There’s been wide variation for years now in how political pundits and commentators interpret Donald Trump’s statements and actions. Is he confused? Is he stupid? Is he just trolling progressives? Is he using hyperbole and other rhetoric just to entertain his base?
Of course, many supporters claimed he would become presidential after the nasty campaign season was over.
Not so much.
People breezed over conspiracy theories and blatant lies as just part of the dirty competition of trying to win an election. My first article on Donald Trump’s candidacy specifically highlighted his conspiracy theory history, though, because it had been clear that he had pushed conspiracy theories for years — this was not just part of the campaign circus.
“Don the Con’s” attacks on our democracy, on journalists who investigate his sketchy dealings and who correct his incessant lies, on the court system when it blocks his unconstitutional orders, and the freakin’ FBI and CIA as well as numerous lifelong Republicans in those organizations and in the Department of Justice, have made certain experts more and more disturbed and concerned. But I keep coming back to one thought:
This guy’s political career started with insane, racist, completely disrespectful claims that President Barrack Obama wasn’t American!
That’s who we now have as president. A racist. Someone who pushes insane conspiracy theories that you could only take seriously if you lacked a tremendous amount of critical thinking skills. Someone who has no shame lying about the leader of the free world. Someone who would go to the depths of a maggot-infested garbage can to pull out an illogical lie to plaster across TV news channels if it somehow made him look better than his opponents.
What most of us learned from Nixon is that politicians should be better and the president should be a moral role model. What Donald Trump seemed to absorb from the story was that Nixon didn’t go far enough in his lies, his coverups, his racist dog whistles, his sludge-soaked gutter politics, and his blatant attacks on the fundamental walls and floors of our democracy.
Obviously, such a conspiracy-obsessed con-man approach couldn’t work if the soil wasn’t prepped for it. That prepping, of course, has been done by the reality-distorting conservative media bubble and Republicans who have blatantly peddled in the same things, who have decided to sit silently as it occurs even though they know better, and who have softly denounced it without genuinely facing the cancer on society and working to root it out. They all helped in one way or another to get Frankenstein into the White House, and now they have to deal with the Frankenstein democracy we have.
Image via The Peace & Freedom Report
