The New Litmus Test for Political Decency

Donald Trump enthusiastically praised Rush Limbaugh’s weekend performance licking Trump’s boots in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News. A day earlier, he praised Kim Jong Un again, boasting about how much he and the sex-slave-owning commie murderer like each other.

Maybe Trump just has a thing for fat, self-important liars who know how to flatter his ego for personal advantage, but this confluence of Trumplaudits puts me in mind of a new standard that has revealed itself in this era for judging who has or has not political intelligence, intellectual integrity, or any claim on the trust of decent human beings. The standard: Does Trump like you or not?

If he likes you, and especially if he praises your character and/or quotes you enthusiastically, then you most likely fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Bloodthirsty tyrants.
2. Communists.
3. Famous people who volunteer to kiss Trump’s butt in public at noon on the Fourth of July.
4. Former rivals of Trump who now cower so humiliatingly in defeat, and grovelingly shine Trump’s shoes on live television to prove their undying, vanquished humility before their new hero, Donnie.
5. White supremacists.
6. Slimy soulless lizards who make a living lying for the advancement of all things Trump, and who have not yet been forced to confess their lies under oath (at which point one instantly becomes a talentless worm that no one ever trusted — except Trump himself, of course).
7. Blond bimbos willing to use “Trump” as their last name.
8. Two-faced, money-grubbing “political commentators” willing to sell out every principle they ever pretended to stand for, and every listener or reader they ever claimed to speak for, for the sake of their own short-term material profit or career advancement.
9. Dependent, weak-willed morons willing to cede their minds and identities for the childish thrill of “belonging” to an angry mob of classless, cowardly, meanspirited, idol-worshipping baboons.
10. Donald Trump.

If, on the other hand, Trump does not praise or like you, and particularly if he explicitly smears you, either personally or as a member of a general class he dislikes, then you likely fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Those who make Trump look stupid.
2. Those who resist Trump’s tyrannical vulgarism.
3. Those intellectually honest and spiritually independent enough to continue to criticize tyrannical vulgarians as such even after they become the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
4. Believers in free markets, freedom of speech, and in general the tenets of classical liberalism.
5. Believers in limited government and the constitutional separation of powers.
6. Those who do not care about, and whose heads and hearts are not turned by, money, power, and/or celebrity.
7. Blond bimbos who do not act as though their dearest dream is to be allowed to use the name “Trump.”
8. Representatives of traditional American allies, particularly when judged in direct contrast with a member of group 1 or 2 in the first list, above.
9. Former writers for one of the prominent conservative media outlets, who lost or gave up their positions with those entities during the Trump era, due to their views not being sufficiently establishmentarian and sycophantic.
10. People I do not regard with complete disdain.

See how useful Trump is? He is a new litmus test for political decency, respectability, and civility. No test is foolproof, of course, but for reliability and accuracy, I would certainly put this one up against any SAT or IQ test.

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Final note on the test standard:

Upon an initial reading of the above standards, my perennial and official first reader (aka wifey) asked me, “What about Democrats or SJWs, CNN or most of Hollywood?” To which my first reply was, “They are not people.”

To clarify, however, it might perhaps be pointed out that the above litmus test only works on people who can be tested on the Trump Scale, which means, in the case of the first list, people whose behavior or speech are judged favorably by Trump, and in the case of the second list, people whose behavior or speech stand fundamentally opposed to the people in the first list. For example, if Trump criticizes you, though you are in fact a communist (see Democrats, SJWs, CNN, or most of Hollywood), then you fall outside of the categories of people encompassed by this test.

And furthermore, if he criticizes you and you are a communist (Democrat, SJW, etc.), you may rest assured that his criticism is not sincere, but purely for optics, since in fact Trump has a long history of sucking up to and befriending progressives, just as he has a long history of hating and trying to destroy genuine conservatives, though he occasionally panders to such people when scrounging for votes.

In short, this test measures people only on the standard of Trump’s sincere judgment (or as sincere as Trump is capable of being), which must be carefully distinguished from his opportunistic blathering of a given moment.