Amazing Seth Abramson Thread about Donald Trump, Domestic Terrorist

Seth Abramson has written an amazing thread about what Donald Trump represents, and the destruction he is wreaking among the American public and American institutions. Because Twitter is awful, his 50-tweet thread is difficult to read, so I have pasted it all together into a single document below.

(For those who find the term “domestic terrorist” alarming when used in the context of the President of the United States, please see my previous blog post about the nature of terrorism: The Information-Terror Complex.)

This is a thread about Donald Trump. If what it says conforms with how you feel, I hope you’ll consider sharing it with others.

We need to never again discuss this man with respect to policy — it’s become more than clear in 9 months that he holds no policy positions. So if you support Donald Trump because of any view you claim he holds, I don’t ever want to hear from you again. The man holds no views. There is no position Donald Trump has ever taken that he has not, at some point in the past or present, taken the opposite position to. We mustn’t ever discuss this man as someone “challenging the system” or any similar bromide. His White House is the most corrupt ever.

Not one story of honorable conduct has emerged from this White House. Instead, it’s been lies, deception, corruption, graft, propaganda. But the most important thing is this: this is the first U.S. president to systematically and willfully terrorize his own populace daily.

His changeability is intended to keep us anxious and on guard. In fact, he’s admitted publicly, many times, that this is a tactic of his. His corruption is equally studied: his business model has always been “get away with what you can,” and that’s exactly how he’s governed. He saw that he had a GOP Congress — and knew that his worst-case scenario was not getting re-elected to a job that he never really wanted.

That’s why he hasn’t eliminated his conflicts of interest, delivered on his promises, “drained the swamp,” acted as any kind of leader. His presidency is a criminal enterprise designed to enrich his family and give him the attention his father clearly denied him as a kid. He has no beliefs, no ambitions, no morals, no principles, no guidelines, no plans, no expectations. He simply needs to sow chaos daily.

What Trump knows better than most is that America is a chaos machine — you feed it and it spits out attention, headlines, sometimes money.

I want to be very clear here: Donald Trump is a toxic human with a toxic public presence and — worst of all — he wants to poison his people. His reign will go down not just in U.S. history but human history as a reign of uncommon cruelty in the democracies of this millennium. It’s more than that; he’ll go down in our history as the worst president we’ll ever have — he’ll go down as one of our greatest villains. Benedict Arnold tried to betray America for a prior sovereign — Trump is trying to torture a nation that was good to him his whole life.

Have you noticed a change in your mood since January? I mean a change you can’t seem to escape? Anxiety, anger, fear, confusion, doubt? The most ubiquitous man in your nation is trying to poison you daily — because it gives him power — and no one’s stopping him from doing it. I’m not using hyperbole: you’re under attack. A deliberate, unprovoked, systematic, and — yes — evil attack. And it’s working. We’re losing.

When humans are endangered, confused and hopeless, there are certain things we turn to — all of which Trump is deliberately stealing away. Our fight or flight instinct — which Trump activates — can be quelled if we’re given respite, which is why Trump ensures we have no respite. That’s why his tweets — which are intended to terrorize, and do — come in a daily barrage of needless conflict, warmongering, and cruelty. He must never stop tweeting, because his tweets now activate our culture in a way so inescapable that we’re almost like his prisoners. You think he’s attacking North Korea in his tweets? No — he’s trying to terrorize you. The NFL? You. Segments of America? No — all of us.

When humans are confused, we seek the stability of truth, trusted institutions, neighbors. He’s destroying those anchors systematically. “Fake news” isn’t about getting re-elected — it’s about controlling your fight-or-flight instinct by giving you no safe harbor in “truth.” Every institution we like or trust, he’s undermined. The media. Government. Unions. Hell — even the NFL. Veterans (when he feels like it).

He’s enabled by the GOP — but he’s no Republican. He wants to destroy any politics or politician whose world he’s not at the center of. He’s a malignant narcissist, and his only ambition is to spread his toxicity nationwide in whichever ways feed his perverse pathology.

If you’re a Trump voter, by all means laugh it up. You’ll be caught in wars, recessions, and international collapse like the rest of us. He has 35% support because Americans love to be right/see fools suffer — and Trump voters think they’re on the right side of the equation. Time will show that we were all the fools — and whatever temporary satisfaction the Right got from annoying the Left wasn’t worth America.

Because the last thing — of the three I mentioned — humans look for in a crisis is hope, and he’s systematically taking that away as well. We don’t have hope future elections will be fair. We don’t have hope our government is working in our interests. We don’t have hope we can trust and love our neighbors and they’ll trust and love us back. And we don’t have hope things will start to make sense again.

But only a fool fails to see that the pain and suffering that comes from having a madman as a leader is soon coming for every one of us. Things are going to get very bad. And many fools will say, “Well — that’s America.” And America is deeply flawed. But we weren’t this.

One in every few generations in the West, a leader arises so vile that he can draw out the evil from his population and weaponize it. Trump is not Hitler. There was only one Hitler. But Trump is the sort of Hitler that America in 2017 — at its very worst — can breed.

Everything evil a man can do to a country like this, at a time like this, in a span of four or eight years, Donald Trump will try to do. He’ll try to make the vulnerable live in fear. He’ll position himself as unreviewable by the media and government. He’ll sow confusion. And when his crimes are uncovered — and he’s been a villain and criminal his whole adult life — he’ll try to stoke violence to save himself.

Trump is the most dangerous American of all our lifetimes — he’s so dangerous we can’t fully apprehend the danger or how to respond to it. He’s an actually evil presence that hangs over your life — and the life of a nation you love — every single day. And he may be unstoppable.

Is there any reason to trust future election results — now that we know Russia is hacking/interfering and Trump’s doing zero to stop it? And is there any reason to think the damage Trump has done to our political system can be solved in just a single American generation? And as he plunges us deeper into our Longest War and tries to start World War III in Asia, can we be certain lasting doom isn’t ahead?

My point: there is only one fight in America today that matters, because all other fights are ultimately a direct corollary to this one. If we want to save ourselves — and our country — Trump must be legally, peacefully and transparently removed from a position of power. ASAP.

(End of Abramson thread)

What’s really horrifying many people is the realization that a good portion of the media is happy to engage in mere partisanship and support this vile regime. They only trade in eyeballs and clickthroughs, and so as long as people keep watching, they keep doing their thing. The GOP has shown no spine and no interest in holding this beast accountable.

Of course there is also the horrifying realization that a large portion of our fellow Americans will support something as grotesque as Donald Trump, because of their information diet and/or ignorance of history. As of September 2017, after Charlottesville, after a disastrous visit to the UN, after a bunch of grandstanding at hurricanes, Donald Trump enjoys a 40% approval rating. Among Republicans, he enjoys an 80% approval rating. Eighty. Percent.

I sincerely believe that Donald Trump is right: he could shoot somebody in broad daylight, on Fifth Avenue, and he would not lose any support. After all, the liberals and the mainstream media are going to get all triggered and protest — and in the minds of 80% of Republicans, that must mean that it’s OK.

This long shadow of a national breakdown is the legacy that Roger Ailes has left us with. This is the Republican brand now: “Make liberals angry.”

Please pay attention to what has been revealed: The next demagogue that comes along, who isn’t so idiotically narcissist and stupidly corrupt as Donald Trump, is going to start with these numbers as a BASELINE. They just need to keep a reasonable Facebook ad budget and they’re going to be flying in the high-60s just by breathing.

I write this addendum as a reminder to civil libertarians of all political persuasions that we live in a real world, populated with real people who see things very differently. In the event of a breakdown of social order, the value of commodities and objects gets reduced to their objective core. That’s why I recommend having a small stash of: guns, fuel, food, and gold.

I would also add “communications equipment” to this, but unfortunately that is one area that we’re doing poorly as a civilization. We need truly decentralized digital communications infrastructure, from the physical layer of mesh networks, to higher-level decentralized storage networks and application protocols. There are interesting projects happening in that space, but they’re not primetime.

I would have added “history books” to the list, but I’m sure everyone already has plenty of those and has been reading them.

It may be a very long night before the dawn. It is best to be prepared.