I grew up watching John F. Kennedy on the nightly news, on what was a circular RCA Black and White TV whose picture quality approximated looking through a mayonnaise jar, empty but not yet cleaned. I grew up poor, but never saw myself as disadvantaged. I could change that. I knew I had the means and the mental acuity to find the answers.
And to me, as an adolescent, it seemed that America was truly the greatest of democracies as they continued to battle America’s historic demons of racism and white supremacy. I thought they could and would win that fight. It seemed that they were against dictatorships, limiting communism and its spread around the globe, and supporting and lifting up people and nations to see the promise of the future and the value of democracy in a world that had recently ended the worst and most destructive conflict in man’s history.
I thought, Americans truly believed in democracy.
America, post WWII seemed a place where anyone could achieve their dreams, as long as you worked hard, told the truth, and played by the rules. Then came the assassination of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Vietnam. The bubble seemed to burst, but America was still seen as a beacon for those wanting a better life.
The end of the Vietnam War, and the loss of the war by the United States, created a schism in the American psyche that to this day, still haunts America. Combined with Nixon’s dishonourable conduct, lies and guilt, and with his discharge of sorts from the Presidency, it seemed to all the world that America had hit bottom.
“I’m not a crook”, validated the world’s opinion that indeed, the Presidency of the United States had harboured a kleptocrat. Fly forward 50 years, and America now has, not just a kleptocrat, but an adjudicated rapist, pathological liar, racist, misogynist and sociopath as its supreme leader. A term that the narcissist may well, once day enshrine in the American lexicon.
How did the promise of America give way to a journey into chaos? When did Americans become comfortable with planned mass deportations, retribution, hate speech, lies as supposed information and threats of turning the military against America;s domestic opponents, ”the enemy within.” More importantly, how did minorities, those actually threatened with arrest and deportation come to vote for the man who will soon, see them deported?
How did America’s two main political parties become next to powerless, even emasculated, by a populist who vows to destroy their democracy? And trump was even returned to office by latinos and what appears to be a majority of black men?
America’s slide into the abyss – of its own making, has mirrored America’s escalating Evangelical Christian’s rise in numbers. What one would have considered counter-intuitive less than 25 years ago, is now a fact. The more ‘Christian’ America espouses to be, the less ethical and moral it acts. Truth is irrelevant, lies are now ‘alternate facts’, hatred and retribution acceptable, morals open to interpretation, and ethics, virtually unknown.
Many politicians today seem to have lost their moral and ethical compass. Their President elect lies, steals, acts hatefully, and seeks retribution, vowing vengeance against life-long bureaucrats just for doing their jobs. He has acted treasonously, like a predator, even raping women, – and yet the American public that elected him is ‘just fine’ with it.
https://www.gcrr.org/addendum-b
And this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the above link’s information will attest.
Republicans were giddy about trump, once again, winning the Republican nomination for the Presidency. In fact, the uglier their candidate has actually become, the greater their support. And then, yes, praise god, he won the office a second time. After four Republican Presidential campaigns had been lost in succession, a man devoid of ethics or morality has won, twice. Republicans were and are, ecstatic.
Having attempted a coup that failed, due to his loss the last time around, DJT is now back, filled with a never-ending storehouse of hate, anger and vehemence, that only a vengeful sociopath can harness.
Having now won the Presidency and having control of the Supreme Court, he can now avoid prosecution and focus on destroying his opponents by whatever means possible.
Andrew Gumbrel wrote in the Observer on November 9, 2024,
“The country has not been the same since (trump). It’s true, the US has never been quite the shining beacon of its own imagination. On the international stage, it has frequently been belligerent, bullying, chaotic, dysfunctional and indifferent to the suffering in faraway nations – traits that bear some passing similarity to Trump’s leadership style.
But it has also, for more than a century, been the standard-bearer of a certain lofty vision, a driver of strategic alliances between similarly advanced democratic nations intent on extending their economic, military and cultural footprint across continents.
After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion. And now….alliances are for chumps.”
Trump has a zero-sum mentality, and he has sold it successfully. The idea that anyone can ‘have it all’ in America was extinguished by events like the housing bubble of the early 2000’s, the Covid Pandemic and a rapid rise in inflation and unemployment. The fact that today, education is near requisite, yet higher education costs crippling, has had a profound effect on those left out of the opportunities it afforded, which in turn has amplified anger. Trump fed and stoked that anger, demonizing those who are educated, who believe in science, those who trusted in the rule of law and in collaboration with democrats that trump and his cohort see as ‘the enemy’.
Everything that is wrong in America is “their” fault, was his lying mantra. And those who needed to find a scapegoat for their plight, bought into it in with extreme prejudice. Media, bought and paid for by trump’s congregation of crooks, amped the message. It’s all “their fault”, they said. It’s the reason you don’t have a job, a house or an education. And, in this zero-sum world, they swallowed all of it.
“They” were anyone that trump needed to blame in order to take no responsibility or attend to anything resembling the truth. Immigrants, refugees, Muslims, anyone identifiable as non-white, all were at fault. It’s a classic play that many tyrants and dictators have used throughout the ages, but today, a media and technology seemingly owned by trump, can create ‘alternate facts’ at will.
AS Gumbrel further stated,
“More appealing by far to those on the outside looking in are Trump’s promises of retribution, of tearing down the entire system and starting again.”
Trump isn’t interested in rationality, logic, collaboration or consensus thinking. He wants to exploit hatred, scapegoating and zero-sum politics where ‘he’ has all the power, and where someone else has all the responsibility. He will never allow himself accountability. He will lie, obfuscate, objectify and blame. In fact, with absolute power, trump will do whatever is necessary to destroy democracy and enshrine himself as the ultimate authority and supreme leader.
In turn, those who see themselves as oppressed – the working class, the disaffected, mostly young Black and Latino men, and those in menial jobs and labourers – have drank so much of his ‘kool-aid’, that they too now support a kleptocrat, liar, thief, racist, misogynist, pervert and sociopath destined to destroy every tenet of American life, -even extending to the constitution itself. The one-time promise of creating a “more perfect union” now seems hollow, inconsequential even trite.
Republicans chortle and smugly state that winning is everything. Well, unfortunately America will become lesser, more affected, angrier and less rational. Republicans fuelled the hatred, the obscenities, the derision, misinformation, lies and disinformation, all the while with a knowing smirk.
They will live with the result, and the consequences of hate-speech as Americans watch democracy dissolve and civil strife and disobedience ensue.
The worst is yet to come.
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