In America, we used to understand that scoundrels roam around, trying their best to take advantage of honest folk, selling them patent medicines and bridges. Most of us know the tricks, we know to resist the temptation to trust slick talkers, trying to get us to buy into something that appears too good to be true. Yet, history has shown, when times are stressful and someone charismatic and bold promises simple solutions to problems we suffer from, they are incredibly hard to resist. This approach has been tried before. Not successfully. When you fall for fake solutions you are guaranteed to wake up to the sad fact that you don’t have a real solution or your money.
With less than 25% of Americans being that gullible—nevertheless, we are all saddled with Trump. These folks either never knew or didn’t care to honor the lessons taught over many generations on how to protect oneself from ruthless schemers and swindlers. They don’t know their world history, and probably haven’t been to the U.S. Holocaust Museum to see the devastation wrought the Germans themselves—as well as millions of other real victims—from following false leaders. At the very least, they should have demanded to be allowed to check references, do full due diligence on who they were getting. Just the fact that millions of voters were so gullible as to be willing to overlook Trump’s refusal to release his taxes—itself an absolutely crystal clear indication that things are not kosher with his financial dealings—makes me incredible sad for us all.
We are brought down by our society’s failure to educate people to have common sense, how to be smart consumers, people who kick tires. This lack of judgment is brutal evidence that our education system is not well suited to the highly unethical times we live in. Even employers and religious institutions don’t fill the “common sense” learning gaps that exist. A person with judgment could not look at Trump and believe that he has an iota of actual human decency. There is no evidence that he has ever done anything nice or good for someone else. No charitable, non-profit or even government work of any kind. He is solely after his own for-profit interests. He even brags about how avoiding taxes and withholding payments to honest laborers because he can makes him smart. No, it makes him thoroughly unethical and possibly bereft of goodness. And when did people forget that braggarts especially lack that of which they feel the need to boast?
So our fellow citizens’ ignorance is our problem now, because we are not a democracy where the majority rules. We are a country where the majority doesn’t even show-up to vote. That makes us a plutocracy, a country ruled by a minority of billionaires who have learned how to twist our elections, our news and our democracy to achieve their for-profit interests, regardless of the plurality vote. Some of us know better but our hoodwinked citizenry are dragging us all down. Purgatory imagery is hard to avoid—especially as the planet heats up faster and faster and profiting oil demons gleefully cheer at the demise of the planet. Trump, naked in his admiration of Putin, aspires to nothing so much as to build wealth like Putin, who is now the world’s richest man, by virtue of having capitalized on his power over Russian fossil fuel oligarchs, Russian mafia . . . and many others, such as Trump, himself.
There are those who say “Let’s see what he does.” How long do you need to see what is obvious? If you follow the money, you will see clearly what he’s doing: nominating all the worst people for every job, so as to keep everyone distracted and the whole government in chaos. Which is, when you think about it, the perfect smoke-screen to cover-up the enormous scale of thievery that Trump is clearly planning. Just like his hero, Putin. After all, you can’t just the steal money when the people are paying attention. You need to find a way to distract them, perhaps shoot at them from the sidelines, or leave the nuclear arsenal unattended, so they are all in frantic defensive mode. Isn’t that what everyone is talking about? In a devilish, snake-oil sales kind of way, Trump is a phenomenal success.