The Devil Is Coming To Washington - Trump And The Coming Apocalypse

For progressives Donald Trump is not just a racist insurrectionist, a threat to democracy and the very survival of the Republic, he is an incarnation of the Devil, a man of hateful insidiousness, the Tempter, the Destroyer, the consummate incarnation of all that is evil. 

Nothing of the sort, of course. The Donald is nothing more than a braggart, a Borscht Belt tummler, a vaudevillian, and a circus clown - a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York.  January 6th was no more than a Viking-helmeted Halloween frat boy free-for-all.  Contesting the election was part of his circus act performed between lion-taming and the high-wire.  His ad hominem attacks are nothing more than a celebration of bearded ladies and two-headed babies.  America is not the sanctimonious Church of the Good Fathers that progressives say it is but a wild rodeo of bull riders, shoot-'em-outs, tinsel, glitz and bad taste. 

 

America has never seen a politician like Donald Trump, let alone a President,  He didn't act presidential, his critics said, as his bombast, bullying, and arm-candy-and-yachts over the top idea of culture took over Washington.  

As he dismantled one progressive idea after another, took on the preposterousness of transgenderism, the idiocy of international compromise, and the deification of the black man, the Left huddled in disbelief.  How could such obviously right, noble, and principled ideas be tossed aside like so many chicken bones?  How could such a hateful, misogynistic, racist, homophobe ever make it to the Oval Office? 

Like it or not, Trump is poised to take the office again.  After four years of a brutal, scurrilous campaign to discredit and dismiss him, Trump is back with a vengeance.  Nothing of the Left's wild, St. Vitus' dance has stopped him - not the lawfare witch trials; not the smearing accusations of treachery; not the banging and whingeing from ear to ear...nothing. 

Donald Trump is the first truly American president - a middle-brow, classless, rude and crude fat man of ambition and popular genius.  No Robert Frost, Pablo Casals, chamber music, and Virginia Woolf for him - only tinsel, pasties, chorus lines, and casinos. 

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious (The Devil – Ivan’s Nightmare, Brothers Karamazov)

Dostoevsky’s Devil is a vaudevillian, a comedian who serves to spice things up.  What would life be without me? he asks. “It would be holy, but tedious”.

Trump is Dostoevsky's Devil.  Without distortion, impossible caricature, one-liner insults, and an absolute, unassailable confidence in remaking the truth, life would be a thumping bore.  All of us would would like to insult, to ridicule, to stereotype in public precisely because we have been told to shut up, be considerate, compassionate, and respectful despite the fact that the world needs more ridicule not less.  

Trump has not only captured the zeitgeist of the time - frustration with an era of wet blanket, feel-bad unhappiness - but understood human nature. We are not good at heart, and have not one progressive, reformist bone in our bodies.  We have only been made to think that goodness is a destiny. 

Donald Trump has a genius for understanding Americans, our love of glitz, ribbons, and tinsel, our dismissal of the somber and the presumptuous   Thanks to his intelligence, arrogant confidence, absolute ambition, and vaudevillian sense of timing and audience appeal, he is waging another perfect electoral campaign. 

Donald Trump is a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, vaudeville, and Barnum & Bailey.  He is the first candidate to understand – and embody – our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment moral rectitude. Issues don’t matter for either him or for his supporters.  

Not even Ronald Reagan stirred so many legitimate aspirations.  No more logic, issues, and moderation.  The way forward is visceral, and absolute.  There is no on-the-one-hand-on-the-other dispassionate consideration here. The circus is the message.

Only the Left misses the point and still don’t get it.  They understand nothing but their own iconography of evil. Trump supporters knew precisely whom they were electing – a braggadocio, a carny barker, an outrageous, oversized, magnificent blowhard.  They loved his political incorrectness and willingness to take on all comers 

This election (2024), say progressives, is no less than Armageddon, the end of days, the fight between good and evil, the last chance for humankind; and yet....and yet, the polls are close.  What if he wins? What if all that we feared and fought against becomes reality? And here, the hysteria begins.  Trump will deport our brown brothers and sisters who have come to America for a better life, will send storm troopers into the inner city, will reconstitute the SS and imprison political enemies.  

He will unleash the greed of Wall Street, wash the poor into the Gulf, champion patriarchy, and flush gays, lesbians, and transgenders out to sea. America will become a gulag, and Trump a dictator worse than Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler put together.  It will be dark, evil time. 

Of the many criticisms one can make of the Left, none is more telling than that of apocalyptic nightmare fantasy.  How did a political party so quickly run off the rails, and fall into the weird, tormented, fearful world of Miltonian proportions?  The Left's redistributive economic policies, anti-religious populist secularism, unhinged sexual deviance as policy, racial myopia, and international capitulation are one thing, but this demonic obsession is entirely another. 

 

Never before has this apocalyptic notion been the ethos, the meme, the principle of electoral politics. As nasty, smarmy, and downright bare-knuckled brawling as past campaigns might have been, there have been none like this. Donald Trump is not simply a hated politician, but an evil. Beelzebub, Satan, the ghoulish devil of Biblical fiction.  

A month before the election his chances are even - and for the Left even that is the most unconscionable, unimaginable possibility - and if he wins, he will be Dismantler In Chief, chucking the progressive enterprises that have done more to undermine America's sovereignty than anything he has alleged to have done. 

And progressives will be stunned, even more so when Hillary Clinton, woman for the ages, got thumped by The Donald.  Not only will the Devil be in office but the ur-woman, the ur-black woman, the woman for all time to come will have been defeated.  A double whammy of cosmic proportions 

So be it.  Election time in America is not for the faint of heart, particularly this year when so many voters think the end of the world is nigh.