The fog of Trump, like the fog of war, is choking the country in a cloud of situational uncertainty and grief. Its effects are extending to the whole world, which is now watching in revulsion the self-destructive implosion of the United States. The America we’ve all known is no more, and it will never be the same again.
In the wildest wild fires ever seen in Western United States, Nature seems to be replicating the fog of Trump, even making the sky turn orange – perhaps a wink to the orange beast in the White House?
That fleeting thought crossed my mind as the news showed sheets of fire tall as buildings flying high into the air, interrupting the night with hungry tentacles of heat devouring trees, homes, and peoples’ histories with equal fury. But unlike Trump and his party hacks who pillage and plunder in the dark, fire lets you see what it’s doing because it sheds the same light on the living and the dying.
It is hard to comprehend the degree of Trump’s criminal dereliction of duty; his ruthless fascist politics; and the lethal constellation of his corruption, incompetence, and the white supremacist poison he inherited from his Klansman father. They all have condensed into the fog of American fascism.
In the fog of American fascism, Covid-19 has been killing mostly Black and Brown and poor working people, more often than not in democratic districts. Precisely the sort of folks Trump loves to hate and hurt. So, since way back in January he’s been proactively lying to them and to the whole country, having full knowledge of the new coronavirus’ lethality, contagiousness , and its ability to also infect and kill little kids.
With this immense and murderous lie Trump will forever have blood in his hands. In the face of incalculable tragedy and suffering this president remains unmoved and stone cold, irremediably marinated in his tyrannical self love devoted only to his own reelection. The people be damned!
Looking to clean up the mess he made, Trump went in into high gear on his demented drive to make Covid disappear from view. He politicized the pandemic as if it were a public relations and messaging issue. Absent from his stupidly-unthinking vision are his duty to serve and protect the Constitution and the American people; compassion, integrity, character and decency.
In all these metrics Trump comes up eerily empty. Displaying the mineral indifference of a born parasite-sociopath, he puts in mortal danger countless millions of people. This is what viruses can do, they endanger people, and the Trump virus might be worse than the coronavirus itself.
This massively insecure thug lives only to be praised and to hold on to power forever. His noticeably prehensile clinging to public office comes from his fear of getting voted out and tossed into the real world, where the consequences of his many crimes will come to find him.
In his seething frenzy, Trump has eviscerated norms and proper means, turning the Oval Office into the offal office, all lower case. No dignity in any part of his rule.
Every hour he sits as president, his fog of fraud and corruption snuffs out the life and the opportunity of the much-deserving American working people. The United States being the powerhouse that it is, the fog of Trump also blankets the rest of the globe.
Every day we live with Trump encrusted in the White House is another day of hemorrhage for America, her resources, prestige, and world leadership.
Trump is a bottomless barrel of need. Panicked about not losing power, his criminality and cowardice have no limits. No matter what happens Trump will continue to be whipped by his imperious need to satisfy the massive daily quota of his insatiable narcissism.
To help realize his depraved and onerous cult of self, Trump recruited the entire Republican zombie Senate. They have become Trump’s servile enablers, mostly silent doormats of passive agreement who hate him in private but bow to him in public.
They know Trump is a junkie. When his massive daily fix of flattery wanes in the face of any criticism, he quickly goes into withdrawal. And that’s when he becomes the demon who will tap into his infinite reserves of vicious revenge, something zombie Republicans shake at the knees just thinking about it. What pathetic human ghosts they have chosen to become, those GOP zombies. You have to be in a moral coma to stay on in that kind of job.
But Trump himself lives in constant fear as well, and so with the same logic of Pascal’s communicating vessels, his political impetus is also based on fear, implanting it in the American heart: Fear of Black and Brown “low-income” people coming to rape White suburban wives, and also lowering the value of their real estate.
So, when this full-time, five-alarm fire, fear-mongering Trump claims he “played down” the pandemic so as not to scare the people into a panic, he showed yet again his brain is short on cortex and still ruled by his limbic system — the ancient reptilian brain from our deep evolutionary past where impulse and emotion reside.
Cortex evolved over it later, as a new adaptation to meet an emerging new need: the gradual and unprecedented sprouting of human rational thought. In this regard, the Trumps of the world suggest evolutionary anachronisms.
That said, Trump is very effective when it comes to breaking things, especially things that were built by others before his time. In just two weeks he took a crow bar to the United States Postal Service and now the damage is done. It won’t be able to handle the vote-by-mail deluge about to come from a pandemic that makes mandatory for a lot of people to vote by mail and not risk getting sick.
Along with that, we saw Trump on prime time TV telling “his” people to vote twice, in case the first ballot didn’t count for whatever reason.
Prior to Trump if you’d written that exact scene in a screenplay — the president of the United States instructing his supporters to vote twice in his coming election — the Hollywood community would have laughed you out of their studios even before you were done with your one-minute pitch.
But here’s the thing: The difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense.
So in real life, a president who doesn’t make any sense is allowed to sit where he is for four years, like an illiterate Zeus issuing killer thunderbolts. Life doesn’t make sense when the most powerful country in the world, with many of the greatest talents, rolls over and lets this lunatic trash everything day in and day out. Also eluding common sense is the chaos we know will follow election night, with new damage, dysfunction, and regression inflicted upon our nation. Yet no one in government will move soon enough to stop Trump before he does all that.
It goes on. Trump’s real-life demolition derby in the face of a climate change now roaring with fires and floods, hurricanes and droughts, also makes no sense. He went out to kick it in the shin by erasing most regulations that were in place to protect the environment.
All this happens because for Trump there is no tomorrow.
In the fog of Trump, which is the fog of American fascism there can be no tomorrow because there is no vision, no new ideas, no long-term plan for bettering the lives of a whole society. There is only the unremitting immediacy of dog-eat-dog survival. Thomas Hobbes spoke of this state of man, and how it produces lives that are nasty, brutish, and short.
But we have also seen that it is precisely in dark times when the best in people has united to change the course of history.
