Trump and Trumpism — the Final Word

Trump calls his latest indictment, for January 6, a political hit-job, with a “deranged” prosecutor trying to interfere with the 2024 election. The reality is Trump himself tried to interfere with the 2020 election.

The detailed indictment is devastating. He claims freedom of speech — but free speech can’t cover actions like trying to cook up fraudulent presidential elector certifications. And he acted “on advice of counsel?” The counselors were co-conspirators. Yet the more damning evidence piles up, the more intense the idolatry of his MAGA cultists.

Most believe in God. How can they square that, and a religion supposedly of moral values, with denying an iniquity that should smack them in the face? They turn the other cheek. Religion itself — belief in absurdities — is the gateway for believing in more absurdities.

They’re trapped in an echo chamber shutting out all contrary factuality. It’s become mainly an us-against-them thing. The “them” is an “establishment” they see as lording over them, disrespecting them and their putative values, always “out to get” their guy. When Trump says “it’s you they’re coming after,” they feel that.

And what are the “values” they think they’re defending? That’s just as scrambled in their heads. Throwing under the bus everything this country should stand for, while waving American flags — and Confederate ones.

Ay, there it is. Racial antagonism is the deepest heart of Trumpism. They vehemently deny being “racist;” but on that too their brains are scrambled.

A recent Paul Waldman column casts the core of today’s Republicanism as actually “anti-antiracism.” A backlash against outspoken efforts to redress a history of inequality. They’re fed up with hearing about it, and think the tables have actually turned, themselves somehow now the victims. While hating the idea that they’re becoming a disempowered minority in their own country. Quite a boiling stew of resentment.

Their frenzy over nonconforming sexuality fits with this. Another way they see a country changing out from under them.

But whatever may be their feelings, even if there were a kernel of legitimacy, it cannot justify their ruinous political path. Paved with stupendous lies — the “stolen election,” whitewashing January 6, etc., traducing the essence of democracy.

This degradation of America breaks my heart. I used to love following politics as a noble battle of ideas, central to how a worthy society should function. Who could ever imagine a U.S. president attempting a coup, with the Capitol stormed to stop a lawful transfer of power? And then being renominated! Off this cliff Republicans determinedly march.

Meantime they’re going to town trying to smear Biden. The “Biden crime family” stuff is ridiculous. (No shred of evidence implicates Joe in Hunter’s misdeeds.)

They’ll likely move to impeach him anyway, supposing people will think that where there’s smoke there’s fire. While Republicans blind themselves to the towering inferno that is Trump.

Impugning Biden’s mental capacity is also nonsense; and anyhow I’d far rather have a doddering senile president who’s a decent human being, and sane, than a malevolent monster.

I was a big 2020 Biden donor, to save my country. But now I feel my money should instead target directly helping people — and that, if enough Americans can be so irresponsible, so insane, as to elect so manifestly evil a man as Trump, then fuck it.