been conditioned that way like followers in a cult.
Now, to be fair, we’re not talking about every single Trumpet. I’m sure there are some that just like the personality. Trump certainly knows how to talk his way
into getting what he wants and to talk his way out of trouble. Some people find this appealing. Certainly his numerous wives do, or at least
did at some point.
And Trump didn’t create this cult himself! That also needs to be pointed out. The conditioning has been going on for quite
some time now; long before Trump started even teasing a run for the White
House. The conditioning was for the
benefit of the GOP hierarchy, with messages coming in from conservative talk
radio in the late 1980’s, with the rise of Fox News in the late 90’s, with the
use of email chains in the early 2000’s, and with the explosion of social media
in the past decade. And then you add to
it the plethora of
books and so-called “documentaries” that only “the privileged” would have
access to. Simple messages and ideas of
obedience, conformity, tradition, so-called “heritage”, the talk of being “under
attack” from an “insert-the-enemy-here”, and the rejection of compromise. Everything that would define a
fascist state were being sold as “American values”, and lapped up by those
that appealed to them.
It didn’t really matter who would inherit this cult-like group just as
long as the GOP benefited from the result.
It could be anyone in the Oval Office as long as it was under GOP
control. It could have been Senator John
McCain or it could have been Mitt Romney if they didn’t lose to Barack Obama. Any one of those sixteen-or-so wannabe
contenders for the GOP nomination last year could have inherited that following
and nobody would have been concerned about it.
The only difference is that this time around, the following went to a manipulative
narcissist who knows how to use it to his advantage.
Now I know at some point someone will play the false equivalent card and
claim that liberals have some sort of cult following all their own, but I’ve
been in this game for over two decades now, and I know from experience that the
liberals don’t have anything remotely like that. That’s why they’re stymied by the GOP’s cult
following.
If an ethic group doesn’t like what the so-called “liberal champion” is
supporting, or if they feel short-changed by that person, they don’t “primary”
that person out; they just stop voting.
The elderly used to be fixated on that “third rail” subject of Social
Security and Medicare, but too many of them have been co-opted by the GOP’s
cult conditioning to worry about it now.
And you can’t exactly challenge established norms and still preach
religious conformity. In other words,
the liberals lack the wherewithal to even consider anything resembling a cult
program, never mind implement one.
So believe me when I say that the cult-conditioning that the GOP has
performed over the past few decades is uniquely theirs. Ironic when you consider that one of the
tenants of GOP conditioning is that there is some sort of “liberal
indoctrination program” to be fearful of.
But, again, that’s how both fascists and a cult operate. They create an enemy and they project their
own failings onto that enemy.
What the people who are opposed to Trump and his cult need to understand
is that you will never appeal to either the GOP hierarchy or their
indoctrinated masses to abandon their support of him. I don’t care what he does or says, they will
never give him up. Ever. For the hierarchy, it’s a matter of power,
and for the followers it’s a matter of conditioning. They would rather cut off their arms with a
plastic knife than to give up Trump. So
they can’t be counted on to either keep Trump in check or to reject him. It will never happen.
The people opposing Trump should stop trying to win over the
35-or-so-percent that will support Trump no matter what. Instead, they need to rally the
65-or-so-percent to some kind of common ground and a course of action that will
keep Trump in check and counter the self-righteous indignation of the
Trumpets. America may resemble more of a
fascistic plutocracy in recent years, but the mechanisms of a democratic
republic are still there, and if we don’t want to see America go the way of the
Republic in the fictional world of “Star Wars”, then we need to make sure those
mechanism are used now before it becomes irrelevant. After all, this is why those mechanisms were
created in the first place.
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