The Trump Chronicles: Forty Miles Of Bad Road
Trump, who is very bright about a couple of things and very not-so-bright about almost everything else, saw this, or was advised to see this as a strategy.
And being the con artist/ruthless businessperson that he is, went after it with all the energy he could muster.
Everything he said and everything he did was designed to execute that strategy and make a lot of disgruntled and disillusioned people feel that their anger and disillusion was well-founded.
He gave them permission to place blame…on Washington and , in turn on Mexican (who were stealing their jobs and generally all bad hombres), on blacks (who were getting way to uppity with their Black Lives Matter bullshit), on Muslims who were basically all breeding terrorists and infiltrating the country at an alarming rate, and on the the previous Liberal administration, whose environmental protection stance and worthless trade deals were stifling big business and preventing America’s economy from growing and making the country great again.
The fact that none of this had any basis in reality did not matter. He plowed ahead, spewing lies and fuelling the quiet rage that had been burning for years inside a lot of people.
He lied and lied and lied some more, He got so good at it that he could even lie about how the media was making up fake news to poison him, and turn the public against him, when in fact all they were really doing was questioning the fake news that he was generating.
After he got elected, he began to systematically break or ignore every campaign promise he had made. Because he had no intention of ever keeping them in the first place.
But he didn’t give a shit. He had played it just right. He had a congress that was a Republican majority who were terrified of opposing him. He hired an alt right policy advisor and psychopath to guide him and began issuing executive orders to create policies that didn’t actually benefit anyone except the military industrial complex, Wall Street, big oil and big coal.
And he threw the country into chaos from an immigration perspective.
But because he was now so far removed from his element, and because he was too egocentric to actually listen to his policy advisers (except psycho Steve), he started running into challenges in the courts. The result, more chaos.
Finally, the Democrats who spent a lot more time than they should have licking their wounds finally started figuring out how to make life miserable for Trump.
The most ingenious thing they have come up with so far is the Russian influence on the election. They like this one because if they pull it off they could actually get Trump impeached or even (worse/better) thrown into prison for treason.
Better late than never, they now appear to have Trump on the ropes a bit, scrambling to create more fake news to counter all the Russian election interference tactics. The latest fake news distraction tactic is that Obama had the phones in Trump Tower bugged during the election campaign.
This was a hoot because, of course, anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that the courts and not the president authorize phone tapping. And they only do so if there is evidence that a serious crime is being committed.
This is the problem with being out of your depth and being too ego-centred to actually think things through.
Everything that is currently happening in America is something that is the result of a long and systematic dumbing down of the population. My belief is that this dumbing down was done to ensure that there was a huge work force of poorly educated people who knew just enough to be thankful for whatever crap job they were able to get.
But when automation started to really take hold, these same people found themselves displaced and marginalized and mostly working for coolie wages in retail.
These are the people that Trump seized on as his core. The rest of the people who added volume to his movement were just regular Republicans who basically were mesmerized by the endless stream of lies coming at them and started to believe them.
This entire chapter of US political history is really nothing more than a huge helping of theatre of the absurd.
People who see it for what it is (intelligent Democrats and independents and people from other countries) find it astonishing that a country that could produce so much of the world’s true innovation, could also be the home to so much ignorance and gullibility. It’s a paradox of epic proportion.
Last night I had dinner with an American guy I know and when we started talking about it, he told me that none of this was all that unusual. That America swings to the left then to the right and that is the pattern. None of this seemed to upset him all that much, except for the fact that maybe things were a bit crazier than usual.
A bit crazier than usual. OK. I can live with that. Can you?
jim out
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