When I read True Believer, I took it as an analysis of historical mass movements. Not as a cautionary tale of modern America. I thought the fringe would remain there on the strength of a strong majority of regular people.
Here's where my credulity is tested. These things are so clear, and yet people I know (though none who I regard as well balanced or particularly thoughtful people, but regular people) would allow him to represent the best of America.*
1. He doesn't say it like it is. (He's mostly wrong, so more accurately, he says it like it's not.) He doesn't just say what he believes. (He doesn't really believe in things except for a moment, but that's not really a belief.). He does make things up on the spot, and say what's on his mind. He reacts like a kid, putting people on an enemy's list based on criticism of him.
2. He's has a genius, but it's a middle school bully level genius. His skill is an innate awareness of someone's greed/fear/bigotry buttons, probably because they are only very shallowly buried under his gigantic id/ego (yeah, his id and ego in the colloquial sense have sort of mutated together). He's not a business genius. He's not good with words. He's not good with ideas or systems. He doesn't really know stuff. He's honed his skills at manipulating the basest instincts in himself and others (greed, fear & insecurity, bigotry). That's provides the bedrock of his business dealings. He's not a negotiator, he's a wheeler-dealer, and if you don't know the difference, so are you. Read this: his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal had a moral epiphany and rebuked his work.
3. He's not good with people. He doesn't have friends, confidants, or relationships like you or I might. Everyone in his life are just work implements. And you could say that we're all like that and our close friends and family are just tools to give us love and to love, but he doesn't feel love like that. His wives are accouterments, his kids are ornaments. His friends are henchmen and there to give him the attention and validation he so clearly needs. He engages in petty feuds with people. Do you? And what do you feel about yourself when you're over it - proud of yourself? I wouldn't either, but I don't engage in that.
4. He is an outsider. But can you think of another outsider who's as much of an idiot as he is? Vanilla Ice comes to mind (no offense, Vanilla, but I read Ice by Ice while standing in a library somewhere and I couldn't believe a book that bad could actually be published. I couldn't put it down, the train-wreck of words was uniquely horrendous. It reads like a Trump Rant, but I was younger then and could tolerate the grotesque much better than I do now.) Can you think of one other business leader who is that full of himself and that shallow a person? Gates. Welch. Musk. Virgin. OK, Fiorina is a distant second. Oh, and Palin. But she's a semi-insider.**
5. This one is particularly pernicious because it seems to make sense but it does not: "Someone who has [raised some good kids/ built a real estate empire/ been successful in business (very debatable)] must have something healthy at the core. Oh my God, no. He didn't raise his kids. Do you seriously believe their testimony in an interview or at the podium when they're trying to get him elected? Of course you don't. Either way, it's a false argument. If you find yourself believing this, you really do need to take some basic psychology. Why people stay with abusive spouses, why people fall for get-rich schemes, why people burn crosses in other people's front yards. There are unhealthy psychological complexes that induce people to believe and do things that are not only false, but against their long-term self interest, and unless you want to be one of them, please educate yourselves! Listening to the Evangelicals rationalize supporting him (who, by their own definition, is the antithesis of living a moral life) is surreal.
6. He's not maligned by the mainstream media, nor the erudite print media, nor the public media, nor the foreign press. There are opinionated people who are out to do him harm, but there are other, often non-establishment Republicans, and others who have never been political, who see him for what he is. His sophomoric deflections fool no one with any time understanding the world. But if you are unable to detect bias and lack of bias, and you're willing to believe a candidate who has given virtually no evidence to support his veracity over every media source out there, there really is no hope, except that you're in the minority.
7. He will shake things up and we need that. I agree. But not without a plan to put it back together. And when you shake things up good, you better have some seriously sophisticated plans to rebuild. If you're going to take apart a complex machine, without any knowledge of how it all works together, you're not fixing anything. Breaking things doesn't fix them!
All the major reasons people give for supporting Trump are weak, if not utterly false. And yet, here he is. With more being caught up in the excitement at the expense of a commitment to integrity. Ouch.
*[I totally understand a Never Hillary attitude. I get that. I wouldn't vote for Hillary because she's a complete politico, and is too far gone to be a real person. She sees honesty and transparency as a weakness, probably based on her history of having been elected and appointed to offices without exercising a real commitment to honesty, transparency or authenticity. But she knows things, and her lies are understandable adult lies (if not less egregious): she's trying to protect her political career, whereas Trump is just boasting, trying to make you think he knows something he doesn't, or habit.]
**[I totally understand why you'd want an outsider to be in the White House. I think everyone is sick of the establishment's inability to think for themselves. But let's at least get someone (anyone) who CAN ACTUALLY THINK. Trump is incapable of sitting down and thinking, analyzing, restating a complex thought or argument, working through any sort of rigorous logic, even when logic needs to be infused with the reality of human problems which must understand and accommodate the irrationality of human behavior as part of their process, but at least coherent.]
No comments:
Post a Comment