There Is
No “Bottom” With Trump
You would think that the people behind the Trump Resistance Movement and
those in the media would have learned something very important by now when it comes
to the Narcissistic President Donald J. Trump.
Besides the fact that he is a narcissist, the one thing that should have
been pretty obvious when it comes to Trump and his enablers and his cult
worshipers is that there is no such a thing as “bottom”.
That was the word being uttered by a lot of people after the past week’s
horrendous Helsinki Summit between Trump and Russian strongman Vladimir
Putin. When Trump, with literally the
whole world watching, rejected his own intelligence agencies for “the word” of
Putin when it came to Russia meddling with our 2016 Presidential Farce. Worse, this came after he belittled and
sabotaged any support for our NATO allies, so he was spiteful with our allies
and then supportive of our enemies.
The backlash was spectacular, and the continual and almost scripted retort
was that Trump had gone “too far”. That
not even his allies and his sycophants and his myrmidons and his cult
supporters would ever support this! Even
Fox News, the very propaganda media that created Trump’s candidacy in the first
place, was saying they couldn’t support what Trump was saying and doing in
Helsinki. Fox News!
“Have we reached rock bottom
yet?” asked columnist SE Cupp.
And while there was a part of me that thought that it would be true, I
knew better than that. I knew that no
matter how bad it looked and how bad it was, Trump would find some way to
weasel through it, and that his cult followers would follow him no matter what.
Sure enough, that’s what happened.
Trump’s propaganda ministers at Fox News went from “we can’t explain
this” right back to “Trump is the greatest ever and if you don’t believe it then
you’re an enemy of the state” within days.
Days!
And I know this has the Trump Resistance pissed. And rightly so. This is yet another instance where Trump can
do something so outlandish that it defies explanation and he gets away with it.
And I knew that he would. I knew that
Trump would be allowed to get away with it because I remember the lessons of
history, and the warnings of a writer who died far too soon by the name of
George Orwell.
Orwell’s classic story “Nineteen Eighty-Four” told a depressing story of
a dystopian society firmly in an authoritarian stranglehold. But what makes the story even more heinous is
how complicit the masses were conditioned to blindly accept the word of the
government without question. This is
particularly true when it comes to what Orwell called “doublethink”.
In one scene, a newscaster, in the middle of his broadcast, gives the
infamous line “we have always been at war with Eastasia”
when in that same statement he earlier said that the government was “always at
war with Eurasia”. The masses watching
this don’t even think for a moment that this is wrong, and they blindly accept
the contradictory change as fact; even going so far as to violently tear down
flags and banners that supported the previous statement made just moments
earlier. That is how conditioned the
masses are in the fictional country of Oceania.
The late Jack Kirby also painted a world full of people equally in the
throws of dystopia for DC Comics. His
creation of the hellish world Apokolips, ruled by the evil tyrant god Darkseid,
is full of what he called “Hunger Dogs”.
But they were not “dogs”; rather, they were the ordinary people of the
world who had been trampled on and subjugated to work in pain, misery, and
squalor without question for so long that they have no hope for anything other
than the sweet release of death. They
have no concept of freedom at all; only of blind obedience and fidelity to their
“god”.
But we don’t need to look at books or graphic novels to see examples of
this complicity in play. History has
given us plenty of examples as well, and I don’t even have to pull up Germany
and Italy in the 1920’s and 30’s to prove my point.
Look at Iraq. Until his overthrow
and execution during the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein committed some of the most
heinous acts imaginable. And yet, the
people of Iraq loved him. They worshiped
him. Granted, a lot of that was because
he was known to squash any kind of resistance, but even when Baghdad was
liberated and his giant statues were taken down, there were plenty of elderly
citizens who cried and mourned the fall of the old guard. They may not have liked what Saddam did, but
they were conditioned to accept his rule as one appointed by god.
The cult followers of Jonestown and Waco proved how conditioned people
could be to blindly follow their “leader”, even as that leader does horrific things. And not only do they support that leader, and
justify what he does as “right” and “god-ordained”, but they’ll follow that
leader all the way to their literal deaths.
And now we see that same complicity when it comes to our own narcissistic
President.
When the infamous “Access Hollywood” recordings were made public in the
2016 campaign, there were plenty in the Trump Resistance and the “Never Trump”
crowd that thought that Trump’s own words would do him in. They thought that this was “bottom” for Trump
and his cohorts. This was his own voice
making these boasts. And yet we listened
in absolute disgust as the propagandists in talk radio and Fox News would
explain and excuse it as “locker room talk” and “boys will be boys” and the
entitled boasting of a so-called “Alpha Male”.
And the masses accepted it blindly.
When news of his affairs started getting about (not that his
infidelity was ever a secret – Hi Marla!), the same religious crowd
that stand piously in self-righteous judgement of the actions of others
announced that they would give Trump “a mulligan”. An apt reference since he plays far below
subpar. The people that were quick to
condemn Bill and Hillary Clinton over Bill’s affairs, who stand in pompous
judgement even today over gays and lesbians and transgendered people, that hate
sexual expression, would turn around and give Donald Trump “a mulligan” for his
activities and nobody questioned that.
Nobody!
Let’s not forget that Trump himself even
boasted openly that he could shoot someone in the middle
of Fifth Avenue in New York City in broad daylight and never lose a voter. That in and of itself should serve as an
indication as to how committed his cult worshipers are to him and his ideals.
So why should anyone be shocked to see Trump suck up to Vlad Putin, throw
his own intelligence community under the bus, to embrace and act like the
third-world dictators he admires, and then have his own party, his enablers,
his myrmidons, his propagandist prostitutes, and his blind cult followers go
along with it? Why should we be
surprised to see the very people that used to praise our friendship with our
allies during the Iraq War and Afghanistan War suddenly be dismissive of them
because of Ol’ Orange Stain? Why should
we be shocked to know that Trump is defecating on the American Flag while at
the same time demand that football players and everyone else be forced to stand
to the national anthem, and his gun-toting flag-waiving cult followers see
nothing wrong with any of it?
Let’s get brutally honest here… there is no such thing as “bottom” when
it comes to Donald J. Trump or his supporters.
It does not exist! At all!
We are dealing with a self-promoting narcissist who has enablers and
soothsayers and, quite literally, nobody that is able to tell him “no”. That, in and of itself, is dangerous, never
mind that this same narcissist is currently the President of the United
States. Add to that a sizeable segment
of the population that has been groomed since the 1980’s to accept the creeping
fascism of their party and to blindly support their “appointed leader” in the
same way that the Iraqis supported Saddam Hussein, and you have someone who has
literally no limits to what they can do or how far down to sink us.
This is who he is, and this is who they are!
And this is more of a condemnation of the Trump cultists than of Trump
himself, because Trump is able to do what he has been doing knowing that his
cult followers will support him no matter what.
These are the masses that claim to be “real Americans”; who wrap
themselves up in that same flag that Trump defecates with his antics; who claim
to cherish freedom and yet want to censor the media; who sing praises for law
enforcement but still crucifies the FBI; who spit on immigrants and then claim
that their
ancestors were “settlers”; and who treat our allies as
enemies and condones Trump sucking up to our enemies. They are the living
epitome of the “blackwhite” mentality of Orwell’s “doublespeak”, holding two
diametrically opposite beliefs and calling them the same.
The rest of us, including those who are not yet members of the Trump
Resistance, need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking that Trump will go
“too far” or do something so outrageous to alienate his supporters. His supporters will not abandon Trump. They would and have already abandoned their
principles, their morals, and any semblance of honor and respect to support the
self-professed “very stable genius”.
They have become more “Trumpians” than Americans.
The real question is what will it take for the rest of us to do something
about Trump and his cult followers. The
ones that sat on their fat asses in 2016 and didn’t vote for anyone. If our country is still supposedly run “by
the consent of the governed”, then what will it take for you to stop
consenting?
We know that Trump and his cohorts and supporters have no “bottom”. What about the rest of you?
No comments:
Post a Comment