Freak Out Friday – December 21, 2018

Happy holidays. If you work for the federal government, as tens of thousands of people do, then there is a significant chance that ten hours from now, you won’t be getting paid.

As Trump prepares to jet off to, as Stephen Colbert referred to it, the Winter Kremlin, the Senate is desperately meeting even as I write this to find a way to avoid a shutdown. But hey, at least Trump said that he would own it. It will be a Trump shutdown. He said that to Pelosi and Schumer, he said it in front of a room of reporters, he said it on camera. Schumer grinned broadly as Trump flat out said the Democrats would not be on the hook for the blame. He would take it. All him.

“The Democrats now own the shutdown!” he declared two hours ago.

Because he lied. Again. He lies thirty times a day, on average. This was just another lie, from the most dishonest president in the history of the country. Despite the fact that Republicans are no more enthused about the wall than the Democrats–indeed, polls show a majority of Americans oppose it–he has attempted to foist all the responsibility onto the party that he swore, to their faces, would not be held responsible. Maybe Schumer was smiling because he knew full well Trump would go back on his word and they could throw it in his face.

And yet no one will care.

That’s kind of what I want to focus on here.

Trump lies so routinely, with such facility, that the Washington Post has had to invent an entire new category called “Bottomless Pinocchios” to cover lies he has told repeatedly. He lied from the beginning of his campaign, through to his election and to this day. He consistently denies wrongdoings, condemns the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” even though dozens of people have been caught and jailed because of it, still claims that three million fake voters put Hillary over the top, still condemns the stream of desperate refugees heading this way as being terrorists or disease carriers without offering a shred of proof.

And yet people still support him.

Let’s face it, if President Hillary Clinton had paid off a porn star to cover up her affair with him, she’d already have been impeached. Yet the same people who howl “Lock her up!” at rallies turn a blind eye to Trump’s activities. The religious right is perfectly fine with a man married three times who cheated on his wife with a porn star.

I mean, do his supporters understand that they’re hypocrites? That’s assuming they even understand what the word means. How can it be that they are so fixated on their causes such as preventing a woman deciding what to do with her body that they’re willing to stay on board with a man unfit for the presidency. A man with ties to Russia, who worships at the feet of dictators and strong men and wants to emulate them. A man who is destroying our alliances and condemns NATO, of all things. A man who drives his own party and his administration nuts with his inability to be depended on to keep his word about…well, anything. A man who can be so easily manipulated that when a bipartisan agreement puts forward a means of keeping the government open, he refuses to sign off on it because Fox News shouts at him about the wall he swore hundreds of times that Mexico was going to pay for.

Indeed, lately on Twitter when I’ve posted something critical of Trump, I get deluged by idiotic responses from people either spewing the Fox party line, repeating Trump’s falsehoods as if they’re reality, or suggesting I stick to comics. They dismissed out of hand the notion of thousands and thousands of people receiving no money for their jobs, claiming it would only be for a short while even as Trump states the shut down could be for a “very long” time. The fact that they’ll be paid retroactively means nothing if you can’t pay your mortgage or rent, utilities bills, or for food right now. Yet it didn’t matter to the responders who felt it was no big deal.

How can they not care that Trump lies? How can they not care that people will be suffering?

I think it stems from Trump supporters praising him because “he says what he thinks.” That’s the most common refrain. This may be why these people hated Obama so much. Obama always clearly thinks about what he says before he says it. He considers the ramifications of his words and determines how it will appear in cold hard print before he speaks. This is how a reasoned, thinking person acts before he speaks, and since Trump is neither reasoned nor thinking, and barely qualifies as a person, naturally he does the exact opposite.

It may well be that that’s the attraction. Normal people have to be careful about what they say because there are ramifications, especially in the current era of social media where one recorded instance of someone using a racial epithet can bring the world crashing down upon them. Yet whatever Trump says, whether he’s condemning Mexicans as rapists, describing black nations as being “shit holes,” or boasts about grabbing women’s genitals, winds up sliding right off him. He’s the 21st century Teflon Don. If a normal person lied and insulted as much as he did, they’d likely lose their job, their friends, their family. Yet Trump says whatever he wants, and yes, people get upset and angry and bitch and moan, but then we pass into the next news cycle and it’s all forgotten.

It’s not that they don’t care that he lies. They envy his ability to lie and not have to pay any price for it. Gary Hart got sunk in his presidential campaign for actions that, as far as Trump is concerned, would just be things he does on an ordinary day. He lives the life that they would love to have for themselves: the ability to say and do whatever he wants and not have to pay any price for it. That’s what they wish they could do, and as long as they can’t, they get wish fulfillment in watching him do it. Especially when he does it to Democrats, whom they despise beyond the pale because we care about things they don’t like…I dunno…rights.

Trump’s supporters live their lives based entirely on letting their emotions guide them. We’ve been listening to Mister Spock speak about the foolishness of living one’s life that way for over half a century, but the lesson has not sunk in. They think not with their brains, but their guts, just as Trump states he does and assures them that his guts know better than politicians, intelligence officers, and heads of state. The notion that they don’t give a damn about people going without salaries means that they have taken it a step further: they are emulating Trump’s example of not giving a damn about people. We know that Trump is that way because he’s a narcissistic prick, but they are emulating that behavior because it’s what their leader does. It’s a deterioration of the American spirit, and as long as Trump is in charge, it’s just going to continue.

PAD