Enjoying the view from Limbo
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,”...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Follow the blue link right here to read a handwritten letter written and deliberately distributed as a public statement by eleven relatives of Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, in response to his vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent attack against him, his colleagues, the coequal legislative branch as such, and Trump’s own vice president. Highlights from this one-way family squabble: “Oh...
The first time I saw the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome, during the 2016 Republican primaries, I honestly assumed it was a reference to the mental state of Trump’s more ardent supporters, the millions who had very obviously traded in all their old beliefs and principles to join a TV star’s personality cult. I probably first realized my error when I started getting swarmed...
Of all the relationships I lost due to Trumpism, the two cultists with whom I had previously maintained the most personal and friendly interaction (and who initially shared my contempt for Trump and his appeal), but who succumbed most completely to the allure of idolatry — the group paranoia, the inability to communicate respectfully with anyone outside of the cult, the susceptibility to...
Anti-elitism, as an abstract tenet or populist mantra, fosters anti-intellectualism, which in turn engenders a disregard for historical precedents and precursors — this last, the blindness to precedent, being an indispensable gear in the machine of progressivism. I have called Trumpism a cult — never meant figuratively. I have written of ten signs of any cult that are all easily applicable to Trumpism....
It is true that after four years of Trump’s vulgar divisiveness, following eight years of Obama’s slick divisiveness, America needs a “uniter.” Joe Biden will not be one. Contrary to all the Forrest Gump fantasies of the popular psyche, an addled mind cannot accidentally happen upon the kind of subtle understanding and persuasive decency required to effect significant societal change in the direction...
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