Equal to endless lies are endlessly self-serving fantasy projections that defy reality
Know anyone who lies all the time? Eventually, except for cultists, credibility vanishes. Know anyone who spouts absurd, laughably wrong-headed predictions? Trump the lead Chicken Little is thus special, managing to hit bottom when bad lying impels bad predictions. Behind all such devilry is the arrogant, fake self-confidence that lying seers must be right because they’re the ultimate know-it-alls. For a partial list, Trump’s jaw-dropping bluster self-anoints himself both incapable of error and the world’s great expert at everything. Why, this model of modesty knows more than world-class stars in science, climate, money, debt, pandemic diseases, war, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, trade, taxes, technology, drones, even the weather.
And so the culmination of this bluster is to commit political blackmail if he’s not made dictator-for-a-day: only Trump stands between the entire U.S. and catastrophe—from a guy who only picks primitive yes-men. Lying about the present facilitates inventing your own future—but instead of some visionary futurist, Trump is now the buffoon of doomsday predictions. The latest lie/fake projection is that America will implode, indeed will “no longer exist,” if he’s not re-elected. That tantrum of logic awards his non-election with a one-to-one-correlation, equating his fate with America’s entire critical mass. We’re not talking invasions or dreadful pandemics, not nuclear attacks, depressions or streaky asteroids colliding with earth. To deny Trump invites national Armageddon. Not only will Never Trumpers thus abandon all hope of making America great again, but his defeat alone is an existential threat. And just think about multitudes convinced of the opposite.
In fact, this junk logic is no different from the mush we heard in 2020, even 2016, when he badly lost the popular vote? “Only Trump alone can solve all problems.” That narcissistic extremism makes Trump equal in importance to 340 million Yanks—DT vs all the clout of the world’s strongest economy and greatest military force. Fact: no single figure (or cadre) is ever equal to the democratic whole. Never, never, never. No figure in history even surpasses an invading army—or a plague far worse than Covid or an earthquake. Yes, cultures dissipate, even die, but 1) it takes a long time for potent empires to give up the ghost, and 2) countless variables impact this outcome, some predictable, some not.
Believing your own B.S.
Trump only extends the worst presidency ever to the worst, least reliable candidate ever (if reason matters). Okay, he doesn’t yet match Steve Bannon’s deranged nonsense: that MAGA “will govern the United States for 50 years,” and that Donald Trump “will go down as the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” At CPAP this year, Bannon the ultimate Big Lie loyalist not only predicted a Trump win but by “a massive frickin’ landslide.” Thus does this criminal duo commandeer lying, blackmail, manipulation and intimidation.
Item: for months, defying all evidence Trump couldn’t have been more wrong on COVID, whether in its severity, duration or best responses. “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear. And from our shores.” Miracle, indeed. Just dump enough disinfectant, like bleach, and COVID will vamoose: forget masks and closures, then impugn vaccines, a know-nothing misdirection beyond historic comparisons. In January, long before COVID peaked, Trump bragged, “We have it totally under control;” eight months later, with multitudes dying, the Deceiver-in-chief’s rampage endured: COVID “affects virtually nobody.” Behold Trump’s malicious version of “survival of the fittest.”
On economics, Trump matched these matchless deceptions. A Biden election, he bellowed, causes “a stock market collapse the likes of which you’ve never had.” Instead, new highs. Ditto, “Your Social Security will be destroyed by the people coming in. There’s too many of them. It’s not sustainable.” Electing Biden in 2020 epitomized destruction: “The suburbs wouldn’t be the suburbs anymore, the economy would sink into its worst depression ever and police departments would cease to exist. Even America’s older adults would be left to figure out how to get by without heat, air conditioning or electricity.”
On immigration, not only did Trump viciously (and wrongly) predict that waves of “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have in every country all over the world” would cause mass lawbreaking (in fact, crimes are much reduced since 2020). Nothing stops Trump immigration buffoonery: “I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden’s border bloodbath” will change the country forever. Compared to what? In fact, immigrants are more law-abiding than non-immigrants, with not one Jan. 6-like insurrection in the immigrant record (notable for recently slandered “animals”). And the irony: All this puffery from by far the greatest presidential criminal ever.
On health care, not only did Trump promise/predict a “better, cheaper health care with more coverage” but as president kept up the fakery, “Republicans will always protect people with pre-existing conditions.” Right, that’s why Trump wants to shred Obamacare, cut medical support for poor folks, and backs the GOP in denying national health coverage. Of course the worst prediction and the worst lie (and despicable coverup) is the Big Lie: that he should be president.Spawned from the Big Lie is today’s whopper: that America will not survive without a Trump dictatorship. Or his bizarro Tinker Bell Fallacy that his leadership is ordained by God, thus he can for example declassify any document just by thinking it. That fits a malignant narcissist throwing a fit: inerrant, buttressed against criticism and thus like Jesus.
Lying, predictions and electoral blackmail
And here lying, fake predictions and blackmail coalesce. Deny Trump and brace for worse Jan 6 insurrections, mass resistance, even looming civil war. His campaign pitch is pure intimidation for street protest violence would lead to jailing critics, opponents or perceived enemies. That’s par for a madman fool, blaming all his indictments on Biden-Deep State sabotage to his re-election chances. That vicious, unvirtuous circle thus allows a career criminal usurper to takeover all the operations of law and justice.
No gray areas here: elect Trump or batten down for Armageddon, full of fire and brimstone. An America that dares refuse Trump is by definition unworthy, even illegitimate, thus perversely deserves a fate like Humpty Dumpty. If this logic had even an iota of relevance, then why did dumping Trump for Biden not end the American system? Thus, Trump rallies smacks of doomsday religious revivals, clothed in Christian imagery full of juvenile, cultish adoration. What’s a greater lie/fake prediction than when a phony messiah looks to God’s wrath, just like the fabled Biblical divinity who decimated Egypt to win freedom for the enslaved.
Of course, the illusory God of white Christianity won’t have to send down his all-powerful angelic brigade—not when militant, fully armed insurrectionists take direct orders from its defeated “Commander-in-chief.” There will be fatalities if enough cultist Trump rebels decide only violence serves their goals. Then, forget law or the Constitution: all these incendiary, white Christian nationalist rebels will have to face off with every police/federal marshal, national guard and military force that the Pentagon can muster. That outcome will be anything but hard to predict: MAGA violence will be met with a force field that no vicious hustler can “alone” overcome. And like “the victim” Humpty Dumpty it will be Trumpism that falls to pieces, even implodes. America has overcome far, far greater menaces than a deranged, know-nothing fantasist with delusions of grandeur barking orders to his slavish cult. Oh, the horror.
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