Over the several months since Donald Trump entered his
oversized hat into the Presidential race, many in the media, and I, have had
plenty of fun as his expense. The list of nicknames is long
and legion: Tribblehead, T-Rump, The T-Rump Trumpet, The Walking Toupee, and
on, and on, and so on. His quirks, such as his propensity to refer
to himself in the third person, his lavish personal tastes, and his oversized
and over-bloated ego in general (manifest by his making DAMNED sure that his
name appears on EVERYTHING he touches), have made him a media magnet. Perhaps that is exactly how he got as far
as he has in this election, still being the Republican front-runner. He plays the media as if it were a
Stradivarius, and at this writing, over 40
percent of Republican voters are dancing to his tune.
But the time to laugh is over. The tune Trump is playing is one that his
followers wrote – one with a cadence of racism, xenophobia, and class division
performed in the key of hate. His
concert tour has taken him to places where Black Lives Matter protesters are
forcibly removed and beaten, with Trump’s wink-and-a-nod approval. The song where he mocks the handicapped
journalist on-stage was a million-seller with his followers. His anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant speeches
have been #1 with a bullet with his flock.
And now, in recent campaign appearances, his followers are creating new
tunes that sound like “Heil Trump” and “Seik Heil”. (This is not a literary
device or an exaggeration – these quotes were taken from actual Trump campaign
events.)
What’s more, the more he’s attacked by both the Democrats,
the Republicans, AND parts of the media at large, he only seems to get more and
more popular. A Teflon Don, a dictator
in the wings waiting to take the stage.
His own party is now holding meetings dedicated on how to take him
down. It’s understandable – his
rhetoric shows a complete disregard for the Constitution and common decency,
even for conservative stalwarts like Dick Cheney. In a recent episode of The Big Picture,
Mike Papantonio stated that Trump isn’t going anywhere, and that he will have
to be dealt with. More ominously, he
predicted that Trump would beat Clinton (the Dems’ supposedly anointed standard
bearer) in the general. Bernie Sanders
would beat him, but not Hillary, said Papantonio. Now,
this is getting REALLY scary.
I’m wondering how many today, who were alive during WWII and
prior and remember the rise of Hitler, see parallels between then/there and
now. Germany was in the middle of a
severe depression, featuring the infamous wheelbarrows of deutschmarks in order
to purchase a loaf of bread. America isn’t
there quite yet, but were losing our middle class at a very rapid rate, and as
a result, people are seeing through the false veneer of the so-called “American
Dream”. The terms spelled out in the
Treaty of Versailles thoroughly humiliated Germany – America still has the
largest economy and biggest, baddest military on the planet, but how much
longer are we going to be able to support this big, bad military with a
hollowed-out economy? Add in the
comparative ethnic hatreds existing in both eras and both countries, and the
parallel lines start to solidify into a picture. It’s not as though we haven’t been warned,
and it isn’t as though we don’t have history as a teacher.
What does this say about we, the people? This is not a new phenomenon – the bar for presidential
qualifications has been gradually lowered in election after election since 1980
and the election of ex-B-movie-actor Ronald Reagan. Remember the saying that a person who stands
for nothing falls for anything? What do
we stand for as a people, collectively?
I would submit that the divisions borne out by the 9/11 attacks, as well
as events like Rodney King and Ferguson, showed that America is simply too
divided to really agree on any one thing that defines what an “American”
is. We, as a people, are so divided
that we cannot, collectively, stand for anything. So, we fall. For anything.
Like “Trickle-Down Economics”.
Like Shrub. And the “official”
9/11 narrative.
Like Donald Trump.
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