I'm not a fan of Horror genre movies or television series. Yet, I find myself forced to observe and comment on the current "Trump Revenge Show"
It's a never-ending scream of rage that has mesmerized and split a significant part of the American voting public.
This strategy, as Steve Bannon explained in 2015, works because politicians can "flood the zone with shit." The public town square of Yore has morphed into a national and global electronic sewer of lies, beliefs, and imagined (and accurate) death threats. For everyone who thinks Trump's gone too far, someone in a MAGA hat shouts, "More boss, more."
Trump, as a Christian savior, is a ridiculous thought. His business career was a litany of fraud, deception, and bankruptcies. Polling data from recent months reflects the bias of the people paying for these polls.
When milk has gone sour, you know it instantly when you uncap the bottle. How do people we know and respect lose their sense of smell and taste in political terms, applauding or accepting this behavior?
Political life can end for numerous reasons. Thomas Eagleton dropped out as a vice presidential candidate because he received treatment for depression. Standards have shifted. Attacks on democracy today have created a nation depressed by the reality that it might all change at the hands of a man who professes his admiration for dictators past, present, and future. Along with his multiple criminal indictments, you'd think that would be a disqualification, not an endorsement.
Trump benefits if American voters wallow in moral chaos that disables their ability to recognize the disaster that another four years of TRS promises. Just four years ago, a COVID pandemic killed millions of Americans, assisted by a president— pretending to be a medical expert —contradicted expert advice.
Constant use of demeaning language and attacks from TRS confuses voters trying to understand right from wrong. Who are today's undecided voters? Trump lost in 2020 by 7,000,000 votes. Did those people suddenly change their minds? Are they now loving the disintegration of Congress by a right-wing cabal or a Supreme Court invoking specific religious beliefs to take control of women's medical decisions?
Social and political conversations have become shorter and contentious in the digital age. Attention spans have collapsed. Low-cost electronic means of people-to-people connectivity result in far less "communication of value."
Today, three nations have a compelling interest in ending the notion of democracy and modern thinking across many areas of life: Russia, China, and Iran. The TRS gang claims Russia and China are good guys, rarely acknowledging that they may be a little misguided, but so what? The GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rep. Michael McCaul says Russian propaganda had "infected a good chunk of my party's base," blaming conservative media. I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it's almost identical [to what they're saying on Russian state television] — on our airwaves," McCaul said.
Most of this right-wing propaganda discourages support for Ukraine's fight against the Russian invasion, motivating the ultra-right-wing representatives to block aid. Former congresswoman Liz Cheney said there is now "a Putin wing of the Republican Party." There was a point in Trump's term when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he believed the Russians paid Trump.
As a known stickler for truth, Trump maintains there is nothing wrong with his relationship with Putin. However, bringing Paul Manafort back to his campaign suggests otherwise. Manafort owed millions of dollars to Russian oligarchs who paid and loaned him money. In 2016, he was handing campaign information to a Russian agent. This treachery helped Russian propaganda trolls. But it's more than Russian help. Dictators of all sizes and shapes would like to see Trump back in power. Most Republicans in Congress are too afraid of Trump to stop this.
We must absorb a sense of purpose from this and work harder to convince friends and family not to vote for Trump. Vote for down-ballot Republicans if you think they are the best choice, but leave Trump to schlep between courthouses and Mar A Lago
Trump's goals are getting more attention now. By highlighting his speaking nonsense, the Biden-Harris campaign stresses that this election is not about the man but whether the nation chooses democracy or a dystopian dictatorship. Trump's language is rarely elegant or precise:
"Over the seas and our land. And then they want us to have clean. I said wait, we're gonna be clean, but it's all flying. Just remember that. Does that make sense? In other words, it's all coming through the currents through the air, they can name it."
Constitutional authority and lawyer Lawrence Tribe wrote," Listen to this insane blather and then think about the nuclear codes.
While the short clips mark his steady decline, it is more evident in long-form, writes Rachel Leingang in the Guardian newspaper. "Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it's like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non-sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories."
Trump tucks his most tangible policy concepts in at the end.
-
Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.
-
Indemnifying the president, all police officers, and law enforcement officials for their actions.
-
Rebuilding cities and taking control of Washington DC,
-
an executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.
-
Changing to one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID.
-
Creating the "Trump Reciprocal Trade Act".In other words, you screw us and we'll screw you." Mr. Transactional remembers the advice of his mentor, Roy Cohn, a scheming lawyer with a clientele of Mafia bosses.
I think Trump's incoherence is more obvious because he pretends that Biden has dementia. Comedian Seth Myers would say it creates a closer look at how daft Trump is and how he's getting worse. Both can mix up names of foreigners, yet Trump's storytelling often sounds like a child's learning to read book. He described using an "iron dome" missile defense system as "ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They've only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom."
In a Wisconsin speech, he called Biden a "lost soul" and lamented, "Can you imagine him sitting at the Resolute Desk? What a great desk." New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie described it as "something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations", whereby no one expected him to behave in an orderly fashion or communicate well.
Some of these bizarre stories are best seen in full, like this one about Biden at the beach in Trump's Georgia response to the State of the Union: "Somebody said he (Biden) looks great in a bathing suit, right? Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don't think Cary Grant, was good. I don't know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won't say names because I don't need enemies. I don't need enemies. I have enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, 'The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.' 'Who?' 'Cary Grant.' Well, we don't have that anymore, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he's 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn't look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?"
The breadth of his menace and hatred toward those who disagree with him is a constant reminder of Trump at his worst. Susan B. Glasser wrote in the New Yorker. "It's easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times." His authoritarian instincts are feral. You can't be a one-day dictator; that's just him trying to put lipstick on a pig,
I have dubbed the medical issue for Trump as PTS: Political Tourettes Syndrome, an uncontrollable urge to shout out whatever comes into his head. His crude and illogical outrages against the judges in trials are not helping him, given that so far the trials have cost him nearly a billion dollars in fines, interest, and legal fees. Experience suggests it will get worse before the November election and then even stranger for losing.
Scripted or unscripted, the nation is not ready for fascism in the hands of someone so malignant.
By: Kenneth tiven