During my high school years Maverick was a television program I would watch each week. Bart Maverick’s ‘pappy,’ would say ‘you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and those were good odds.’ Con-people have a good gullible audience to play with much of the time.
During World War II, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propogandist would say that ‘if you tell the people a lie often enough, they will come to believe the lie to be the truth.’
Today, we have the marriage of both philosophies in our political and social worlds. Misinformation, conspiracy theories, false equivalencies, alternative facts abound in today’s world as the 2024 Presidential Election approaches.
The point person for this social happening is Donald Trump. He is a sociopath who has no reality boundaries’ that govern his words or behavior. In addition, part of his being a sociopath means that he has no regard for the needs and feelings of others. He is also considered a pathological liar who will state one thing that is supposed to be the truth, and then, state an opposite position in his next utterance.
Often what pours out of his mouth is the antithesis of what is socially or politically considered to be appropriate. His comment about Putin ‘being able to do any damn thing he wants in the Ukraine, if the Ukraine doesn’t pay more than it is presently paying in its war effort, is one such example of an out of head, out of mouth statement. In this statement, he is turning his back on the United States’ role in maintaining America’s NATO alliance.
He uses people and then, abuses people. He has a history of having people do a construction job for him, including materials and then not paying them what he had promised to pay. He uses delaying court tactics get around keeping his obligations. He has a history of telling lies about the large size of his property, to be able to secure larger loans, when the property is much smaller than he has reported it to be. He is facing a half a billion dollar fine for such behavior in the state of New York. Over the span of five months, he was indicted in four separate criminal cases and charged on a total of 91 felony counts. He was also, convicted of raping and defaming the woman he raped.
He attempted to change the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election by asserting that the election was ‘stolen’ from him. This, despite of 60 court rulings to the contrary. He still asserts, today, that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.
He is guilty of conspiring to interfere with the peaceful transition of power from his administration to the incoming Biden Administration. In this, he is guilty of an act of sedition and is legally should not be able to run for or to hold any future political position in the government of the United States.
In the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he encouraged and supported the use of violence, even against his Vice-President, if Pence did not support Trump’s wish to assume the Presidency without winning the election.
He has, also, attempted to change the election results of the people in Georgia, to become the people’s choice of the vote, when, in fact, Biden won the Georgia vote.
Throughout all of this, Trump paints the picture of being the victim, a martyr, if you will. People accuse him of things, that from his pathological perspective, are not true. He has taken on the role of the source of restitution for all those American’s who also feel that they have been victimized in life. He also manifests delusional thinking in that he compares himself second only to Jesus and Nelson Mandela as a savior to all who have been mistreated as he feels he has been.
In fact, Trump reminds me of an emotionally 7-year-old who passes gas, ‘farts’ to use the vernacular, around a family member’s birthday dinner table. When he is confronted by another family member who is sitting next to him to stop passing gas, he asserts that he has not passed gas. When the family member persists with his assertion, seven-year-old Donald accuses the family member of ‘always picking on him.’ Thus, the 7-year-old who has become the victim in the matter.
Jennifer Freyd, Professor Emerita of the University of Orgon, in 1997, described an approach that many who victimize others, will use to deal with being accused of their aberrant behavior. It is referred to DARVO and stands for Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender. In this, the offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense. Trump is an effective practitioner of this strategy. In this process, reality becomes blurred. What is true isn’t and what isn’t true, is.
In my experience there is another dimension to this DARVO method of evading responsibility for one’s behavior. What Trump has done is to express the absurdity of something in its most extreme way. He wants to get rid of all checks and balances of our governmental safeguards by declaring that he wants to be an ‘imperial president.’ He wants to be a ‘dictator’ and exudes lavish respect and praise about how Russa’s Putin, North Korea’s Un, China’s Xi Jinping and Hungary’s Orban are ‘at the top of their game.’ In essence, he wants to overcome his sense of inadequacy by casting himself as being all powerful.
In other areas, he takes credit for such things as a woman no longer having the right to maternal health care by the removing the possibility of an abortion, eliminating a fifty-year precedence that Roe v Wade provided all women. Today, women are denied medical options in their reproductive health care, because of Trump’s packing of the Supreme Court with his acalides.
Trump’s playing to the absurdity of a position is appealing to those who feel stuck with having no options open to them when they feel helpless to change their life situation. Becoming a dictator, being the one who is instrumental in eliminating a woman’s right to have the ability to determine the course that her own health care, is more satisfying than living as someone who feels helpless about their life choices and someone who feels inferior to women. With Trump, woman are objects. Women are no more than eye candy and something to provide him with sexual pleasure. He, also, refers to members of the military who have lost their lives defending our American way of life as ‘losers and suckers.’
And this is the dynamic that is currently playing itself out in our society. To know that this is happening is to be forearmed about what we need to expect in our current political climate. This calls to mind the Buddhist notion that the source of all suffering is ignorance. Not knowing about this process, and being impacted by it, causes suffering within our American Family.
Our Declaration of Independence has a well-known line: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness or Enlightenment. This is the foundation for the great American Experiment, that serves as the glue that makes the potential for our way of life possible.
Donald Trump’s sole goal in life is to destroy this American experiment. In this he is an outspoken in his disdain for immigrants, ‘they are poisoning the blood of our country. We must ask, what would America be without those immigrants who made it to our shores over the hundreds of years of our creation?
Our responsibility as American citizens is to become aware of what is going on in our political world, and to take on the responsibility for doing our part to stand for what we believe and know to be true. We need to remain aware of what is going on in our midst and go to the ballot box and vote for what matters to us. Trump wants to do away with your expressing your view of what matters in your country. He wants to be a dictator without any boundaries. This weak, insecure, and ignorant con-artist wants to change our way of life by destroying what makes our way of life special. Are we going to let this happen? It is up to each of us to stand up for who we are.
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