By Michael Randall
Here’s a serious question for you: should we be concerned about the 2024 presidential election’s outcome? Let’s examine what one of the leading candidates thinks about and speaks about widely. When he ran in 2016, he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
We found out that might be true, though he never tested his theory so violently during his presidency. But he did his best to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election, and has challenged its outcome ever since with his “Big Lie,” even when told by his own senior staffers that he lost that election. Also, he incited an insurrection in January 2021 to try to stay in power.
Why is his repeated lie and his illegal efforts to stay in power OK with so many people, people who fervently want to see him elected president again? Apparently, some of us do not mind having to live under a totalitarian system in which the dictator says what the law is and is not, where citizens’ fates are determined by the dictator alone.
What is the wide appeal of this “not-even-a-man” (“NEAM,” my new acronym to counter “MAGA”)? He has called veterans “chumps” and “losers” and “suckers,” and has called desperate people on our southern border “criminals and rapists.” If elected in 2024, his team is already planning for him to invoke the “Insurrection Act” so that he can use the military to quell citizen protests. His team now plans to build massive camps to hold illegal migrants after sweeping the country for them prior to their deportation. Also, they are now vetting the names of people they would appoint to roughly 1,500 higher level positions in different federal agencies, people who will swear loyalty to Trump rather than to the US Constitution. These plans actually are underway for 2025, if he wins. Don’t believe this? Look it up.
Do his supporters like to be told what to do by a dictator? He pleases millions of these folks, gets their juices up with his seething anger against immigrants, senior military officers, the media, federal agencies, and the courts. On the Veterans Day just past, he pledged that “…we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country….” He claimed, “They’ll do anything to destroy America, and to destroy the American Dream.” This rotten-flesh rhetoric is putrid meat to feed his disciples. Where are the communists? Where are the vermin? Most importantly, what are the people like who believe in and support his ridiculous garbage?
Johns Hopkins University did a study in 2011 before Trump came onto the political scene, a study in which they evaluated a large sample of people, part of which was to identify personal characteristics of people who held negative attitudes toward minority groups, especially African Americans and Muslims. In 2018, they decided to go back to those same people to see what they felt about Trump after he had been in office for two years. They found that people with negative attitudes toward minorities were widely supportive of Trump. What are they so afraid of regarding people of a different skin color or different religion?
Much media coverage asserts that Trump created the current angry, hateful atmosphere in American politics. But the Johns Hopkins study found that he was simply the flame that attracted angry moths from the dark. Such animosity (full of fear, angry resentment, and the sense of being victimized) has always been present in any human population. But Trump’s unhealthy mental condition, belligerence, racist language, and fine-tuned cunning drew this kind of person to him. He knew just how to appeal to them and make them into what psychiatry calls “totalists,” people who are totally committed to some idea, and whose minds are closed to new information that contradicts their current thinking. (Of course, many “progressives” on the political left are totalists, too.)
A former senior Trump White House official is quoted anonymously in Jonathan Karl’s new book, “Tired of Winning.” The man worked closely, daily, with Trump and says, ““He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring. He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.”
Trump’s thought process and political language closely resemble those of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, whose tyranny killed many millions of people, crushed their surviving citizens into submission and made them silently obedient. Many Americans do not think such things can happen here. But in times of confusion and crisis like now, many people among us would welcome being told what to think and do by their chosen dictator, and would be glad to see violators punished for disobeying.
They should be careful what they wish for. Trump has openly expressed admiration for Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un–all dictators who have severely tightened the screws on their people to create police states. Everything Trump (remember “NEAM”) says points us in that direction if he is elected President a year from now.