The crowd roared
Greg Sargent at The Post underlines the obvious: Trump is an abusive monstrosity bent on destruction.
At a rally in Ohio on Thursday night, President Trump drew deafening cheers by boasting about his order to assassinate Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, deriding Democrats with petty schoolyard taunts and mocking the very idea that Congress should act to constrain his warmaking powers.
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At his rally, Trump belittled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “not operating with a full deck.” He derided House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff as “you little pencil neck.” The crowd roared, demonstrating how heavily Trump’s petty abusiveness figures as a factor in his appeal.
But what Trump really displayed here is that his deranged attacks on the opposition aren’t mere insults. Taken along with Trump’s mockery of congressional demands for input into decisions of war, they demonstrate a profound contempt for the very notion that his most consequential decisions should be subject to oversight and accountability at all.
Did we need any more demonstration of that? He’s made it very clear all along.
Mockery of the opposition is, of course, a constant in politics. But this is different. Trump regularly crosses over into a form of harsh belittling and abuse that is designed to delegitimize the opposition, that is, to tell his voters that the opposition has no legitimate institutional role in our politics at all.
Well…I think that attributes too much thought and deliberation to the abuser. Sure, the abuse delegitimizes, but he would do it even if it didn’t. He does it because that’s who he is, and because he thinks it’s funny, and because he thinks he’s a brilliant and successful insult comic, like Don Rickles but sexy and gorgeous. He does it because he likes doing it. That’s who and what he is: a person who loves insulting people, who can’t get enough of insulting people, who lives to insult people. He’s that guy. He’s a howling wilderness of ego and contempt, and the insults are an inevitable output of that recipe.
I suddenly imagined a possible way to mitigate Trump’s damage. It would take an enormous amount of work, but — right before one of his rallies, surreptitiously pay off the folks waiting in line and replace them with actors who look and sound like a Trump supporters. They fill the stadium and roar their approval when he comes out. And it all looks like a normal rally … for the first few minutes.
But then it changes. Petty insults get silence. Same with warmongering, or those sure fire attacks on liberals and the media. People start to boo. Whenever Trump mitigates his stance, however, the crowd applauds. It’s like those experiments teaching pigeons to play table tennis. By the end of the rally, he’s advocating bipartisanship, peace, and a return to civility, exiting to a standing ovation.
And the same with the next rally, and the next, till the Trump supporters can be trusted to return and follow the new zeitgeist. Our country’s crisis has been averted.
Of course, the details need to be worked out.
Heh. Brilliant plan.
I can’t like it though. I seem to be some kind of fundamentalist about it – I want people not to want to be like that, I want them to recoil from it as one would recoil from a spitting grease fire.
Toddlers and small children have to be taught that fire burns, and that insults are not nice. So perhaps the plan is less like fundamentalism, and more like enlightened parenting.
Both Trump and his fans are hanging out with bad influences. They need to be separated from each other and exposed to a nicer crowd, with better manners and more wholesome interests. Their rebellious natures, however, require a little deception here. Maybe the actual rally crowds replaced by the paid actors could be steered towards a rally with a single paid actor — a Trump look-alike in his greatest role ever, a President who begins to become presidential, gradually nudging his fans towards civilization. While, in the meantime, the same thing happens in reverse.
No need to worry about exposure. The media’s all so corrupt.
Sastra, didn’t we get a mini-version of that when Trump addressed the U.N.? Of course, he knew he wasn’t facing a crowd of supporters then, but it didn’t stop him from being shocked when he got laughed at or his “applause lines” drew silence.
No I’m the one who’s a fundamentalist about it – about wanting adult people to be not just conditioned not to harm others but to be converted to not wanting to.
It’s true that children have to be taught not to but it’s also true that children acquire empathy as their brains mature. But for a third true thing there are some people who just can’t – psychopaths for instance. So, yes, it would be good if Trump could be conditioned to stop harming others – I’d be down with electric shocks – but he would still be a bad person underneath.