Trump as an Authoritative Leader
From NPR: “All authoritarian leaders have cults of personality,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. “Meaning, they propose themselves as all-powerful, as the only solution possible to the nation’s ills. ‘I alone can fix it.’ “The story linked above is well worth four minutes of your time.
We’re a full eight years past the point that Trump arrived on the American political scene, and, at least to some of us, all of this still seems surreal. It’s just hard to imagine that this happened in the United States.
At the core is Trump’s lies. There are still tens of millions of American voters who believe that Trump won the 2020 election, and that massive fraud pushed Biden into the White House.
And getting rid of him won’t be easy, as he’s effectively holding the country for ransom. You either elect me as the 46th president, or watch me create several orders of magnitude more chaos and mayhem than you’ve even seen before.
I appreciate the offer, but I’d rather trust my retirement savings to an honest investment advisor than a professional liar.
We’re banning books while we muzzle and starve our teachers.
Let’s suppose that Trump has 50 million supporters, and let’s admit that, for most of them, there is no crime that their leader could possibly commit that would affect that loyalty. Or, put more specifically, there is nothing he could do that could cause them to vote for a Democrat.
When I was a marketing consultant to the Fortune 100 tech companies, there was a thing known as “business bullshit bingo,” where meeting participants would keep track of the use of various corporate clichés and shout “bingo!!” as soon as they heard any five out of the hundreds of possibilities like:
Regarding the meme here, a message to its author: Present day Trumpers, i.e., those who think their leader has done nothing wrong, will never regard their loyalty to the former president as any form of “stink.” They will go to their graves believing that Trump is an honest servant of the American people who was corruptly persecuted by the radical left.
From Jayson Allen:
This from MSNBC correspondent (and Harvard graduate) Joy Reid. Good one!
As I posted earlier, we don’t see this level of hostility and abject stupidity in any other country in the developed world.
