 |
| By Tara Donovan (Corcoran Gallery) |
For a habitual liar, former president Donald Trump can be amazingly candid. He will, occasionally, interrupt his countless falsehoods with astounding moments of candor. Such as when he said, with spot-on accuracy, at a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa early in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
Yes, it is. Incredible. And commenting on him nonstop since June, of 2015, when he descended that escalator in the gaudy salmon glitz of Trump Tower, to pronounce immigrant Mexicans as criminals and rapists, I have yet to get my head around the missing piece that Trump provides for his supporters.
Permission, I suppose, to be as vile and perpetually injured as they obviously want to be. A TV star, descending from the Mount Olympus of gaudy wealth and tabloid celebrity, to bestow blanket permission on anyone who will pledge their unwavering loyalty, to assure lumpen red state America that they are the true victims of history, that every life that is not straight, white, Christian is an offense against them, one they can battle with all their energy, guiltless and unrepentant.
Thus his being judged Tuesday by a New York jury as having defamed and sexually molested writer E. Jean Carroll — an assault, which, in another moment of absolute honesty, Trump copped to, on tape, as doing habitually to women who stumbled into his grasp — is added to his being impeached, twice, not to forget his continued delusional denial of an American presidential election. Plus his fomenting of an insurrection against the Capitol that led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers — if you can ignore that, what is a civil case that goes against him? Toss it onto the enormous steaming pile of Trump’s previous wrongdoings.
As I’ve said many times before, once you get into the habit of ignoring reality, the specifics of the reality being ignored hardly matter. Reality itself has been discarded by millions of Americans as being a mere fraud, a practice so imbedded now in the Republican Party that Trump could vanish tomorrow — no sign of that happening, alas — and his acolytes and imitators would proceed along his blazed path.
To continue reading, click here.
Our best hope is that he dies from his crappy diet & lack of exercise. Soon!
ReplyDeleteTrump is the perfect vehicle for a right wing movement that started a little before the Goldwater years. It took advantage of the flaws in our constitution and Trump set it free.
ReplyDeleteWe have the electoral college to blame as well as the reality that it is the Senate, not the President, who decides who becomes a Supreme Court Justice.
Starting with southerners who never got over the fact that they lost, blaming their economic woes on the loss of cheap labor and spreading to hypocritical northerners who didn't want blacks in their backyards, this group is now the base of the ultra conservative right.
They don't care about the truth as long as it moves their needle in their selfish direction.
It's great that the Cowardly Liar has been officially exposed. Unfortunately his followers are still dismissive of the weight of evidence against him, giving him a pass on everything similar to the transgressions of the Clintons, real and imagined, that they have repeated ad nauseam. Even fomenting the insurrection against the will of the People was not enough the make his cohorts Woke. Had they been successful in hanging Mike Pence on the 6th, the radical horde would have cheered, but what about the elected Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy, Scales, Jordan etc.? Would they have remained silent as Trump consolidated power in the vacuum left by uncounted Electoral College votes? Or would they have seized the opportunity?
ReplyDeleteIt matters not what he is convicted of, all he has to do is write a check, and the amount will be quadrupled in a week by donations from his followers. There were 5 officers who died as a result on Jan 6, as well as that poor misguided woman. I see many people giving condolences and attending funerals when local officers are killed, and the public wants the killers (the people who caused the deaths)caught and put away forever. Yet the orange idiot gets votes and backing (like from the FOP, of which I am a member) even though his actions caused their seats. Mind boggling, frustrating and angering.
ReplyDeleteI remember an abnormal psychology class long ago where “reality testing” was cited as a test of mental state. It questioned a person’s ability to distinguish between real and unreal in order to judge how serious their psychological problems were. Is that still that used in diagnosis today? If so, has the scale shifted so that what indicated serious psychological illness 40 years ago, would not today?
ReplyDeleteA frightening thought, if he's re-elected. I didn't think it could happen the first time.
ReplyDeleteThe Biggest Loser loses again.
ReplyDeleteThe Access Hollywood tape is such a remarkable thing. It's as close to a confession to Carroll's, and a dozen other accusations, as one could reasonably hope for. Finally, he has been held to some sort of account for the behavior he described there, officially.
I always thought the Fifth Avenue quote was hyperbole. Then we had a pandemic and it became clear that, not only could Trump have shot somebody else, plenty of Americans in thrall to him were essentially willing to kill *themselves* by not getting vaccinated and behaving as if Covid was indeed the "hoax" he originally labeled it as.
"Can the illusion be shattered? Typically, only by losing." Indeed, there's the rub. He *has* lost. They have lost, repeatedly. The 2018 midterms. The 2020 election, then dozens of court cases trying to overturn it, then the Insurrection. Then, under-performing in the 2022 midterms. So, while he keeps plugging along and delusional folks continue to send him money, I refuse to "renounce hope."
I'm fully aware that many in the cult refuse to give up and are more than willing to cheat to win. But his support is not as monolithic as it once was on the right, and I think the various legal actions against him do slowly chip away at the number of people who ignore reality with regard to his unfitness for office. I could well be wrong about that, as I was about his chances when he rode down the escalator...
The 2020 election was too close for comfort. Five states flipped from 2016 but not by much. The margin in Pennsylavania (20 electoral votes) was 154k; Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) margin was 21k; Michigan (16) margin was 154K; Georgia (16) gave Biden 12k more votes than Trump; and Arizona (11) sliced it real thin with a 10k difference. Record high turnout at about 67%. The yammering yam could win again.
DeleteI agree with you that Clinton, though deeply flawed, wasn't as bad as Trump but a lot of other Americans did not. Clinton was one of the worst candidates ever. The Clinton wing of the Democratic party is one reason, in addition to some that you mention, for the loss of white working class voters.
Can you ask your editors to stop wasting ink on Trump photos in every article about him? Everyone knows what he looks like.
Shrillary was not the worst candidate ever, but she's near the top of the list. I worked and voted for her only because of the terrible alternative, which we got anyway. Had Beau Biden not died, Joe would have been the one to face Orange Julius, who would have crawled back to Florida for good after a royal ass-whupping.
DeleteBut Beau died. And we ended up with a nightmare with no end in sight. Oh, we thought we'd stuffed the evil genie back into the bottle in 2020. Dream on. He's still in there, with a better-than-even chance of coming out again, and more diabolical than ever. I have never hated another living human being as much.
The mess we are in did not begin eight years ago. He was a symptom, not the cause. The roots of the cause go back a long,long way. Beyond the Tea Party, beyond the eras of Bush or Reagan or Nixon. They go back to the days of the John Birchers and the Young Americans For Freedom. Back to the Vietnam Era.
The ghosts of that cataclysm, now so many decades past, have brought us to where we are now. To the unbridgeable Great Divide, and to the very real possibility of the end of the American system, the end of participatory democracy. Vietnam was what finally broke the plate. You can pick up the pieces and try to fit them back together. But it will never truly be whole again.
I'm sickened when I think about where we might be in another twenty years. But I'm in my mid-70s, so it's not likely I'll be around to witness it. For that fact, I'm actually grateful. Hell, if we get Orangey 2.0 in '24, I don't even want to stick around for the election of '28. Chances are, there won't be one.
A number of folks like to say that had Biden been the nominee in 2016, the Biggest Loser would never have been elected. I've always considered that a moot point, because I've never been close to convinced that Biden would have beaten Hillary. I'm delighted that he won in 2020, but he benefited greatly from non-cult members having had 4 years to realize that they had to do anything they could to beat the orange guy. Joe had never been all that impressive of a presidential candidate in the past. Both elections *were* way too close for comfort, especially the one that went the wrong way, but a key difference was that "other" candidates only got 1.85% of the vote in 2020, while they got 5.73% in 2016. If the holier-than-thou folks who went for fricking Jill Stein in 2016 had held their noses and voted for Hillary, instead, she'd have won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and, thereby, the election. Biden didn't have to deal with that factor.
DeleteDon't forget the idiots who voted Libertarian...almost 4.5 million of them.
Delete