Reconsidering Trump
The battle-cry of the clinically insane
That was the title and theme of an editorial I recently read, by an author who is good enough to sound reasonable, on occasion, but who quietly pumps out morally repellent nihilism in great quantities. Still, his ideas seem to resonate with a lot of young men so I think we should look at them.
The first warning sign is usually when the author attempts to provide his nonpartisan bona fides. He will say something like, “Don’t get me wrong, Trump is a horrible human being and was a terrible president.” That said however, the author will immediately give Trump a pass for his past (and future!) crimes and offenses by saying he is “authentic” or “a disruptor” or simply a cunning politician giving the people what they want. Then they usually like to throw in something flippant about how all of Trump’s schemes to destroy the country failed so… no harm, no foul, right?
Then it’s hard on to the real purpose of the article, talking about how hopeless and broken the system is, how awful President Biden is, and how we’re all doomed and should just let democracy fall. It serves up *truckloads* of false equivalency, whataboutism, and double standards. After all, Trump may have been impeached twice, tried to overthrow the United States government, and is promising a vengeance-based Nazi-lite regime if reelected, but evil Joe Biden has failed to solve a centuries-old conflict in the Middle East to everyone’s perfect satisfaction! I mean, they’re practically twins!
The author claims that people pointing out that Trump is embracing white nationalism and drawing inspiration from Hitler’s speeches about “vermin” and immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America means that we have lost the moral high ground and thus the argument, in a willful misreading of Godwin’s Law. What that joke law actually refers to are people who like to say that anyone who disagrees with them are Nazis. For example, people who tried to say that the public health regulations during the pandemic were like Nazi Germany are silly people who overreact and can’t argue. Calling attention to authoritarian and racist behavior by a political leader is clearly different and necessary.
Finally, after the author has made numerous excuses for Trump and many wild assertions about which states Biden has already lost for his imagined transgressions, the author says that maybe Trump isn’t such a bad option. Maybe he’ll destroy the country and we’ll break up into smaller states, but that doesn’t sound so bad. It reads like two teenage boys acting cool and saying, “Yeah, I’d go to hell. That’s where the parties are! Who wants to sit around playing a harp with dumb angels?”
Except of course, the fall of American democracy would not be good, or better, or okay, or bloodless, or without-horrifying-consequences. It would likely mean the fall of democracies around the world. It would mean a global economic meltdown. It would mean violence and chaos. Trump CAN NOT be president again. If you sincerely have a problem with the entirely adequate job that Joe Biden has done as President, then you should be doing everything humanly possible to help Nikki Haley get the Republican nomination because if it is a choice between Trump and Biden that is no choice at all.
