It’s a truism that anyone who would want to be president of this country should be automatically disqualified. From what I’ve read about the Republican would-be presidents in the Fox News debate, it’s a truism that’s true. Formerly dignified, formerly intelligent people raising their hands when asked if they’ll support Trump if he’s the nominee indicates that their lust for power is so strong they’ll ignore the man’s overwhelming moral and legal defects, the damage he’s done and is doing to this country, and the burn-it-to-the-ground rage that possesses him.
Donald Trump’s great appeal to his followers is that he has legitimized staying angry and damaged. He has made it okay to follow impulses toward cruelty and vengeance, impulses that destroy the possibility of becoming a decent human being. But for a lot of people, that’s okay.
We all have moments when we cherish our wounds and our anger, but common sense and common decency say that we shouldn’t inflict them upon other people. It takes consciousness to feel regret and decide to do better. It makes us better company, although we feel like crap until we actually become that better company.
Donald Trump’s example has made it okay to give up on consciousness. You never have to feel like crap even when you’re made of it.
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To say that Trump’s indictments on 91 separate charges are an attack on an innocent man requires a belief system that says everything we hear on the news is false, and that the conspiracy against Trump is so sweeping and perfect that mere humans cannot be involved. Someone else must be running things. Of course, if someone else is running things, how could Trump have been elected in the first place? How is it possible that Trump hasn’t departed this mortal coil in the manner of Yevgeny Prigozhin, if any entity is powerful enough to pull this conspiracy off?
Unanswerable questions. But you can be sure that these candidates either believe in a labyrinthine world where everything is constructed illusion or they’re lying through their teeth in order to become vice president and take over when Trump succumbs to apoplexy.
None of these people should be in office. We don’t want a leader who is a paragon of moral expediency. We don’t want a president who self-abases now and gets even later. We can look to the orc-state of Russia to see how that works out.
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Yes, Julie and I skipped the Republican Hopeful debate on Fox News. We didn’t want to start the 2024 election frenzy this early, and we don’t watch Fox News anyway. We get enough propaganda from the Watchtowers the Jehovah’s Witnesses leave on our front door. We also didn’t want to see people transform themselves into orcs in order to survive in Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
I’m 90% certain Donald Trump will not possess the Oval Office again. He might be the Republican Party nominee, and he might get enough electoral votes to make the election look close, but he won’t spend another day as president. He threatens our country much in the way that Yevgeny Prigozhin threatened the Russian state. You can’t back off when you attempt a coup. Everyone knows you will try, try again.
That doesn’t mean that Trump’s plane will suddenly explode on the way from Mar-A-Lago to Des Moines. It does mean that too many people know a second Trump term would be devoted to destroying his real and imagined opposition. We don’t yet have a Putin in this country, but Trump has signaled that if he gets back in office, he’ll become one. No Republican legislator or oligarch who dared threaten Trump would be safe. Smart Republicans, and smart Republican oligarchs—presuming both categories still exist—know that the Trump Revolution will eat its children.
Polls won’t tell us a lot until the nominees are settled, but I expect that if a poll indicates Trump has any chance of winning the election, steps will be taken to make him unelectable, by means of the Insurrection Act or the 14th Amendment or a suddenly Trump-hostile Supreme Court or a carefully preserved videotape.
Also Trump is an overweight, out-of-shape near-octogenarian who eats poorly, with poor sleep habits and self-administered overdoses of hate and fear. If Las Vegas hasn’t calculated his odds of dying before he reaches the Oval Office, a lot of would-be vice presidents have.
That’s problematic, because by definition, Trump’s vice president will be an orc.
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The Ukraine War has convinced a lot of formerly unbigoted people that Russia is an obscenely ugly country full of obscenely ugly people doing obscenely ugly things to their neighbors. It’s not for nothing that the Ukrainians call them orcs: monstrous, crude, stupid once-humans whose social organization is the devouring horde. You can look to Russian history to see how a once-humane people became so debased—a hundred years of totalitarian patriarchy will transform any decent human being into an orc.
That’s because patriarchy is, at its heart, an inhuman system. There can be only one patriarch, who embodies the state. Everybody else has to become something less, and the usual methods of totalitarian patriarchal takeover—normalizing the use of force against enemies, the cult of the innocent victim, the subjection of individual choice to the mob—ensure that they will.
Under totalitarianism, the individual becomes a black hole of greed, grievance, violence, and sadistic fantasy. Unthinking loyalty to the leader takes the place of strength of character. These things add up, over time, to a worshipper of death. A debased creature of a debased system. An orc.
The trouble is, even the leader of such a system becomes its victim. The patriarch ends up hollowed out from the inside, eaten up by the image he’s created, controlled by his own propaganda. It’s easy to see that Trump the president was a creature of Fox News, and without Rupert Murdoch—and to some extent Yevgeny Prigozhin’s disinformation factories—he would never have been elected. Now that Rupert Murdoch has broken with Trump, a lot of Republicans are looking to be the next creature of Fox News. They’re halfway there. By virtue of having risen up in the Trumpian state, they’re already creatures.
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People don’t like to be told they’re products of a system, but after being a student of human nature for 70+ years, I can’t think of anyone who isn’t. But some systems produce better human beings than others. Humans nurtured by liberal democracy, with its protections for individual dignity and privacy and free thought, are more resistant to becoming orcs than people who grow up in totalitarian organizations.
In our upcoming election, we are facing a brutal choice between human beings and orcs. If the orcs win, the idea of the arc of history bending toward justice will be put aside, probably for a century or two. If such an idea is ever revived, the civilization that revives it won’t resemble ours any more than it will resemble Russia’s.