Donald Trump will try his best to co opt the RNC for himself with help from the same enablers who sold their souls to him from the start. What is clear, is that in spite of the feverish support he has from millions of his followers, and their expected social media barrage, Trump will face longer odds to resurrect himself without the machinery of the Republican Party. That platform is the single biggest asset he has to potentially exploit as he leaves office.
The story linked below is yet another trigger for the exhaustingly redundant questions I’ve tried to answer for myself of how this man got elected, and how it is possible he could continue to infect our sociopolitical system years after he’s gone from the White House.
Concurrent with the devastating coronavirus sweeping the globe, is an equally virulent disease that has infected millions in America. Trumpism. In this case, the answer is not a vaccine, but a broad scale comprehensive treatment of the disease carriers that is even more monumental than administering a nationwide Covid vaccine.
It’s hard to imagine a single individual as the proverbial patient-zero being capable of super spreading an infection, which then goes on to cause a chain reaction in a country’s entire political system, but, that is what this country is fighting off right now with Donald Trump and, arguably, his victims.
The origin of the disease is not an immediately transferable comparison with a physical virus because it’s not physiologically originated. It is psychological. Likewise, it is not a contagion that one gets, or not gets, through random unexplained immunity, or inherent physical vulnerability. Instead, this psychological disease needs to be understood from its earliest days within each individual’s initial infection, and then, tracing contact backwards through family, friends, parents, co-workers, as far back as necessary, and of course, including the overlay of technology and social media.
I have ruminated on this, and other “psychological diseases” afflicting humanity long before this dude in his red cap and red tie showed up. He’s nothing new. He is a human character that’s been re-incarnated many times from others who have come before him. He’s nothing new. Nor are his followers. He, and they, are simply this time’s version of the same play and theater that had its curtains raised on what’s always been there among all of us. Fear. Fear of powerlessness. Fear of weakness. Fear of loss. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of the other. Fear of confronting fear.
Humanity is prone to a panoply of fears on a daily basis. Small fears. Medium fears. Larger fears. Each of these fears has a root perhaps in a single universal fear. Unfortunately, honest deliberation among all of the earth’s citizens on subjects of this depth, rarely occur outside of deeply religious enclaves, often with dogmatic approaches. They form communities of coping and perseverance in the name of one religious or spiritual movement or another, but, in most cases, the end result is the same. Separating us from each other in judgement. No matter how gentle the language used in defining those who “believe” and those who do not. This will also be the struggle of humanity. The struggle to feel part of something universal, of a higher meaning, and of an equal inherent value among all the others in the same grand scheme.
Donald Trump may be easily diagnosed with deeply rooted psychological problems, but tens of millions of his followers are not as easy to dismiss. Understanding them is no different than understanding any critical mass of humanity that is stirred into action at any given time in history. Its nothing new. It happened before. It will happen again. What have we learned? What will we learn?
MB
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights”
― Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
How Trump Hopes to Use Party Machinery to Retain Control of the G.O.P.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/us/politics/trump-gop-control.html?referringSource=articleShare