Merriam-Webster defines the verb “trump” as “to get the better of: OVERRIDE.” And so our 44th president has overridden and gotten the better of us on so many fronts. Above all, he has overridden our expectations about what a leader is, how much damage a single person can do to our country, and how anyone who behaves like he does could get away with his actions and behavior and not already be in jail.
The latest indictment on maintaining top-secret classified documents, obstructing the investigation into them, ignoring demands from the National Archives, ignoring subpoenas, and even hiding evidence from his own lawyers is just the latest example of his horrendous behavior, and it’s doing nothing to weaken the support of his most ardent followers, who think the man is incapable of doing anything wrong.
Let’s turn this crime on its head, look under the rock where Trump typically lives, and demonstrate how this time should be different, should be clear to any clear-thinking human, but still manages to put up the defenses of Trump’s lemmings, despite their twisted logic and their inability to see through blatant lies.
Trump and his followers think this is no big deal, that it’s a political witch hunt, that it’s a “weaponizing” of the justice department. This is the same man who attacked Hillary Clinton relentlessly during the 2016 presidential election for an email server. Clinton (and Joe Biden and Mike Pence and others) didn’t obstruct any investigations into their maintaining classified info. Trump literally said during this time, “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.” And, “Nobody is above the law.”
This argument based on the highest standards of hypocrisy is completely impervious to the Trump lemming crowd. Throw it out there, and you’ll immediately be met by a whole slew of what-about-isms directed at other politicians, mostly Democrats.
The Trump voter believes this is politically motivated, because he says so, along with Lindsay Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and a host of others. Go ahead and tell them that federal prosecutor Jack Smith prosecuted former Democratic Senator John Edwards for alleged campaign finance violations to hide an affair, and it doesn’t matter to them—it’s still politically motivated. They are impervious to logic.
These charges are serious. That’s the evaluation of legal scholars, not Maga-hat-wearing sheeple. His nonchalance over top-secret documents about sensitive intelligence puts our military and our intelligence workers at risk of their lives, but it’s completely unacknowledged by the Trump crowd. He can do no wrong.
But most of all, Trump’s followers are oblivious to the most obvious fact of all, one that I totally love about Donald Trump and love to say: the man is a total loser. He lost the presidency, lost two midterms, and weakened his party in the last midterm. So I’m completely baffled (though not surprised) that his followers among the electorate and especially in Congress keep lining up behind him on the way to his latest disaster.
I’m no fool to believe Trump can’t find a path to the White House in 2024. It’s going to be a tough fight. But I really wonder, after four years of a functioning government that gets things done, what it’s going to be like for him to come back with no other argument for regaining the White House besides, “It was rigged! I should have been the president! The election was stolen!” It’s going to sound really dated, isn’t it? And if the economy is in any way better, it’s going to sound like a pretty stupid argument to follow anyone.
The danger is that he won’t take the results again when he loses, because he’s a crying little baby who can’t accept losing. But this time around, we have a president who respects law and order, and a crowd attacking Congress is going to be met with a strong show of force, unlike on January 6 when they hung around like a tailgate party until they were just let go.
Trump’s followers have been Trumped. Their logic, sense of decency, and caring for others have been overridden. It’s like he’s Jesus to these people. The ultimate joke is that so many of his followers who committed crimes on January 6, 2021, are going to jail while he’s not, and they STILL follow him. You can’t argue with this illogic. We just have to drown it out with logic.
Unfortunately, many of the other candidates are just as scary. Ron DeSantis believes people who are gay or trans are inferior beings not entitled to acknowledgment, a safe life, a history of their people, or much of anything else. Trump never really attacked the LGBTQ+ community (while he was busy lunching with known anti-semites and white supremacists), so he has that over Ron DeSantis. But we know he’d sell his own mother down the river, so he’d go along with everything DeSantis says if it meant 11,000 more votes in Georgia.
This nation can’t be overridden or Trumped. If we have no rule of law, if people are treated as lesser than others, if it’s okay to attack other Americans who are different than you are, we’re on a fast track to fascism.
It doesn’t matter that his followers can’t listen to logic. The next election, like most, will be settled by independents, and Trump is losing them bigly.
Find those people. Tell them both Trump and DeSantis would be disastrous for this country. Trump would burn the place down on his way to getting another dime for himself out of the Oval Office, and either one has no problem winning the presidency by turning half the country against the other half. The only way through either of these guys is by staying united.
