Yesterday, Trump took his road show to Arizona, to repeat his campaign shtick, up to and including ‘greatest hits’ like “Lock her up,” et al.
Trump goes to Arizona – Gustav Doré
James Clapper calls Trump speech ‘downright scary and disturbing’
Leinz Vales / CNN(CNN) James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, said Wednesday morning he questioned President Donald Trump’s fitness for office. “I really question his ability to be — his fitness to be — in this office, and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it,” Clapper told CNN’s Don Lemon on “CNN Tonight.”
Hours after Trump delivered a defiant speech in Phoenix, Arizona, Clapper said he found the President’s rally “downright scary and disturbing.” Clapper denounced Trump’s “behavior and divisiveness and complete intellectual, moral and ethical void…. How much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare?”
Well, at least I wasn’t alone in my assessment. It was 77 minutes of deflecting blame and dealing hate the way a Vegas dealer deals cards: slick and mechanical.
Now Republicans defend Confederate flags and monuments
Listening to Donald John Trump in Arizona tonight, accessed by accident but continued as I watched this serpent hypnotizing the gullible and unlettered masses of Arizona, (the New Alabama as Oklahoma is the New Mississippi) with his usual “I can’t let ANYthing go, EVER!” defense of his frankly stupid and racist response to Charlotteville, Virginia — as he carefully read an equally carefully Bowdlerized transcript on paper in his hand.
And there was, candidly, something entirely Hitlerian in his tirade. I could not help but recall Hitler’s ability to sway his crowds with raw emotion, and the SAME raw emotions: We got a lousy deal. We’re great but our enemies are keeping us down. Whatever is now wrong that I’m fixing was Barack Obama’s fault. I”m here to stand up for you. Etcetera.
Hitler rehearsing in front of mirror – 1925
It is a cunning linkage of the audience’s interests and pride with Trump’s pride and interests, and listening, you begin to understand the Pavlovian Conditioning involved: Trump will say whatever gets the audience to react as he wants: boos and then cheers, groans and then laughter, but endlessly sucking them into an IDENTIFICATION with Donald Jong Trump, the Aggrieved and Wounded Zillionare.
Kind of ironic that the Washington Post‘s fact-checking department just commemorated Trump’s first One Thousand Lies on the same day.
And most chillingly, the manner in which Trump took after the media, including the media present and endlessly and Methinks The Liar Doth Protest Too Much with his endless aria on CNN. Had he even less gall, his soprano might have squeaked even higher.
The alleged Trump “base”
I want you to understand something: this was the appeal of Hitler. The masses’ identification, the scapegoating, the attack on the media (Nazi term: Lügenpresse*) and the vicious xenophobic “patriotism” (almost entirely wrapped up in the hatred and loathing of “the other”). It was, to anyone educated in the history of fascist movements in the 20th Century, blood-chilling.
[* QUOTE: When a video of two Donald Trump supporters shouting “Lügenpresse” (lying press) started to circulate Sunday, viewers from Germany soon noted its explosive nature…. At that time [that the term was coined, in 1914], the word was used more descriptively. A decade later, it had turned into an explosive and stigmatizing propaganda slogan, used to stir hatred against Jews and communists. Critics of Adolf Hitler’s regime were frequently referred to as members of the “Lügenpresse apparatus.”]
And worse was the seemingly casual and almost off-hand manner in which Donald Jong Trump used the classical slurs, seeming to care very little as to whether they incited violence or worse against his enemies. What mattered was the ego of the septuagenarian toddler.
As Joseph Conrad has Kurtz note, the horror, the horror.
The cutsie-pie way he refused to name Jeff Flake and John McCain (the two Arizona senators who voted against the vicious bait and switch known as Trumpcare) while excoriating them AND self-characterizing himself as “presidential.”
As my parents’ favorite colloquialism states: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
All of the traditional neuroses, paranoias, tap dances and grotesqueries were on display, and perhaps the most dispiriting portion of the entire sorry debacle is that Donald Jong Trump hasn’t evolved or even moved forward so much as an angstrom from election night. He has learned nothing. Doesn’t even have any new enemies. It’s as though his entire miserable, insulting existence has concluded as the final inner groove on the British pressing of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album: an endless, unchanging loop of studio ephemera.
We are living in the midst of an entirely avoidable and now inevitable disaster and tragedy.
And we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The future cannot be (from this vantage) bright, and may well be apocalyptic.
I am glad that I stumbled on the spectacle and unutterably depressed that I viewed it.
We used to be a serious nation that cared about serious things. Now we’re a banana republic falling into disrepair and decay. And all self-inflicted.
And finally, astrologers were noting that the All American Eclipse of Monday fell almost exactly on a critical portion of Donald Jong Trump’s natal horoscope. And, as has been noted for thousands of years, its appearance on Regulus (Alpha Leonis) is considered an omen of destruction.
My view of the eclipse
So with a passing familiarity of the subject, I thought it might be interesting to look up the “Sabian Symbol” of the degree of the Total Solar Eclipse. (Sabian Symbols are a 20th Century invention of astrologers, with a symbolic situation for each of the 360 degrees of the circle.) You know, just for s***s and giggles.
Here, without further comment, is the seeming symbol of Trump’s eclipse doom:
The Sabian Symbol for Leo 28: MANY LITTLE BIRDS ON THE LIMB OF A LARGE TREE
FWIW. Just for the record.
“In a fit of pique he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there’s actually very little to stop him,” Clapper said. “The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.” [CNN ibid.]
Courage.
Cross posted from his vorpal sword.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.