Trump, the King of Fools
Far too much has been said already. Too much ink spilled. Too much bandwidth used. Too much oxygen burned. Too much mental energy expended. Too much opportunity cost spent. Too much time wasted of the brief lives of mortals in arguing the painfully obvious, only to have such uranium-clad reasoning fail to move the slobbering mass of imbeciles who still support him, and who are still numerous enough within the electorate to threaten the world and the republic with a second disastrous term of Donald Trump. That so many people in what appears to be a persistent vegetative state are capable of walking upright to the polls is quite an astounding fact indeed, and one that must be reckoned with.
Trump is truly sui generis in the annals of American politics. Among political figures, historical and contemporary, he is uniquely stupid, inarticulate, and unlettered. He is malignant narcissism incarnate, with no sign that he possesses anything resembling common human empathy or decency. He is comically arrogant and oblivious to his own many shortcomings, both moral and physical. He often cruelly criticizes the looks of others, while himself looking something like a pear-shaped, orange, saggy sack of flesh in an ill-fitting, gauche suit and tie, topped with a combover that continues to mystify origami aficionados the world over. He has no scruples against projection, hypocrisy, and intellectual dishonesty of all kinds. He is constitutionally incapable of emotional equanimity or anything like stoic reserve. He is a sore loser. He is a sore winner.
He is the only president in history to have been criminally indicted, facing ninety-one felony charges. The only president to have been impeached twice. He has the ignominious honor of having had the highest staff turnover in presidential history and an unprecedented number of former cabinet members, including the usually apolitical military brass, speak out against him, both during and after the national clusterfuck (a technical term) that was his presidential term. This large list of detractors includes his attorney general, secretary of state, multiple chiefs of staff, multiple secretaries of defense, multiple national security advisors, numerous aides of all sorts, and his own vice president. The man has more disgruntled ex-lawyers than Wilt Chamberlain has ex-lovers. By a long shot, he is the most civilly litigated against, trailing a list of lawsuits numbering in the thousands. Twenty-six women have credibly accused him of rape or sexual assault, and a civil jury has found him liable for the sexual assault of one woman so far, making him preeminent among politicians for sexual misconduct—no easy feat.
He is the Old Faithful of liars, with deceptions both grand and petty regularly flowing from the fount of his oddly-shapen mouth like water from an ever-welling underground spring. He is paradoxically the world’s most obvious con man and perhaps its most successful one. A friend to dictators and enemies of the free world across the globe who browbeats and berates democratic allies. A draft dodger who disparages prisoners of war and fallen soldiers as “losers and suckers.” The only president who has ever whipped up a violent mob against both Congress and his own vice president. The only president to have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to deny citizens the right to vote and to have their votes counted. Need we go on? That this litany could be extended quite further is itself a crucially telling fact. Trump's unfitness for office is the most overdetermined conclusion in American political history. If it were any more overdetermined, it would be a tautology.
Despite all this, and despite the bleeding wounds of a scarcely countable and ever-growing number of both criminal and civil court cases, in both federal and state courts, involving election interference, fraud, mishandling of top-secret documents, hush-money payments to porn stars, defamation of his sexual assault victim, and others, he is still walking freely towards the GOP nomination. He is the real world analogue of the comically impervious horror-film villain who, despite sustaining stabs, blows, and shots that would have killed mortal men five times over, comes back again and again to rain havoc on the hapless protagonists. Behind this horror-villain stand the zombified droves of his supporters, as impervious to reason and common sense as he has hitherto been to justice. Continual efforts have been made to reason with them, but a steady plurality of the Republican base remains firmly inoculated against the ingress of manifest reality. Perhaps Thomas Paine, writing about a very different American crisis, said it best:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Where reason cannot penetrate, perhaps ridicule is warranted. If the foregoing fractional sample of all the oh-so-evident reasons Trump is not merely unqualified for office, but supremely anti-qualified, is not enough to sway the voters in his thrall, then let them be both scorned and pitied for being fool enough to fall for Trump’s obvious lies and transparent con artistry. For it is not those of us who see him for what he is who are the targets of his deceptions. It is the most gullible of the gullible—his followers. A person could withstand being considered deplorable, and perhaps even take some twisted sense of pride in it, a sort of negative virtue signaling. Absolutely no one, however, wants to be revealed as an easy mark, a pawn, a rube, an idiot. The thing is—that’s exactly what they are.