Paul Edwards
It was Forrest Gump who said it first. My son says there can be nothing Trump does now that will surprise him, a great defense against his lunatic behavior, and I wish I could say it with him.
What prevents me is the conviction that the critical factor in Trump’s stupidity, which he has demonstrated to the world in so many and various ways, is not just the inarguable density of his grossly inferior cognitive equipment, but rather the irredeemable, organic malevolence in it.
You may say that all stupidity is malevolent, which I won’t deny, but the common forms of it are accidentally so, and it is chiefly an introduced quality in America, where elements of cruelty and hatred are cultivated non-stop by what is risibly called Capitalist culture. It seems the toxicity is really in his DNA, since all he does exudes the nasty tang of venom, yet that can’t be true.
Capabilities, susceptibilities, even inclinations, may be genetically determined but behaviors must be instilled and conditioned by life experiences. This means his constant malevolence has to have been a learned and trained compulsion.
His very plan and slogan is rooted in furious and indiscriminate destruction. Now, admittedly, so much has been deformed and perverted in the body of The Gem of The Ocean, so utterly has the Republic Franklin warned we could lose been mauled and debased by ages of Capitalist infamy, that the great hope of many Americans is now vested in sad, mute, constant yearning for a regeneration they know in their hearts will never come.
He promised a disfigured simulacrum of it, based entirely on his hates and prejudices, which are legion: women, people of color, the educated, scientists, immigrants, environmentalists, activists for civil, economic and political rights; every variety of aspiring, striving humanity that does not prostrate itself to his brainless, guttersnipe sociopathic creed, and kneel to his gross, vulgar will.
In taking an ax to American government, his only loyalty was to the worst, most vicious, anti-democratic Capitalist cabals. He made no effort to disguise it because, in his moral depravity, he prides himself on inflicting ruin on the state and pain on society.
That American government should be dismantled and rebuilt is not in question. Its essential function, at which it has failed utterly, is to promote the general welfare, but capture by the evil, Capitalist cadre that owns it, made it rotten and dysfunctional.
Trump’s intent is not to improve it, but to destroy it, make it more violent, and orders of magnitude worse. He wants it to be the toy of the endless greed of cronies, criminals, and financial vampires.
In his fathomless, anti-human pathology, he is driven to wreck and obliterate all the best in human culture, replacing it with the morality of a bull fight and the polity of a slaughter house.
Because intelligence cannot permit such ethical mayhem, he lusts to obliterate education, history, reason, and science, using them against their purposes in ways fatal to their very existence.
His sinking of America in the nauseating horrors of Ukraine and Gaza, and his looney war on Iran, have choked the world with revulsion, even those vile, cowardly whore nations who genuflect and kowtow to the monster. He has done more in a few years to make us universally hated than eight decades of our arrogant, blatant intimidation and brutalization of the world achieved.
Shown up in geopolitical folly, with Gaza an endless suppurating wound, Ukraine out of his control, and total inability to coerce and break Iran, he indulges in his rhetorical, bullshit chin-music.
He rants about voting subversion by—get this!—Communists. And Chinese, as if they gave a goddam who fronts our sick joke of a country. He will smash political movements to the left of Genghis Khan. He offers nuclear capabilities to the sluttish totalitarian Saudi state. He vilifies Canada for having caught fire. There is no outer boundary to the psychotic’s lunatic behavior.
At home—if America can be called home now—he promotes race hate against dark people, and elevates monstrous Zionist Jews to paramount power, authorizes by fiat the destruction of remaining forests, grasslands, national monuments and parks, rivers and lakes, and the wholesale looting of their resources for the dirtiest, most polluting pirate industries.
His regime, elected by a freakish alliance of giant Capital with the lowest and stupidest hillbilly element of our ignorant people, is engaged in the trashing and firesale of all the physical, mental, and philosophical attributes that defended the American people.
When it is clear as never before in our history that the man at the controls of the ship of state has the instincts and incentive of a Kamikaze pilot, and the cruelty of Attila, The Scourge of God, if any character and courage exist in the people, it must rise to thwart and eliminate this monster that is destroying them.
But there is not. Americans are a passive, torpid, defeated race. We are suppressed and manipulated serfs, damaged, lost souls, devoted to our abuser, cowards beaten into cringing submission.
We prefer to be witnesses to our own eradication rather than to stand up and fight, and die, if necessary, for the liberty we sing of, but will never defend, and we richly deserve our destruction.
