No method

Commenter Brandunaware on some important secondary effects of living among the Trumpers:

Endless psychopathic surrealism.

In addition to them being the absolute worst people on earth there’s a second order effect where it’s impossible to respect anyone who treats them with anything but contempt. You see the news treating them as serious people and you realize you can’t trust the news. You have friends or relatives who act like these are real responsible people and you realize those people have no standards whatsoever. It’s crazymaking.

It is. The relentless sanewashing/gaslighiting is one of the worst of the many terrible things of this moment in American history, when half of the polity is either insane or shutting its eyes to the insanity.

Yesterday I started reading a NYT op-ed by Oren Cass, a “serious” “conservative” “intellectual,” and whaddaya know folks I just could not do it . . . I got about five graphs in and realized “this person is describing a pure fantasy world, in which Donald Trump is Has A Grand Vision For America.”

What are they going to say when he’s gone, Oren? Are they going to say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans, he had wisdom?

Again, crazymaking.

The elites in this country can’t tell the truth about Donald Trump, even to themselves, because what would that say about the system that has made them who they are?

DamnYankeesLGM elaborates in a way that also helps capture the sheer insanity of it all:

I’ve said this before, but he enormity of how stupid and childish Trump is, and the inexplicability of him winning not just once, but twice (after committing insurrection!) is so overwhelming it won’t ever be explainable. The fact that he has been president warps reality in a gravitational sense; the fact of his power means that society, in telling the story, can’t actually conceptualize him as so unserious and stupid, because by definition he has been elected twice and so he is, by definition, important and serious. Power justifies itself.

But of course that’s a fiction. He’s as evil, stupid, venal and unfit for the role as he was 10 years ago, when it was a cosmic joke to think he could ever be President. The fact that 10 years later has has been President twice doesn’t change who he is and what he is. He is the most terrible person in every possible way to even run for president let alone win.

And as Brandunaware [suggests,} this fact about him warps reality. It’s crazy-making. It’s society-wide gaslighting. I dont know how I will ever be able to explain this to my children.

Hannah Arendt pointed out that the ideal subject of totalitarianism wasn’t the convinced Nazi or true believing Communist, but people who had lost any sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood, between fantasy and reality. Trumpism is a kind of apotheosis of this, in that in place of even the farcically absurd ideologies of Hitler and Stalin it offers no ideas of any kind, unless rage, hatred, and the worship of Donald Trump can be considered ideas.

. . . WinningerR:

Adding to my befuddlement is the fact that he’s every single stereotype of a loathsome shitheel from the last one hundred years of popular culture, all at once—the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar, the entitled silver spoon trust fund asshole, the clueless boss who does nothing but create crises for his employees to clean up, the lecherous old man, the vapid self-important celebrity, the penny pinching miser who stiffs the honest working man, the oily corrupt politician, the cowardly bully, the draft-dodging faux-patriot, the scumbag crook who gets off on a technicality. He’s almost literally every repugnant trope from generations of literature, movies, and TV shows.

This is the man— the clown, the ignoramous—who ends our Republic?