Trump!

I have been avoiding this nasty topic for weeks but, like facing any demon, the sooner I attack this topic, the quicker life can continue. Already I have stated my sentiment but for the regular Trump supporter, I will make it clear with this: Donald is an evil, self-centred, ostentatious, shallow, bumbling, inarticulate, sleazy, money grabbing pig of a man.

Trump supporters, the exit is to your right.

I cannot bring myself to rehash his background story of privilege. It’s been told and reinvented to fit the image of the man, very similar to L. Ron Hubbard (see my previous post).

Trump personifies all that is crass in this world. His gold remodelling of the Oval Office is a symbol of this crassness. It now looks like a brothel’s fantasy playroom. He has made plans for a new ballroom in the White House tearing down the East Wing after lying that the historic wing would not be.   

He is lining his own pockets and those of his family without any sense of shame or discretion. He is not any type of statesman but a second rate reality TV showman selling the 21^st Century equivalent to snake oil. But we already know this.

We need to understand how America came to this as the nation wilfully dismantles its own democracy and shift power to a cache of third rate politicians, business people and corrupted judiciary.

But just how far back?

The notion of the nation was founded by landed rich white men ruling over stolen land; not the most promising of starts. These men and their descendants owned slaves until the full brutality of this system pulled the country apart. The damage was deep with fractured lines that are still deep over 160 years later.

The dream of a promised land draw millions and the great capitalist machine was in place. Isolationism gave way to outright imperialism and the United States entered the very violent 20^th Century, brash and confident that only its democratic, market-driven ways could save the world. Granted it help defeat fascism but all the while creating its own domestic form of conformity and a deep fear of any alternative as characterised by the Soviet Union. When that evil power crumbled, America thought it ruled the roost but then the events of earlier this century put it on alert. Permanent alert.

Bush gave us Obama and then gave us Trump with a slight hiccup called Biden. The overreach of the secret state overhang each administration. I argue that the current fascist tendencies were sown in the rubble of 9/11. Those same tendencies were always there but the fear of terrorism gave rise to the Tea Party movement, Trumpism’s unwedded mother. Like an open wound they coagulated and provided the scab of 2026, emboldened by an innate greed in the capitalist system, those fractured lines of race mentioned above, fears of culture wars that are not wars at all but rather just progress and a stacked Supreme Court.

It sometimes feels like Trump is a puppet of the deep state and he does act like it but to dismiss him as such is a dangerous thing. This man cloaks himself in patriotism and conservatism when he is neither. He sees the Oval Office as just an extension of a TV studio and boardrooms. The man has not a fibre of public service in him. At least all his predecessors had a political background and sense of public duty, keeping themselves as uncorrupted as possible, in public, at least. Trump publicly talks about grabbing pussy, mocks the disabled, demeans women, and speaks like a man of a maximum of 5 inches- on a good day.

More on him and how Trumpism can be defeated (by any means available), next blog.