Trump and the Republicans: The Dominant and Submissives in an S&M Big Daddy Personality Cult
The dis-Honourable Michael T. van der Veen, Esq., mislabelled the charges against Trump as “incitement to resurrection,’ and can’t really seem to speak English. At least not coherently. When the gormless lawyer sputtered about whether or not Trump’s actions amounted to ‘Incitement to Resurrection,’ though ridiculous and misspoken, he was not wrong to put it into that apocalyptic context.
At the moment Pence was running for his life through the Capitol back stairways, a military aide was chasing after him, carrying the ‘nuclear football.’ Trump knew this, of course. …And he didn’t give a shit. In fact, he liked it — took it as a compliment and confirmation of his influence and power — that he was loved by his deplorable insurgents. In fact, moments later, he doubled down on condemning and further endangering Pence in an enflaming Tweet to his raging ‘followers,’ criticizing his own VP as a coward for not stopping the ratification of the people’s vote. His Tweet doubling down on maligning and attacking Pence a few moments later was Reckless Endangerment on THE grand scale.
And so we add this to the extant actionable charges of Depraved Indifference, Criminal Negligence, Dereliction of Duty, Unlawful and Egregious Abuse of Power, and a major Betrayal of his Oath of Office.
Why was Trump so ebulliently, gleefully confident in 2016 when he crowed” “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”? Exactly WHY did he think “his almost unlimited bravado, bombast and dominance of any situation” would allow him “to get away with figurative murder”? (Robert Reich, ‘Trump said he could kill and win — Covid and cheating may prove it,’ The London Guardian, 11 Oct 2020.) Why was he SO sure his worshipful followers would just continue to reliably, endlessly, masochistically ‘bend over’?
Because he’d been practicing his textbook case of Malignant Narcism and sociopathy on family members since he was a child, where he learned such techniques of mental cruelty, emotional abuse, psychic terrorism, humiliation and control literally at his father’s knee. He practiced on his siblings, to the point of nearly getting all of them disinherited. He practiced on his own children, Ivanka included (just using different abusive methods more aligned with tactics of emotional, erotic and romantic surrogacy, which are nevertheless textbook techniques of child abuse). He’s practiced the lessons daddy taught him on his wives, and on everyone and anyone who’s ever come within 100 miles of his influence or orbit. More to the point, malignant narcissists’ cravings for their ‘narcissistic supply’ (medical term for the kind of fraught attention they garner by such methods) demands it. They’re addicts.
Why do abusers do this shit? Because it works. It not only gets them the fix they need, in the immediate sense, it even works exponentially, on a mass scale, on crowds, factions and entire demographics. Fifty-three percent of Republican interviewed in a recent poll, taken in the weeks since the incendiary riots and insurrection at the Capitol Building, said they would vote for Trump if he entered the lists in a 2024 GOP primary.
A correspondent on Academia.edu made the following comment: ‘“Disgust, horror, awe, and fascination often join forces” and I can see that running through history and manifesting in recent history in Fascism, autocracy, dictatorship and the most recent one; Trump. It explains the psychology and fascination of the millions mesmerized as they were with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc. that in itself is an uncomfortable truth about our nature and how societies go through the phases that seem to defy explanation or reason.’
I responded, ‘Yes, and the fascination that bizarrely depraved serial killers hold for certain groupie-like cadres of women and men. I’ve been thinking about this lately — it’s as if there’s this faction out there, as many as one third of the population, who actually crave a demented no-holds barred, boundary smashing psychopath for a ‘leader’ they can literally worship. Like, it ‘frees’ them or something. Like, that’s how constrained they feel — that they need something this outré, this outlandish and transgressive, so far beyond the pale, to spring them from their bonds — religious, authoritarian, fear-based or whatever…’
I actually heard Republican operative, Executive Director of Stand Up Republic Evan McMullin, say on CNN, “I think the sentiments among our group after the acquittal of Trump in the Senate by Republicans is that it only makes more serious the demands for something new, whether it’s a faction within the GOP that’s committed to democracy, or an independent faction that works outside of it….” !!!!! (OMG!)
I mean, WTF?!!! Shouldn’t ALL representatives of a nominally democratic nation be “committed to democracy”? If they’re not “committed to democracy, then what the fuck ARE they committed to? ….Begging the question, what the fuck are they doing there then? If they’re not “committed to democracy”? If they don’t stand by their own election or role as a representative in a democratic process?
Easily the thousand and tenth time I’ve been utterly stumped by an American (unerringly a Republican) lack of socio-political coherence and/or logical follow-through. On all fronts. Thought mechanisms on the fritz. I blame the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” and other scamming meta-narrative mind-fuckery.
There’s something wrong with the thinking process — and I’ve always noticed it. It’s mean, small-minded and punitive while being sanctimonious about it — like it’s a good thing. I mean like, since Nixon, and John Birchers and the Religious Right and their notions of Right Wing rectitude and their mendacious and demonstrably false justifications that the ends justify the means.
This is false logic. Function follows form and vice versa. Obviously. You can’t have a result that is somehow divorced from its ingredients. It has to do with the cultural narrative, the story they tell themselves, that is cynical in the extreme, and takes a toll on their collective cultural cognition. There was an article published some time ago about Bill Barr’s ultra-conservative Opus Dei styled Catholicism dictating his corrupt behaviours disguised as piety and rectitude.
To sum up, I greatly resent the Earth having been put in danger of nuclear conflagration because the asshole couldn’t care less about putting the ‘nuclear football’ being carried by Pence’s military attache into the hands of nihilistic domestic terrorists flying his flag. He has to answer for that.
Trump, personally, will go down, certainly — in federal courts across the land, resoundingly in the Georgia Supreme Court and in the State of New York. Also, the City of New York.
Hopefully, somehow, the Republican Party will implode, the radical insurgent Trumpists will splinter off and self-destruct in a cultic conspiracy theory ghetto, and racist male-identified American Christian White Women will come to their senses and stop voting against their own self-interest as women, which is to say, voting Republican.
(Racist American Christian White Men are not motivated to transform their allegiances as, obviously, they perceive voting Republican as voting in their own self-interest, not unjustifiably. Plus, the party is afraid of and in thrall to its own monster — the monster it created.)
My message to everyone is ‘buckle up.’ Because no matter who you are, or where you are, since Trump was acquitted, you will be hugely, negatively impacted down the line. The knock-on effects will be deleterious in the extreme. That’s what happens when an overwhelmingly dominant ideology, economy and militaristic society goes rogue. This is why the U.S., where such things can, apparently, so easily happen, must never again be permitted such power.
The ‘Communist’ society of China and its cynical use of capitalism to acquire economic hegemony must, likewise, be given a hard look and internationally sanctioned. Any nation state that tries the same crap must be contained, its ambitions constrained. For the good of All. And this dominant-submissive Big Daddy personality cult bullshit absolutely needs to go the way of the dinosaurs.
