Tagged: Trump cult

V. R. for V. P.

Vivek Ramaswamy has dropped out of the Republican Party primaries in a manner that perfectly completes the first stage of his campaign to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. He is the one primary candidate who at no point in the process had any intention of winning the primaries or setting himself up as a serious contender. His whole purpose all along,...

Mike Pence: The Republican Party Personified

Mike Pence, vice president to Donald Trump, has suspended his 2024 Republican presidential campaign months before the first votes will be cast, in the face of abysmal poll numbers and empty coffers. No man’s fate more clearly exemplifies the truth and trajectory of the entire Republican Party since it allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality TV grifter and his moron cult...

The Trump Supporter’s Error

The mistake that Donald Trump’s admirers and defenders have consistently made since 2015 may be reduced to one fundamental error of confirmation bias: They saw his flouting of ordinary party politics, ordinary presidential rhetoric, ordinary administrative state regulations, and ordinary Republican establishment conciliation, as evidence that he saw the corruption of modern American politics the way they did, and that he was standing...

On Speaking From One’s Tribal Mind

Mike Lee, since he stopped being the pre-2016 Ted Cruz’s more principled and less self-promoting sidekick and became a pathetic panderer to the Trump cult, seems to have lost his intellectual moorings. No longer sounding like a rare libertarian with a moral compass, Lee increasingly sounds like a slightly less smarmy and disingenuous imitation of the post-2016, pathetically bootlicking Ted Cruz.  Lee’s new-found...

Defining Our Terms: Peace and Freedom

A simple question: Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tulsi Gabbard, Candace Owens, Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Nick Fuentes, Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria — does this list embody the alliance for peace and freedom today? If it does, then I oppose peace and freedom with every fiber of my being, and wish to go to my grave as the...

January 6th, 2021

Donald Trump was the leader of a very large, deeply devoted cult. He won the cult by stoking fear and anger in people already feeling dispossessed and rejected by their society, and then hardened it by consistently promising his followers, in mantra-like fashion, to stand athwart history as the only man willing and able to serve as their protector and avenger. (“The Wall,”...

Abjectly Stupid Person, Heal Thyself

Ann Coulter, one of the most audacious and enduring stars (read “unprincipled profiteers”) of the so-called conservative media, has read the tea leaves and, after a few years helping to foment the unique brand of anti-American hatred that is “MAGA,” suddenly realized that there was no future in it, i.e., no long-term career prospects in the Trump cult industry. That is to say,...

Filling the Void

The Arizona election audit — paid for and conducted by Trump dreamers who would give their right arms (they gave their souls years ago) to find one scintilla of semi-plausible evidence of widespread voter fraud that might lend credence to their idol’s endless and hitherto groundless ranting about a stolen election – turned up exactly zero scintillas of such evidence. Nothing. “Not a...

On American Conservatives, So-Called

American conservatives — and I am thinking primarily of the famous money-grubbing ones on television, radio, and internet, but this applies to the grassroots dupes as well — love to spew venom and vitriol at the many public victims of “cancel culture” who have felt compelled to apologize to their executioners in a desperate attempt to save themselves. These so-called conservatives ought to...

The Jester’s New Clothes

Donald Trump, in response to Mitch McConnell’s having dumped him in the alley after making a complete fool of him for five years — this being no great feat, given the man’s foolish essence — has “lashed out” at his old puppeteer in his typical twelve-year-old mean girl fashion. And in the process, Trump reveals, admittedly somewhat superfluously, what a pathetically craven shell...