By Sid Schwab / Herald columnist
If a single picture captures Trump’s America, it’s one showing those duped Trumpists blocking and intimidating early voters in Virginia. It’s all there: ignorance, anger, carefully coordinated indoctrination swallowed whole. Mob mentality. Enthusiastic lawlessness. Fascism adjacent. (Google: tinyurl.com/no-vote4u)
They arrived as if called to prayer. To them, the picture attests, MAGA means renouncing the Constitution, about which they and Trump have never really cared. It confirms how close we are to civil war, as Trump repeatedly declines to agree to peaceful transition if he loses. He’d rather see our country burn. Every American should decry this undisguised intent to overthrow democracy. Why is it only Democrats?
Recall Trump’s demands at his fakery-fests: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” he ordered the gratefully misinformed mob. And they did.
Accomplishing what? Preventing the fabricated “thieving and stealing and robbing” that people waiting in line would have been doing if they, the red-hatted submissives, weren’t surveilling them? Were they hoping to scare legitimate voters away, patriotically? Is that their en-greatened America?
Had they been inside, what do they think they’d have witnessed? Between signing in, casting votes and leaving, how would voters have enfleshed Trump’s hallucinations? Irrelevant: Trump is mobilizing tens of thousands more poll “watchers” to go forth and threaten.
It’s a nutcase nutshell. A psychopathic “president,” to convince himself and his supporters that if he loses, it’d be from Democrats’ skullduggery, has been spinning a deadly conspiratorial web for months. Echoed by the complicit Attorney General of Trump and colluding media multimillionaires, belief in non-existent treachery is digesting Trumpists’ brains like Naegleria fowleri. If it weren’t so pathetic, it’d be laughable. Instead, it’s an intentionally lit fuse, burning with Trump’s lies about climate change, Russia, Covid-19, even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and his nauseating praise, this week, of violence against journalists. He’s brought us to the brink.
Dealing with Trumpists, liberals are disadvantaged. Being liberal, they still look for occasionally normal behavior and decency from the other side. From adherents, if not leaders. Seeing a “president” lying so blatantly, his Attorney General abdicating responsibility to the law, people so impenetrably manipulated by an American Putin, is confounding. It’s not of their world.
Take surgery as a metaphor: After a decade in practice, there was no operation I did exactly as taught. Knowledge progresses. I read research publications, attended meetings, and, with experience, developed my own innovations. It’s a non-political example of liberalism. Who’d want doctors who refused to learn beyond the end of formal education? It’s unthinkable.
Yet it perfectly describes Trumpists: Minds gaping wide to deception, hermetic to reevaluating inculcated beliefs. People outside that circle are unused to such intransigence. Countering mindless acceptance of Trump’s mendacity with facts, liberals have found, is a frustrating waste of effort. People accustomed to open-minded discourse lack the tools, if any there are, to awaken closed-minded Trumpists to the danger ahead. Nor are liberals capable of Trumpic amounts of lying. No undamaged humans are.
Like that photograph, Republicans’ weapons-grade hypocrisy following Justice Ginsberg’s death reveals it, too. All pretense of integrity abandoned, they’re acting in their own and their donors’ interest, not yours. Public opinion, which opposes virtually all their policies, including the timing of RBG’s replacement, is of even less concern to them than greenhouse gases or properly vetted vaccines.
To pre-conditioned Trumpists, the SCOTUS fight is about abortion. For flip-flopping Republicans, though, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., explained this week, it’s about the demands of corporate dark-money paymasters: tipping the law to them rather than their employees; deregulation, no matter the consequences; approving vote-suppression to retain minority control. Promising retribution to senators standing in his way, Trump just admitted, out loud, that for him it’s about creating a court that will help him steal the election. (HuffPost: tinyurl.com/take-from-U)
Rehearsing a post-election coup granting unlimited power, he’s already acting the role. Having declared Seattle, Portland and NYC “anarchist jurisdictions,” to justify punishing mayors he fears, Trump intends to withhold federal funding. Same with denying help to burning western states, which, ironically, contain more Trump voters than the total of several states he won. Not an issue: he considers them “disgusting.” (Independent: tinyurl.com/U-disgust-him)
That picture is everything. Born of the damaged mind of a pernicious “president,” those unthinking Virginians are ready for revolution, the potential first wave of a countrywide uprising. Despicable as violent demonstrations are — and they are — they’re nothing compared to millions of Trumpofoxified Americans, ready to take it all down, for the lies of a malignant, self-absorbed charlatan.
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
