“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Newsweek: “A Cut of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, 1980

Whenever I think of Donald Trump’s soliloquies that feature mispronounced countries like “Thighland”, mangled names of national treasures like “Yo-Semites”, and incoherent political vocabulary words like “toetallytariatism”, I think of only one thing: the 2006 movie, “Idiocracy”.

Trump’s gibberish is almost always comprised of highly entertaining “macaronics”, a word that I instantly placed in my memory palace for moments like this. Trump reaches deeply into a white bouquet of American speech patterns and literally speaks phonetically so that nobody among his cult ever has to learn how to read. And he’s destructively impulsive in case you haven’t noticed yet. As George Packer writes in the Atlantic: “He’s like a boy who starts tossing matches near a gasoline spill to see what happens.”

Welcome to Hollywood; welcome to Enquiring Minds Want to Know – only use small words and speak slowly. And when Donald Trump is forced to read a speech that was written for him by someone else, he uses a strangely monotone, sing-song voice meant to convey his impatience with having to curb his worst inflammatory instincts. Donald Trump channels Bart Simpson’s bratty style of anti-authoritarianism. His ideas are reminiscent of the opening chalkboard gag in the Simpsons episode, “Like Father, Like Clown” where Bart writes on the chalkboard: “I will finish what I sta” – over and over again. Or in the episode, “Mr. Bart Goes to Washington”, where he is forced to write on the chalkboard: “Spitwads are not free speech.” And one of my all-time favorites: “High explosives and school don’t mix”.

But don’t be misled by the antics of a 5th grader with dementia. From establishing a Secret Police Force to preventing mail-in ballots, Trump has been using his DIY approach to the presidency to permit capital to displace labor with a cosmic sized Kaboom!

By now, you may be wondering how the image above, showing the restoration of the fresco, “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man), by Elías García Martínez, a 19th-century painter, somehow meshes with the movie, “Idiocracy” and Bart Simpson at the chalkboard. In 2012, Cecilia Giménez, an 80-year-old woman with no previous training in art restoration, or even in art of any kind, decided that she could and should fix the deteriorated fresco. The result presages our future: Idiocracy. Idiocracy is when someone with absolutely no education and no qualifications “restores” a 19th century fresco because everybody deserves a chance to express their inner genius. America became a formal idiocracy when Kanye West announced his candidacy for President of the United States. Idiocracy is where “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

This Trump-designed and Republican-inspired farce that threatens the destruction of American liberal democracy has finally exceeded the speed of light, as retirees now consider volunteering at their local post office so that mail-in ballots can be processed in time for the November election – and America doesn’t end up electing a “president for life”.

We now live in an idiocracy where too much scientific inquiry leads to too much, you know, knowledge and stuff. But now for the bad news: We’ve been an idiocracy for 50 years. It began with the political consumerism model brought to us by the cheerleader also known as Ronald Reagan. It was championed by the Voodoo Economics of the Grandee of Kennebunkport, George H. W. Bush. It was delivered to us swaddled in the blanket of deregulation – compliments of George W. Bush, you know, the “guy you’d like to have a beer with”.

In the understatement of the 21st Century, Tom Nichols writes in his “The Death of Expertise”: “These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.”

The National Science Foundation reported that in a 2014 survey: “About 25% of 2,200 Americans surveyed believes in a geocentric solar system (that the sun orbits the earth), and 35% of Americans could not name any branch of the U.S. government. Moreover, 53% of Republican U.S. Representatives and 74% of Republican Senators deny the scientific facts of the causes of climate change.”

Historian Benjamin Carter Hett, in his new book entitled: “The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War” writes: “Above all, the world of the 1930s was wracked by a fundamental conflict: Should the world system be open and international, based on democracy, free trade and rights for all, anchored in law? Or should the world be organized along racial and national lines, with dominant groups owing nothing to minorities and closing off their economic space as much as possible to the outer world? Today we face this very conflict once again.”

We are an idiocracy struggling with profound questions like: “Should I wear a mask during a pandemic, even if it makes me look like a girlie-man?” And “My right to refuse to wear a mask definitely trumps your right to live.”

And the most astounding of all examples of life imitating art was delivered directly from Trump’s pouty little lips to your exploding head: “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light… supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way”. Adding: “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

America the Beautiful, where is your backbone? You have succumbed to the dumbest pick-up line in history: “Make America Great Again”. And you have become a swamp of stupid.