We All Find It Hard to Admit that We’ve Been Bamboozled

It’s unclear if the late astronomer Carl Sagan was referring to any specific event in history in his famous quote here.

It’s certainly one of the factors that keeps Trumpism in place.  Clearly, there are many people who, if they were psychologically able, would reject all this as total malicious crap.

Imagine if we could go back in time to 2015 and somehow look forward to the present date.  What if we were able to provide voters in 2016 a list of all the lies Trump has told since, all the criminal acts, the degradation of our nation on the world stage, the environmental devastation, the tax breaks for billionaires, the extortion of the Ukraine, the dishonest and incompetent butchering of the pandemic response, the incitement to insurrection, and the attempt to tamper with the election results?

He would have lost the 2016 election even more decisively than he lost in 2020.  Just like the “boiling the frog” metaphor, many of his supporters ignored the outrageous behavior because it was spread over such a long period of time.

Of course, there are others who really didn’t get bamboozled at all; in fact, they got exactly what they signed up for.  Trump appeals to the dark side of the human personality: the hates, the fears, the prejudices, the rejection of science and knowledge, and the thirst for punishment and vengeance.  And, as we’ve learned to our shock, the U.S. is home to tens of millions of people with these characteristics oozing out of them.