Welcome to Trumpoholics Anonymous
Every smoker tells himself he will quit — but “not right now,” when he has so much stress to deal with in his life. Every drinker says, “I know I have to cut back, and I will — after I get through this divorce / get over this problem with my boss / survive my exams.” Everyone taking antidepressants insists he will reduce his dependency on pharmaceuticals — as soon as he gets through this dark patch.
In 2016, millions of Americans got hooked on the fantasy that an unprincipled, vain, historically ignorant self-promoter and reality television star was exactly the man to save America from the hundred-year schemers and planners of international neo-Marxism. Four years later, with superabundant evidence of Trump’s complete failure to realize any of the hallucinations this carnival barker conjured in his followers’ desperate imaginations, as well as his having caused more tangible harm to the social fabric, the rule of law, and America’s standing as the world’s bulwark of freedom, than perhaps any president in American history, the radical leftists (not to mention America’s global enemies) are achieving gains on all fronts that make the accomplishments of the Obama era look like minor tinkering. So naturally, the Trump cult is insisting, as all addicts insist about their favorite vice, that they could not possibly give up on Trump now, since he is “the only man who can stop the socialists.”
In other words, like progressives, who create societal problems with excessive government intervention, and then promise they alone can solve those problems, if only people accept the need for more government intervention, so the Trump cultists and their fellow travelers, the dyed-in-the-wool Republican tribalists, are just certain that the only solution for the multi-front disaster Trump has fostered or exacerbated is — more Trump.
Never let addicts, who dig an ever-deepening hole in their lives by repeating the same destructive mistake as though it might somehow “help” this time — this is what the trendy psychologists call “self-medicating” — determine the fate of your country. That seems a bit obvious, I admit, but it is apparently a lesson that the former greatest nation on the planet never learned.