Among the both sides, and “we must respect Trump because a respectable party nominated him” is the unspoken sense upon the media that each candidate has a vision for America. Truth is only one candidate has a vision for the next four years and it is not Donald Trump. He has never had a vision for the future. But he has visions.
When Biden speaks of infrastructure he speaks in hard terms, rebuilding bridges, improving Amtrak, internet for all; visions that evoke FDR’s plan for rebuilding America. We know what Biden is trying to do, because he tells us what he is trying to do. When Biden lays out his visions of the future we can generally see what he means because he speaks of it in hard factual terms.
Trump has never ever offered his vision for a future American. Instead, he speaks in superlatives of the imaginary people who would gaze upon his works and describe them. “America is great again.” “We are winning so much we are tired of winning.” These are not visions of the future, but imaginary descriptions of what people would see once he made that future. Except, he doesn’t have a plan for such future.
Trump has made lots of promises of America greatness, but he has never, ever had a vision of what that would look like. Instead, he makes the promise and lets his followers fill in the details; whether it be a white supremacist world, a Christian nationalist heaven, or just average folks imagining mana and money from heaven falling into their laps. He lets his supporters imagine it for themselves. This is the trick of the con. You don’t have to promise anything hard or concrete, just promise enough to let your mark fill in the blanks.
That said, while Trump offers no alternative vision to Biden’s, he does lay out a vision. It is a very dark vision. It is also the only vision he has ever had.
From the day he descended from the golden escalator to paid actors, he has set out of vision of an American apocalypse. Mexicans coming to attack us, crime rampant, a country in decline. All the things right wing media have been buttering up his followers for. He followed it up with his nomination speech of how America is a hellscape and he alone can fix it. Then, he did the American Carnage speech, to which the last GOP president, the one who led us into an illegal and disastrous war, called “some crazy shit.”
During his four years in office he had no vision, no plan and no interest in having one. He got what he wanted and went to play golf and return home to watch himself on FOX TV.
But here is the thing. Trump does have a vision, and it is very very dark. He tells us of it every time he holds a rally. He describes a world that does not exist in real life, but which he sees in his own mind. Scary monsters coming out from his bed to harm him and his followers, but really, just him.
All he knows is death and destruction and chaos. Because that is all he sees. Everything he describes in America today is likely everything that would happen if he became president again. Because all he can see is death and destruction, that is all he can create as president.
The period from 2017 to 2021 was so traumatic we forgot how much his vision of destruction and dysfunction was actually all he had. From the longest government shut down to the pandemic, all he knew was how to create chaos, even if it was only by refusing to make any decision to solve it and ignoring his advisors. It was like all he cared about was watching the world burn and seeing it on FOX news; which is how he watched his presidency end on January 6; glued to a TV. The most popular image of Trump from that era was him sitting with his arms crossed and defiant while Angela Merkal, Nancy Pelosi, or just about anyone else confronted him
Everyone who cares about our country is trying their best to convince people not to vote for Trump, to convince others to get out and vote against Trump, but there is one thing we should wake up to. We know what Biden’s vision for the future is. It is time to start asking Trump what his vision is. This is the failure of the major media. They will gladly report on his delusional vision of America now, but they have yet to ask him for what his vision of the future should be. Or, at the very least, pointing out that he has a vision and it is very dark vision of America.
