The drift has been somewhat insidious, but it has been both rapid and relentless. Trump is developing a cult of personality. A man who was once ridiculed for a campaign many thought was just performance art, has now become almost a Messiah—a man who is going to put the proverbial chicken in every pot. He might be a cut-rate buffoonish Messiah, but he’s becoming the M-word nonetheless to many.
Some of it is understandable. The Romans might have been the first to put the style into words—panem et circenses—but it has likely existed since Eden or Oldavai, depending on one’s belief system. Trump tells people what they want to hear. That works, even if most people know deep down much of what he says is hyperbole. Trump long ago cornered the market on superlatives, reserving most of them for himself like a trademark or copyright. Another reason Trump resonates is that a large segment of the populace is fed up with the over-reaching political correctness that characterized the Obama years. The pendulum simply had to swing back. (Lucky for Obama he only had eight years, because he’s pretty much run out of victim groups to champion and moniker-ize by the end.) In the backlash against political correctness, Trump rode the swinging pendulum to the other end of the spectrum, deep into Fat Tail territory.
The danger in any personaility cult, besides the throwing of raw meat to the most extreme sycophants, is that flaws and foibles are either ignored or overlooked by less rabid supporters. In the hope that Trump can deliver on even a portion of his promises, his often bizarre idiosyncrasies are allowed to fade into the background, save for in a media that largely discredited itself durng the campaign. Trump can get away with things even if the things are real and bad, or dangerous. The media has become that tree falling in the forest: whether or not it makes ‘noise’ is a matter of definition. For Trump’s cult members, the media is silent.
The promise of jobs and the tag line of MAGA deliver much of what the masses want, so Trump’s flaws get pushed to the side. He can get away with things many of his supporters have long been against. He can get away with odd comments, some of which suggest mental instability. He can get away with continually claiming to be the smartest man in the room, when in fact he is woefully uninformed of much of the worlld. Remember his campaign comment: “I know more about ISIS than all of the Generals”? That is rather unlikely. In fact, it is laughable. Former SecDef and DCI Robert Gates made a comment on this Trump idiosyncrasy and Trump’s shortcomings during the election saying [Trump is] “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself…..He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations….a thin-skinned, tempermental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.” Gates now says he ‘hopes’ he was wrong.
At a time when the Dow hits new records, as Trump meets with industrial bigwigs who promise new domestic investment, or union leaders for whom Trump promises jobs, while also erasing many of the Executive Orders Obama initiated and which were unpopular with Trump’s supporters, Trump can sneak a few things by virtually unnoticed by his fawning constituency. His White House legal counsel has been tasked with ruling on such things as domestic collection of METADATA, whether waterboarding qualifies as torture or not, and whether rendition of terror suspects to lands where the rule of law and prisoner rights do not exist violates any US law. Is all of that what America really wanted when it went to the polls on 8 November? Ironically, an election once viewed as a two factor imitation of Hobson’s Choice, morphed into cult worship for the winner. Neither candidate ever changed its stripes, but inevitably one had to win. America was going to lose either way.
Many of Trump’s comments and actions get little notice, again save for in the bruised and battered mainstream media. Trump claims, with no evidence whatsoever, a staggering level of voter fraud, something that would constitute a national scandal of epic proportions, but is only ‘considering’ whether or not to investigate, since—as spokesman Spicer said—the President is comfortable with his Electoral College victory. (The consideration may now have become an order to the Department of Justice, the equivalent of ordering NORAD to prove the existence of Santa Claus.) Trump’s painful level of insecurity evidences itself continually with his obsession with crowd size at his Inauguration, which is reminiscent of his obsession with the ‘small hands’ comment during the campaign. (Despite his hopes everyone—at least female everyones—would not notice, the fact is he cannot stretch an octave on a piano keyboard, and that bothers him to no end.)
Perhaps most illustrative both of how Trump intends to control the narrative, plus how his abject insecurity evidences itself, is Trump’s 21 January visit to the headquarters of the CIA. White House Spokeman Sean Spicer has made a point of saying how well received Trump was there, with ‘raucous applause and a standing ovation’. What Spicer failed to say—and which he has denied—is that a couple of buses of new White House staff accompanied the President on the visit, and three rows (out of six total) were reserved for these shills, who gave the ‘raucous applause and standing ovation’ they were brought to deliver. After that Pyongyang-style ovation Trump—who had insinuated the agency was like the Nazis, and who disparaged the organization in both Tweets and his pre-Inauguration press conference—gave a speech where he pretty much ignored the Wall of Fallen Heroes in the agency lobby, and spent the vast majority of the talk boasting about his ‘smart person intellect’ and number of TIME magazine covers he has been on, and then railing against the media and small things he wishes were larger. The performance, which Trump has called one of his best, was simply bizarre. In fact, he said in an interview this week that “It was probably the best speech I have ever given, and one of the great speeches ever.” The first part is arguable, since he has never set himself a high bar, but since the speech was hardly evocative of the Gettysburg Address or anything Ted Sorensen ever penned for JFK, the second part leaves hyperbole in the dust and knocks on the door of delusion. Agency people viewed it as somewhere between disrespectful and—because personality assessment is an integral part of the agency skill-set—evidence of serious mental issues. Trump insists the room was full of love. It was full of something, maybe, but love was not it.
Spicer the Spinmeister, Trump’s designated media whipping boy and latter day Joseph Goebbels (can we say ‘short’ again, or must we continue with ‘vertically challenged’?) championed the CIA speech and the reception, claiming there is a great relationship between the intelligence community and Trump. In reality, the relationship remains cautious and distrustful at best, and like Hillary and Bill Clinton during their White House years at worst, which is to say fractured and seemingly irreparable, continuing merely because it has to. The sycophant media, i.e., Fox News and maybe the Washington Times, like to say the tiff was all because of now-former DCI Brennan, but that is not the case at all. Trump lambasted the agency for things occuring long before Brennan took command in 2013, and nobody who has willingly gone into harm’s way, or who has lost friends who did the same thing and were subsequently memorialized on the agency’s lobby wall, is going to forget the Nazi quip anytime soon. Everybody knows Trump never served the nation for a second in his entire cartoonish life until 20 January 2017, so for him to disparage people who have served (don’t forget Senator and former POW John McCain and the Khan family) doesn’t sit well.
The cult even has its own lingo and has already come out with its first Neo PC term. There will likely be more. Kellyanne Conway debuted the term ‘Alternative Facts’, which is Trump Speak for ‘lies’. It is not even the equivalent of referring to what was once called a janitor as a ‘facilities engineer’. It’s simply false, not prettified. Well, Sean Spicer is short or alternative facts are lies. Not even Trump can have it both ways.
To the extent Team Trump can control the narrative, both with this new vernacular and with performance art like 21 January at the CIA, his flaws and foibles will be overlooked by many, owing to this cult of personality that has grown up around him. It would be a good idea, however, if somebody, or a few somebodies, stay out of the aura and also stay separate from those who simply refuse to accept that democracy can produce a Trump just as easily as it can produce a victory for the Ikhwan al Muslimeen in Egypt. Majority rule is majority rule, even if it involves an Electoral College. Democracy might be the best system, considering all of the alternatives, but majority rule does have some inherent flaws, owing to human nature itself. True patriots have to remain vigilant.
If some objective sources fail to pay attention and don’t call a spade a spade, then there are two possible outcomes. One outcome makes international disasters likely (Trump just fired State Department staff who might know something about the world, to be replaced by Trumpists who insist they know everything about the world), while also threatening domestic institutions like the Fourth and Eighth Amendments, when such things as METADATA collection, rendition and torture become acceptable. If the pendulum swings back again, the other outcome might have the most politically correct elements of the electorate mobilizing their constituency and trouncing the Trumpists in 2018 and 2020. Neither bodes well for America.
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