Watching somebody spiral into insanity is disturbing but that process becomes indescribable when the person in question is a candidate for the president of the United States, in the last weeks towards Election Day. America has been a dysfunctional family for eight years now, with an insane member — quite a few insane members, as a matter of fact — occupying places of power that they never should hold or have held. I know whereof I speak on the subject of mental illness in families. I come from a family with mentally ill members and have been in and out of therapy my entire life in an effort to cope with it.
As a matter of fact, I think that the reason I was able to spot Donald Trump for who and what he was, the minute he came down the escalator, was because of this background. It takes one to know one, and if you grow up around ungrounded, distressed personalities, who cannot cope with life on life’s terms and who drain and abuse all that they come in contact with, you come to recognize mental illness when you see it.
What I didn’t expect, though, was for the Republican party to normalize the Trump freak show and foist him on the rest of the country as something legitimate, and proceed to defend his abusive excesses. And that decision on the part of the GOP has warped America in such a way that it will take us years to recover. In all events, here is Trump’s latest deranged spew on social media.
Well said Obama. pic.twitter.com/KPLzxRzcTF
— Sandy (@sandiechill) October 11, 2024
Once again, the crazy man has spoken and once again, you may depend upon his right-wing media enablers to amplify this nonsense and make it make some kind of sense. And once again, the mainstream media will chime in with a sanewashed and normalized version of this dementia. Such it has been for eight years now, nine if you want to count 2015 and the primaries, and such it will be until Trump finally fades into irrelevance or dies.
We have a lunatic running for our highest office, and this self-same lunatic was in office from January, 2017 to January, 2021, at which time he tried and failed to overthrow the government and almost got his vice president killed — for which he had no remorse. Yet those of us in our dysfunctional family of 330 million people, who see this plain fact and are abhorred by it, are said to suffer from a malady, Trump Derangement Syndrome. I never thought plain sanity and the ability to reason from fact would be held in contempt, but by God I have lived to see that day. And so has Charlie Pierce.
The elite political media is utterly helpless in what should be its job, and it seems in many cases to be reveling in that status. (That NYT headline about the former president*’s “decades-long belief” in bad genes was one of the last straws thrown on the bones of a long-fallen camel.) I have this creeping feeling that reality is no longer enough.
I’ve covered enough campaigns to know that they all warp and twist reality to their own advantages. That’s how we got George W. Bush, rhinestone brush-clearer, and Richard Nixon, ace crimefighter, and the entire fantastical flight of fancy that was the public career of Ronald Reagan. (He can be seen as a predecessor to one of the newer characters in our national drama, J. Divan Vance, the suburb-raised Yalie venture-capitalist son of the Appalachian soil.) But there’s something different about this campaign. Reality has been abandoned at almost every level. A deranged convicted criminal is roaming the landscape, telling monstrous and easily debunked lies at every turn. Actual elected officials are talking about dark government forces controlling the weather. There is an organized campaign to destroy national unity in the face of two monstrous weather events in as many weeks. And large and influential media outlets flail impotently when they are not surrendering entirely.
The past eight years have destroyed much of the trust a cynic like myself had cultivated about the political world. I can only imagine what has happened to the psyches of the people who actually work in politics. How do you run a campaign in the dark forest of the unmoored political id? It must be exhausting, because it’s freaking exhausting trying to cover it, pointing out that, no, Joe Biden is not the maestro of the jet stream. That’s what I’m feeling these days—that for the first time, reality has a sell-by date, and that we all may be past it.
We could find ourselves at the end of the democratic experiment and looking at fascism taking the reins in a matter of weeks. That is where we have come to. But Charlie has found a ray of hope and maybe it is as simple as this: money. We are a culture ruled by money, obsessed by money. We deify those with money, even when they have done nothing to earn it, but only inherited it or grifted it, as in the case of the Trumps. But let’s look to the ray of hope and maybe it will be enough.
However, there was a story this week in The New York Times that came to me as a ray of hope, although I’m thoroughly ashamed to admit it.
Vice President Kamala Harris has raised $1 billion in less than three months as a presidential candidate, according to three people with knowledge of her fund-raising haul, a remarkable sum that has remade the race against former President Donald J. Trump. The $1 billion haul, which encompasses money raised for her campaign and affiliated party committees, including the Democratic National Committee, is being spent on a wave of television and digital advertising and an expansive operation of offices and staff in the seven battleground states and beyond. The historic sum does not include money donated to allied super PACs.
If a billion dollars in campaign money isn’t enough to beat a campaign of utter bullshit, if it isn’t reality enough to defeat the imaginary monsters going door-to-door for the other side, I will lose my remaining faith in the wisdom of the people entirely.
Charlie Pierce makes a good point. People would not have opened their wallets with such generosity if they didn’t want to see Trump defeated. Trump was begging from his penthouse for money yesterday. The GOP has underearned this election cycle. Democrats have the advantage vis a vis ad making, ground game, all of it. Trump specified that he wanted to use donations to make political ads.
Are political ads that powerful? Let’s ask Rick Wilson, he’s made his fortune making them.
Don’t drink the poison.
The reality is simple: there are two campaigns being run right now. One Campaign is to motivate a new coalition of voters from the left to the center-right, from Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney. That Campaign is pragmatic, professional, has fuel in the tank to win, and calls out to your better angels.
The other campaign is Trump. You’ll hear lies, hideous distortions, and grotesque interpretations of reality. You’ll see them characterize Harris in ways that are false at every level, desperate in every way, and repulsive to anyone of conscience. You’ll be fed a belly full of lies, conspiracy theories, garbage polls, ahistorical analogies, and ludicrous bank-shot theories of the electoral case for Trump.
Please keep your eyes clear, stay focused on the fight, and never, ever, ever let them convince you that all is lost. The lies are all Trump has left, and he only wins if we believe them.
Don’t drink the poison.
I guess that’s it. That’s what we’re going to see for three and a half weeks now. Pure, unadulterated bullshit from the Trump campaign, because that’s all they’ve got, and truth from Harris/Walz. It is devoutedly to be wished that truth wins out. But in a country with two narratives of reality, running side by side, I confess to not knowing. I never thought we would be where we are and have been for the better part of a decade now.
All I can say is that I hope more people turn out for this election than ever and rout this mentally ill son of a bitch into a room behind bars, which is the only place that he belongs. And then I hope that the GOP, what’s left of it, does some serious introspection and house cleaning. They have utterly failed America and the lion’s share of the responsiblity for this mess falls not to Trump, their patsy and Vladimir Putin’s patsy, simultaneously, but to them.
if you have drank the kool-aid, you’re all ending up like Jim Jones followers…if COVID didn’t get you, the kook-aid is your final destination. So, KEEP ON DRINKIN’.
“if you grow up around ungrounded, distressed personalities, who cannot cope with life on life’s terms and who drain and abuse all that they come in contact with, you come to recognize mental illness when you see it”. This describes my older sister perfectly. She has the mentality of a child. She will never grow up and she is nearly 70 years old!! Still dealing with her insanity. I totally understand!
I never expected the old-school repubs to accept Donold. I kept waiting for the blistering verbal attacks I know they are capable of. Needless to say, they never happened.
The love of money is the root of all evil. The Bible
And then I hope that the GOP, what’s left of it, does some serious introspection and house cleaning. Don’t hold your breath….RW is rotten to the core & will remain under the influence of the corrupt Corp’ 1%, their Benefactors!
Des Kapital