This post originally appeared at Forward Kentucky.
By BERRY CRAIG
I never saw a Bush (I or II), McCain, or Romney souvenir trailer veer off the campaign trail to Mayfield, my deep western Kentucky hometown.
But the proprietor of a Trump trailer has been doing a land office business.
The guy knows his customer base. Mayfield is the seat of nearly 87-percent white and largely conservative, Republican-voting, evangelical Protestant Graves County, which leaned southward during the Civil War.
The storekeeper enticed buyers with big Confederate and “PROUD AMERICAN CHRISTIAN” flags.
Graves County is Trump territory. The president collected 76.4 percent of the vote in 2016. (His statewide percentage was 62.5.) Even local Democrats concede that hogs will fly before Joe Biden carries the county. (Likewise, every presidential poll I’ve seen has the Bluegrass State indelibly Red.)
Anyway, a trove of Trump treasure was on sale, mostly yard signs, flags, hats, and tee shirts.
Shoppers — all of them I saw were white and maskless — could choose from the prosaic “Trump 2020 KEEP AMERICA GREAT” tees to the pointed: “Trump 45 Because the 44 didn’t work for 8 years…” The latter apparel was emblazoned with an automatic pistol aimed toward the wearer’s left.
Irony lives
Irony also abounded in the little shop on wheels. There were “Women for Trump” tees. Most polls show Trump in big trouble with most women (though probably not the spouse-helpmeets of white evangelical menfolk).
“Thank GOD TRUMP is Driving the BUS!” yard signs went for $20 apiece. “God Guns and Trump” proclaimed a tee-shirt.
Forget that Trump has spent most of his adult life as a serial violator of at least eight of the Ten Commandments, which are supposed to be the core of Judeo-Christian ethics and are posted on the walls of more than a few churches hereabouts.
True, he says nice things about his late momma and daddy. And, the president hasn’t personally killed anybody, though he famously bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Yet Trump kneels at the altar of earthly wealth. He curses and blasphemes. (Good Christians aren’t supposed to talk dirty, but several flags proclaimed “TRUMP 2020 NO MORE BULLSHIT.” A tee-shirt boasted “Hell Yeah! I voted for Trump.”)
Trump, too, eschews church for golf on Sundays. Habitually, he has stiffed creditors, which is the same as stealing.
Thrice married, he’s cheated on two — maybe all three — of his wives.
Trump’s an habitual liar, pathological or otherwise. Since he was sworn in, the president has borne false witness or made misleading statements 20,055 times, according to the Washington Post. (The tally doubtless is higher because the paper stopped its latest count on July 9.)
I didn’t notice a price tag on a pair of large, macho-military-style flags. One showed the president standing on the hull of an onrushing tank. The other one had Trump-as-machine-gun-toting-Rambo with the warning, “NO MAN, NO WOMAN, NO COMMIE CAN STOP HIM.”
Trump’s favorite foreigner is Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, a former KGB commie. Trump avoided the draft and Vietnam with a quartet of college student deferments and a medical deferment for foot trouble that some have questioned. (“Sylvester Stallone [Rambo], who now makes millions by fighting the Vietnam War for cameras, spent the real war in college and teaching muscle-flexing at a rich girls school in Switzerland,” Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1988.)
Trump covets the unrestrained power of Putin and other dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He even envies bush league strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
No Republican swag – just items for the Trump Cult
Interestingly, I didn’t see any Republican Party merchandise in the trailer. Never mind that polls suggest Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is in a tight reelection battle against Democrat Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. If there were any re-elect McConnell goodies, I didn’t run across them either.
Nor did I detect “Pence” on any tee shirts, flags or hats.
The trailer load of Trumpabilia seems more proof, as if it were needed, that the GOP has become the COT – Cult of Trump.
“One characteristic virtually all cult leaders share is their ability to deny reality and have their followers deny reality,” Robert Sulnick wrote in the Santa Barbara Independent.
“It is like a cult,” sociologist David Nickell says of Trump’s most fervent followers. “A cult requires strict obedience to the leader. Members see him as saving them.”
Nickell, a native western Kentuckian who teaches sociology at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, near Mayfield, says Trump’s appeal is deeply rooted in bigotry. Trump got elected by pandering non-stop to racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and religious prejudice.
He meant for white folks to read “Make America Great Again” as “Make America White Again.” Millions didn’t disappoint him.
His almost entirely white base pines for “a return to their old world order – ’Mayberry RFD’ and its all-white cast,” Nickell said. “They see minorities everywhere and see Trump as their savior to bring it all back and ‘make it right again.’”
Hence, the shepherd can do no wrong, according to the flock. “The strict definition of a cult means blind obedience to the leader,” Nickell said. “He alone can save them. Cult members will not believe any evidence that portrays their leader in any negative way at all.”
Nickell also said his brother, Tom, recently posted on Facebook a photo of a familiar red MAGA hat with a warning, “The Bible predicted Christians would follow a false prophet and that they’d wear his mark on their foreheads.”
There were plenty of MAGA and KAG — ”Keep America Great (White)” — hats at the store. But none had that beware-false-prophets advisory.
