From early days, the Trump spectacle treated his glib, campaign swindle, fabricated declarations, even law and justice, as variations of the Big Joke, Life-is-just-a-game-for-me callousness
Exposing both his insecure ego shell and AWOL winning messages, Trump’s blustering, scattergun cocksureness sets up his ultimate legacy: “often in error, never in doubt.” The catchphrase hits the uncanny bullseye of Donald’s self-evident pattern. First he lies, then compounds lying with more lying, then impugns (projects on) his reactive critics for lying, finally to smugly bask in fabricated notoriety, whining about absolute grievances and concocting laughable conspiracies, like pet cannibalism.
Know how to know Trump is lying? No, not just when his lips move. but when he encases his manic, desperate blustering with absolute certitude. Like a five-year old, the greater the screamed certainty, the greater the fib factor – thus do tantrums obscure mendacity. Nothing like covering a bold-faced lie with the thick gravy of more lies, then more denials, then more repetition. Frankly, it amazes me that he has any political lives left. Are hardcore fans not fed up with empty hostility against Democrats, the status quo, the “deep state” and minority demands to control everything: school books to elections to capital punishment?
The ever-outrageous Trump lies with the fluidity of howling cats in heat – then looks up and expects to be trusted as the most honest man alive. Thus does this wannabe dictator, a stated defier of democratic procedures and principles, dare attack Biden-Harris as the undemocratic candidates. Beyond paradox, beyond contradiction, beyond credibility – here’s the criminal boss as fake saint. If that’s not gall, what is?
How equally absurd yet revealing for Trump’s contagion of callousness to bemoan non-existent pet exterminations – all to crudely drag immigration into the battle. Forget pets. He’s the guy who approved putting terrorized children in cages, the death of countless, needless Covid victims, bombing Gaza, Putin’s terrorizing of civilians in Ukraine, and murdered D.C. police doing their duty. Here the guy who says “So what” when rioters destroy the Capitol and scream about hanging his own VP. No wonder Trump admires the feline magic of nine lives, informing why a clownish creep can get away with crossing so many lines.
What? A cat with more than nine lives?
Any other clamorous poseur would have been dead and buried nine times over. After all, he’s guilty of serial sexual abuses, business, campaign, diplomatic and election fraud, inciting a failed coup, even contempt for patriotic soldiers who sacrificed lives because they believed in something greater than themselves (baffling to Trump). This framework fits Trump’s astonishing (disheartening) ability to extricate himself from career enders for normal cats. Need we painfully recall his utterly discredited Obama birtherism, the Hollywood Access tapes on grabbing pussy, over 30K presidential lies, double impeachments, record-breaking indictments, trials, felony convictions and stunning financial penalties, Election denial, Jan. 6, more Election denial, and theft of reams of top secret documents? No doubt, thinking himself superior to cooked and ingested cats, Trump certainly tests their proverbial nine lives threshold.
Yet, thanks to an awful confluence of perverse media habits (hypnotized by shining outrages) and broken legal accountability systems, sharpened by cult irrationality, he staggers on, despite more than damning character revelations. One obvious exposure of late is seeing an increasingly incoherent crackpot deluded by his own invulnerability. Another is his inexplicable, unhinged loyalty to a repeated campaign loser: total election denial and the prediction 2024 will be a replay. If he’s right, he’s the ultimate fool; if wrong, the ultimate, lying, manipulative knave.
Behind all this is the epic arrogance of an epic gamer. We know, as Carlos Lozada wrote two years ago, that Trump views politics as an endless, trivial joke he can manipulate, everything reduced to brute struggle for power that thishooligan confronts like a drunk waving a loaded gun. Lozada’s Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Liebrilliantly explains that the Big Election Lie depends on the permanent, cynical Big Inside Joke, that only chumps take politics or government or people’s needs or reality seriously. Whether elections, militarism, or legislative programs and the people they impact – all are just big, whopping stages for gamesmanship, self-aggrandizement and domination. That’s why Trump has no principles because, like shame or self-awareness, they would only get in the way of crass tomfoolery. Recall the literal dictionary definition of “trumpery:” tawdry, worthless nonsense – gaudy, garish, vulgar, worthless and tasteless.
Why is Trump the only non-rigged entity?
In the world of trumpery, everything is rigged and he is, as Adam Kinzinger said at the DNC convention, the hypocritical perpetrator playing forever victim. Okay, he’s good at PR and a fabricated rhetoric by which this master poseur exposes all the hidden (certainly unprovable) plots designed to do in him and fans: oligarchs, anti-abortion evangelicals, gun addicts, and radical libertarians, burn-it-down militants, blow-it-all-up anarchists. But Trump cares nothing about what addicts his base, only that he leverages their grievance that someone else makes all the decisions they so feverishly covet. Thus, the inciting of violence, the utter lack of sympathy for true victims, and the callous sense that nobody else (even pets) really matter. MAGA insiders know it’s all a joke – and thus anything goes as long as they take home all the marbles after the scrum.
The problem is that the unfeeling Trumpian brew of chaos, cynicism, and suspicion sabotage what open democratic systems depend on: adequate trust in institutions, relative truth-telling and civility towards opponents. As it turns out, every time Trump and Vance lie, thus betraying the hard reality of truth, they carve out the part of their brain where moral values exist. Rank opportunism is bad for your psychic health: without any moral compass you will inevitably get lost. And that means, as you wreck and pillage, that you expend whatever cat lives your private soul had at birth.
Yes, in theory all are born with the opportunity to find out who we are, where we best belong, what we can do to help others, and how to feel our lives have meaning. If you have no center, and no values, whence cometh meaning, the way we justify the gift of life we all get for free at birth? Money and fame ain’t enough.
For many months I have argued that the merciless, law-breaking Trump is unelectable nationally – payback from the Big Lie election infamy, the calculated, violent Jan. 6 insurrection, and the defiance of our greatest strength, the sovereignty of majority voters linked to the peaceful transfer of power. No greater Trump crimes against our political integrity surpass this unspeakable expression of demagoguery in action.
Not that the cult GOP wouldn’t nominate him, nor that he wouldn’t find new lies and deceptions to obscure the huge, national resistance against another Trump chaos term. I wouldn’t have said in 2021 that Trump would manage to avoid facing key trials after the D.C. indictments or the undeniable theft of secret documents housed at Mar-a-Lago, even though they all took far too long. Nothing indicts our institutions of justice more than its profound stagnation, despite convicting and jailing MAGA underlings, to bring the top of the criminal pyramid to the bar. Any other defendant would have been tried, convicted and sentenced, now serving time one way or the other. He still runs because he somehow claims multiple political lives.
Apparently, failed institutions like the Supreme Court boast more than nine lives, too. More’s the pity.
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