re: #350 Renaissance_Man

For the benefit of… Donald Trump.

Donald. Trump.

Donald fucking Trump.

I might add that this, above, is at the heart of the rot.

It’s not that Donald Trump is a masterful con man who has people fooled. It’s not that he’s a charismatic leader who has a cultlike following among the rubes and Republicans are forced to go along for self-preservation. It’s not even that he’s a puppet of neo-Nazis and the Russian mob and Republicans are held hostage to these circumstances. The last of these is mostly true, but even that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter.

The truth of it is this. Donald Trump is not just the demented, fat old man bumbling through the halls of the White House. He is the avatar of modern day White Conservatism. He is a blank slate, a gibbering, mindless hunk of protoplasm and collected vices that right-wing media writes upon anew every day. He is the essence of everything that White Conservatives are, in undistilled form. For them to repudiate that would be to repudiate themselves, what they are at their core, stripped of all the trappings that civilisation ever stamped upon them. Donald Trump represents the id of the modern White Conservative. Not everyone who is a part of this movement is male, not every one is white, but at their core, they know what they are and what they want to be, and that is Donald Trump - loud, rude, angry, hateful, and on TV. Every day.

That is the wretched little homunculus at the heart of everyone who identifies with this movement. They can’t go against that. He is them and they are he.

They’re not the entirety of the rot, though. They have accomplices, in the other third of the US that doesn’t fully believe, but doesn’t really care, and is much more comfortable with hating Democrats when their TV tells them to. Those accomplices might be swayed, might be willing to do something. But not if American media has anything to say about it.