The fantasy fraud of Trump is driven by America’s celebrity culture
He was able to con himself into the White House, where he damn near destroyed democracy and the nation.
By DOUG THOMPSON
April 5, 2023Donald J. Trump became president of this nation not because he was a good leader who deserved the job. No, he was a fantasy-driven con artist who sold a fake image and lied incessantly to voters who wanted celebrity, not leadership and fantasy, not truth.
He used racism to draw out the bigots, promised riches that only benefitted himself, and lied,, cheated, and conned his way into the most powerful office in a celebrity-driven nation.
Trump became a potent monster fabricated by the right-wing extremists who control Fox News, which sold his lies and threats to destroy democracy and the soul of a gullible cult.
He completed the destruction of a Republican Party that lost its way 30 years ago when it embraced lairs and frauds like Newt Gingrich and celebrity trollops like Sarah Palen. That party now promotes racists like Kevin McCarthy, its new speaker of the House, and white trash like Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom abandoned all pretense of truth or patriotism in a vapid search for power and money.
On Tuesday, as now-defendant Trump pled “not guilty” to the 34 felony charges of fraud, obstruction, and conspiracy to cheat the electoral system, there was a sad feeling of Deja Vu that dates back to Watergate and worse.
“There was something about Tuesday, and about the five days that preceded it, that was somehow both familiar and deeply abnormal.” writes Ted Anthony of the Associated Press.
He continues:
For the most part, Americans had left behind the all-Trump, all the time ethos that governed our days between 2016 and, say, mid-2021. So that Trump-flavored thrum that has prevailed since news of the indictment emerged Thursday was hardly new. Familiar, too, was the uneasy collision of exhibition with seriousness, of the mannered machinations of government with the anything-goes rhetoric of reality-TV-inflected, 21st-century populism.
Just as during the Trump presidency, you saw the monuments that Americans build to reassure themselves that their effort to administer a democratic republic is a Very Serious Endeavor. Before, it was the Washington edifices of the executive and legislative branches; on Tuesday it unfolded in a courthouse made of heavy masonry erected into the imposing architecture that enshrines the rule of law.
Yet all that familiarity obscured what was something genuinely new under the American sun: the moment-by-moment chronicling of an ex-president leaving for court, entering court, charged with felonies in court, leaving court in a motorcade headed for the airport to board his private plane, the one with his name very publicly painted on the side.
This is happening when the House of Representatives is controlled by a majority of brain-dead Republicans who falsely claim that Trump won the 2024 election while they also support and promote a disgraced fraudulent former president who is facing not only 34 felony indictments but will also certainly be indicted in Georgia for trying to overturn a legal election and new charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy of sedition, a serious charge that is really treason against this nation.
Notes Holly Bailey in The Washington Post:
In Georgia, the investigation is far more sprawling, involving a cast of characters that includes not only Trump and some of his closest advisers but a litany of prominent Republicans including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. LindseyO. Graham (R-S.C.) and several top Georgia officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were the targets of Trump’s lobbying to overturn Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state.
In Esquire magazine, Charles Pierce warned the nation about Trump before he was elected in 2016.
Damn the delegates who will vote for this man. Damn the professional politicians who will fall in line behind him or, worse, will sit back and hope this all blows over so the Republican Party once again will be able to relegate the poison this man has unleashed to the backwaters of the modern conservative intellectual mainstream, which is where it has been useful for over four decades. Damn the four hopeless sycophants who want to share a stage with him for four months. Damn all the people who will come here and speak on his behalf. Damn all the thoughtful folk who plumb his natural appeal for anything deeper than pure hatred.
Trump, who has declared bankruptcy multiple times so he could walk away from his failures, sold himself as a “successful real estate developer” as host of the “Apprentice” reality show on NBC. In reality, such shows are cheaply produced fantasies.
“Donald J. Trump remains a potent force. Commanding attention has been his world, and politics is a realm of attention,” says Ted Anthony. “Whether the legal realm, which he has successfully avoided until now, will be anywhere near the same for him may be another reality entirely.”
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