He Knew! What Does That Mean For Us?
He Knew!
So we have witness testimony corroborating that Trump lied. That he knew he lost, but went with the "stolen election" line anyway.
It was clear from the moment he was first elected that he knew he was screwed, because the Presidency meant being under a real microscope, not like he was used to, and he couldn't continue to get away with a life of crime and Russian agentry. He knew that he needed to remain President into perpetuity to have a shield from criminal prosecution. He was desperate to keep power from the moment in 2016 that he knew he had won.
So what has this "Big Lie" really been all about? In plain language, he fabricated a fairy-tale for the paranoid, stupid, enraged, hate-filled, infantile, greedy, brainwashed ideological fanatics, racists, religious zealots, and borderline psychotic broken individuals who are his base. "Deplorables" doesn't even come close to covering it.
Not every single person who voted for him the first time are all of those things for sure. But those who went with him the second time around? They drank his Kool-Aid.
The most important question to ask then is not, in my view, what are the legal implications for this new revelation? That is low hanging fruit. In fact, it's an example of how we all too often react on a superficial "sense certainty" level to profound events rife with deeper meaning.
My question is "what went wrong with us", not "what went wrong with politics and the law?"
It is true that Donald Trump has always been fascinated with Adolf Hitler, in terms of how he could sway large numbers of people with oratory and propaganda. As mentioned previously, he used to read Hitler's speeches in a book he kept by his bed at night. But this fact doesn't explain the success of Trump's "Big Lie." It doesn't scan. How is it possible that a largely literate population with access to almost unlimited information through an array of technologies could swallow Trump's fairy-tale whole?
It's the Tabloids. It's reality TV. It's the culture of celebrity worship, sports heroes, Hollywood action heroes. It's the synthetic culture of sexual fantasy, violence and scandal to which Americans are addicted which have rendered so many vulnerable to Trump. And it is also the reason that resistance from his opponents has been up until now so lame.
It is easy to blame institutional racism, misogyny, capitalism, patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, or any other "ism" for Trump, because very little of it involves looking in the mirror. We are content to blame abstract conditions for our current predicament to avoid confronting ourselves.
We are addicted to scandal. Scandal in every domain. Sex scandal, financial scandal, sports scandal, Hollywood power couple scandal, political scandal. We relish it, luxuriate in it, we troll the news sites looking for more of it to distract ourselves from a reality we have difficulty facing day to day.
Unfortunately, enough of us have imbibed in this world of non-reality in recent years that the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is not has been blurred, creating a vulnerability to exploit for a skilled scandal-mongerer such as Trump. But the rejoinder is, "I don't do that, I hate that stuff, I never watch reality TV or Sports, I stay off Twitter" etc. But are you sure?
There is virtually no one, for example, who doesn't at least take a peek at the Tabloid headlines when they go through the checkout line at the grocery store, I'm 100% certain. Maybe you look quickly so that nobody sees you looking. And if caught, you and the other person share a laugh and an eye-roll in recognizing the ludicrous essence of the headlines. "The Queen Pregnant At 95"! "Alien UFO Predicts Whoopi For Pres 2024"! Or whatever. And that is how they get you. You accept the idea that the lie itself has an intrinsic right to exist, and to be on full display for the public.
The Lie is so transparent, so stupid, so... almost funny, that it almost seems plausible. If something seems so unbelievable, and no one else is saying it, then maybe, maybe there's some truth to it, is the rationale. This is how they play the populist, anti-establishment paranoid fantasists who believe they are being lied to by the "powers that be" about everything important.
The truth for these folks, therefore, are those things which the authorities have conspired to keep hidden, that they don't want you to know. So, the proof for example that UFOs exist is that there is no evidence of them, clearly because of a government conspiracy to suppress it. That is how we know it is real. This is how we know JFK was shot by his limo driver to cover up UFOs, and the proof is that his brain was missing! Just like we know the US government created covid in a lab, and spread it so that illegals and fake voters could vote by mail and elect an illegitimate President.
In the strange case of Donald Trump, celebrity scandal is his world. The reason he has married three times and blown up each of his marriages is to stay in the news! The self-serving narcissistic drive to see his name in headlines is as important to him as money, sex, and power. The media is his mirror, and the life he sees in it is his form of porn, not unlike the character of Patrick Bateman in the film "American Psycho". And he has successfully played this role for 50 years because he knows that Americans are fascinated with it and him, and our addiction to his scandals is his personal drug of choice.
Trump's best buddies in New York were Tabloid kingpins like the aptly named David Pecker, and the editors and reporters of the mainstream Tabloid press like the Daily News and the New York Post. He was like a god in the editorial offices of Vanity Fair and New Yorker, which covered him and his psycho-Stepford family as if they were royalty. He was a regular on f*cking Howard Stern, for crissakes! This is the guy who is now emerging as America's very own Adolf Hitler, a dictator wannabe. Donald Jr.'s and Eric's father, (have you seen them?) the "King of the World?"
How in the world do you really think this happened? If we are not taking the opportunity of this crisis to do a little introspection, to see ourselves for a moment as people of other nations see us, then we will not solve our MAGA problem anytime soon. Have a conversation with a person born and raised outside the United States, and they will likely ask you, "how did this happen, you were such a great advanced nation, you freed the world from dictatorships, helped end colonialism, you were never perfect and not always good, but we all wanted to be like America, and have what you have, and now you have this"? You will get something like this question, I would surmise.
If we are content to deflect from our own culpability, blindness, and lack of historical awareness by blaming the usual laundry list of boogeymen, (corporations, Republicans, Rupert Murdoch, Ronald Reagan, Texans, Donald Trump's mother) instead of examining what went wrong with us, then tragedy will be the result. In that sense, we are like the characters in a Shakespearean drama, stumbling from moment to moment, not knowing how the ending is written because of our lack of self-consciousness.
Tragedy is bad enough, but is worse when it is self-inflicted. Think about it.
