Think of it from an asshole’s point of view. If you need to win an argument (because losing, which includes any kind of compromise, is unbearably humiliating to you) and the facts are not in your favor — FUCK THE FACTS. Seriously, just keep a straight face, an aggressive stance, attack your opponent and make any noises you like, grunts and squawks are fine. Keep doing this, never pause, never back down. The other person will eventually grow frustrated, if you are arguing about something important — say human rights in a democracy (I just typoed demoncracy, which seems to fit our moment with the antichrist-in-chief). When their frustration explodes, or they walk away, frustrated, you merely smile and make a mocking little dog sound as your friends applaud.
As long as you cater to the emotional cravings of those you control, people also desperate to be right, who, if in danger of being proved wrong, prefer killing you to admitting fault, incoherence is perfect. You can’t argue successfully against an incoherent assertion. Incoherence is immune to persuasion of any kind. It is self-contained, self-proving and self-reinforcing.
When Donald Trump was an adolescent millionaire (his father paid him $200,000 a year from birth, his salary as president of various fake corporations dad set up to avoid taxes) his psychopath [1] father intercepted a carton of switchblades his son had delivered to the house. Donald’s plan was to arm his schoolyard gang with these knives and rule the elite private school his parents sent him to. His parents decided that a few years in a military academy would be good for the young bully’s discipline and “make him a man” of some kind. We see how well that plan worked. Heharr claims to have loved the hierarchical life at the military academy where he specialized in bullying the younger cadets. There was a new crop of these young, pampered chumps every fall for Donald to torture with his winning personality. Then, after graduation, proudly dressed in a military uniform, bone spurs, unfortunately, kept him out of uniform for the rest of his life.
More than sixty years later, the dude is unchanged. He bullies everyone around him, except when someone stands up to him directly. No mere box of switchblades this time, Tomahawk missiles, nuclear weapons, enraged toadies and lickspittles competing daily to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him, unlimited dark money to prosecute his thousands of lifelong grudges against every kind of enemy imaginable. He now claims the legal right to illegally defund programs Congress funded, endangering and torturing millions and costing countless lives (poor people, disposable) and to have his underlings commit cold blooded murder and get away with it. He’s not crazy to believe these things since his 6-3 Leonard Leo majority granted him extraordinary criminal powers in the aptly named Trump v. United States. The party line ruling granted him the right to commit criminal acts, and pardon any criminal, if he can claim he did the crime as part of his core duty to advances his/their agenda. He has replaced the Department of Justice with the Department of Retribution, his gigantic glaring face adorns its building.
I think of my own father, a soul with many gifts and the most decent of impulses, helpless against the many traumas of his early life. Whipped in the face by his mother from the time he could stand, growing up in what he always called grinding poverty, legally blind until the age of ten, when FDR’s program for the poor gave him his first pair of glasses to correct 20/400 vision, he considered himself the dumbest kid in his little town, even at the very end of a distinguished life. We argued many times over the years about whether people can change in any meaningful way. I contend we can, and always made the case. He insisted people cannot change in any fundamental way and that all forms of therapy only support a delusion. I learned only recently that we were both right, and both wrong. Many people can change, if their pain makes the need to change urgent enough. Many people can never change, no matter how acute their pain becomes. If you can’t be wrong, there is nothing to change.
Donald Trump is an example of the kind who can never change. He is the perfect avatar for the interests he represents — entitled psychopaths [1] who created an ideology of “liberty” (which requires unreasoning faith to believe) and a massive propaganda machine to promote their right to own and control everything. There is no good argument for why some should have 100,000,000 times what starving children and their struggling parents have, why children should go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country in human history. There is no conceivable moral argument for that. Even Charles Koch’s beloved Institute for Humane Studies never successfully made a moral case for starving poor children. And so, an incoherent, demonstrably false fable — makers vs. takers — the rich make the economy move for everybody, and what trickles from their pathologically greedy lips makes fine soup for the rest of us. Booted and spurred, most of them from birth, to ride the backs of anyone less deserving than they are (in the fine image Jefferson stole from a Scottish rebel about to be hanged), these creatures found their avatar in a man willing to do anything, including bark like a pet dog pursued by hungry, imaginary Haitians, to never lose.
Are we tired of winning yet, America?
[1]
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