In Trump’s world, there isn’t really right and wrong
Chris Cillizza explains Trump’s thinking on the whole fascism is bad-I love fascism thing.
On Monday night, just hours after he had, finally, condemned in harsh terms the neo-Nazis and white supremacists involved in violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump took to Twitter. And he retweeted thisfrom a man named Jack Posobiec:
“Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?”
It’s true, there were many shootings in Chicago over the weekend. It was 30, not 39, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Nine people died. But this is more about who Trump chose to retweet.Posobiec is a well-known figure on Twitter — he has more than 181,000 followers — thanks to his vociferous defenses of Trump and his willingness to promote conspiracy theories.
He is, to put it kindly, an unreliable source. He peddles falsehoods. He is a provocateur, more interested in making headlines than adhering to established facts.
He’s the guy who’s organizing that stupid “March on Google” to protest against all this weak girly apologizing for talking sexist shit.
So why would Trump RT someone like that?
Maybe he didn’t know who Posobiec is…but it’s a lot more likely that he did know and that’s just what he likes.
Remember this: In Trump’s world, there isn’t really right and wrong. There are people who love him/work for his interest and people who hate him/work against his interests. There is no gray area between those two poles.
If you are in the love category, you are, by definition, good. The reverse is true for those Trump puts in the hate column.
And that’s Trump – a moral vacuum. In Trump’s world, Trump is all there is.
Can you imagine a more hellish world?
It’s also Scott Adams’ world, apparently. I never thought Dilbert was that funny, but seeing its creator say that Trump embodies empathy, love of America, and adroitness at the helm is eye-opening that fascism can be just as seductive to the economically secure as the economically anxious (as we really knew all along).
In a lot of ways, I think it may be even more seductive to the economically secure, because authoritarianism is very useful to them in terms of keeping the “riff-raff” from taking what they have. My dad got more and more toward that ideal as he got more comfortable, as if somehow someone (probably a person of color or a feminazi) was going to take away everything he owned.
I think you’re right. It’s all about maintaining what they’ve got, and not letting the people below them have anything more. That’s the core grievance of those poor working-class white people; not that they’ve been taken advantage of for generations by upper-class whites, but that they’ve been at the top of the local heap and able to look down on the coloureds. Now that that’s over, they’re awfully aggrieved.
The sad thing is that if they would just stop trying to reclaim their place in the former hierarchy, all of that resentful energy could be used to break the current one and make everyone more equal and most of us better off. But we can’t have that.
And yet, the morons with the tiki-torches…working in hot-dog stands etc.?
Gibbon wrote about democracy teetering between ‘The jealous interest of the few, and the rude enthusiasm of the many.’ The way the ‘many’ subordinate their own good to the ‘few’ is the most chilling thing.
Smug triumphalism and aggrieved whining. Even Trump sees himself as opwessed and beset with enemies.