Like most Americans, as Donald Trump re-assumed the role of president one year ago, I never imagined it would be this bad.
To set the bar, I have a vivid imagination.
I’m far from alone in clearly seeing that Trump’s return to the White House has been somewhere between a ghastly failure to a wholesale disaster for the United States, and the world.
Last week, a poll commissioned by CNN revealed that about 60% of Americans see Trump’s first year back in the White House as a failure. Even Republican voters gave Trump crappy reviews, including on his handling of the economy and immigration, which pundits say got him elected.
The unfathomable Top 100 list of really dangerous, stupid, corrupt and outright monstrous things Trump has done and said reads like human history’s most extensive collection of “you can’t make this stuff up.”
While I might still harbor a smidge of naivete in my news-cycle-weary body, I still believe, or want to believe, that it will take years, probably decades, and maybe even generations, to repair the damage that Trump and his acolytes have inflicted on the nation — and each of us — but somehow America will survive and prevail.
And probably the most unfair part of “Trump Part Deux: The Reign of Terror” is being robbed of endless days of gleeful schadenfreude scolding those who supported and voted for him, gloating with frequent told ya so’s. It’s because we are now all desperate victims of what happens by electing an unfettered man suffering from acute Narcissistic Personality Disorder as the most powerful person in the country, and the world.
“What could go wrong?” too many voters asked. You’re watching it unfold as you read this.
No doubt, just one news story from yesterday sums up the serious trouble we’re all in right now.
In the heat of Trump’s irrational and perilous obsession with taking over Greenland, Trump got busted sending a text to the prime minister of Norway that would have been begrudgingly funny if it had been produced by satirists at The Onion and not Trump himself.
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” Trump told Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
Twenty years ago, either Trump’s creepy obsession to invade and annex any nation, especially a fellow NATO nation, would prompt a bipartisan push for impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment. The obsession, coupled with the clearly unhinged and threatening and fallacious text to a world leader, calls for immediate intervention and probably medication.
Back to, you can’t make this crap up, the White House staff actually, and repeatedly, defends Trump’s clearly unhinged behavior.
Hey, I was right there with probably most of America questioning the wisdom of electing a president like Biden, who seemed frequently to have problems with his train of thought. Now we have a commander in chief whose thoughts are pretty much all deadly train wrecks.
After a year of not sleeping much and unable to keep a mental catalog of all the egregious gaffes — like Dealin’ Don’s Blanket Tariff Bingo Bust, killing Medicaid for children, firing and rehiring thousands of federal workers, accepting a $400 million jet from Qatar royals, bringing back polio and measles, endless Department of Justice lawsuits filed against his political enemies, and an air-craft carrier sized boatload of lies and misstatements — I’ve come to three observations that help me keep this all straight.
First, how is it, when Trump’s malfeasance, corruption and prevarication are not just painfully obvious, but regularly substantiated and publicly documented, do many Americans, albeit fewer every day, support this guy?
It turns out, everyone knows that he’s lying. Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., writing for Psychology Today in 2017, was among the experts who analyzed Trump’s lying. As your instincts may have told you, Trump is a prolific and documented pathological liar.
All lies are, essentially, grouped into two categories: “white” lies, which are told for someone’s considered benefit, “no, really, you look great in bright orange;” and self-serving lies, for the sole benefit of the liar.
DePaulo found that Trump is not only the variety of liar who makes crap up or misleads his audience for his personal benefit, he’s unusual in that a large number of his self-serving lies are also cruel in nature, denigrating someone with a lie.
Research by DePaulo and others shows that, outside of soap operas, real people lie like that very rarely, as little as 1%-2%, she wrote.
“Now let me tell you what I found when I tallied Trump’s cruel lies…they accounted for 50 percent,” DePaulo wrote. “When I first saw that number appear on my screen, I gasped.”
I didn’t gasp at all. I wasn’t even marginally surprised.
But it absolutely leads to another big mystery about Trump. Given his undeniable deceits, flagrant narcissism, toxic personality, and increasingly demented political stunts — like Greenland and tariffs for every meal — why haven’t more Congressional Republicans dumped his lunacy?
I’m old enough to remember being fixated on the Nixon Watergate hearings. Every day, Republicans would push back from Nixon as his own mental illness and corruption spilled out, until they all went running for the impeachment switch.
Jack Bacon, a legendary UPI wire reporter and metro-area editor, once told me how easy it was to sort the Republicans in the 1970s who were genuinely horrified by what Nixon did, and those who were horrified that their political careers might be nuked by not telling the public how horrified they were by what Nixon did.
While there are a few Republicans pushing back at Trump, or at least looking the other way, it’s just consistently crickets from their side of the aisle at the Capitol when it comes to pointing out that Emperor Trump not only has no clothes, but it’s pretty scary and gross.
It isn’t like the polling hasn’t already cast a pall over the mid-term elections.
It smells to me like some kind of mass Battered Person Syndrome. Just like battered spouses, GOP members of Congress know it’s coming, along with the “don’t make me hit you again” behavior. Then comes the assault. Then the lies, the threats, and then the verbal assaults recede.
They’re too afraid to stay and too afraid to leave Trump.
Anyone who’s ever known anyone chained to an abusive relationship knows that it only ends badly, but this isn’t a bad marriage or a boss. This is someone destroying the nation, and actually lives, now.
And so why do so many Americans — yup, fewer every day — continually watch this and still defend or support Trump?
That one’s easy, but unnerving. Researchers show Trump supporters know Trump is a liar and a con man, but they don’t care because they believe they’re getting something out of it for themselves.
Mother Jones magazine’s Washington DC Bureau Chief David Corn was equally perplexed by all this and dove deep into the weird world of sociology and psychology in 2024 to uncover an understanding of how freaky this all is.
Corn cited a 2018 analysis by Oliver Hahl of the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business and Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan of the MIT Sloan School of Management, showing that, essentially, people absolutely know Trump lies a lot, but he says what they believe, or what they want to believe.
The study revealed that, for whatever reason, Trump’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia and dislike for real expertise are admired, in part or parcel, by his avid fans.
So the thinking that if we could just help his supporters see how much of a liar or a cheat Trump is would provide a way out of this quagmire, it won’t work. They already know, and they don’t care.
“Trump voters like the lying,” Corn concluded. “Or, the lying is the point.”
Given all that, three years from now seems like an eternity. Looking for optimism, we’ve pretty much identified the problem: persuading Congressional Republicans to find the courage to rebuke their abuser, and persuading his supporters that they’re suffering his presidency right along with the rest of us.
Better get started.
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There is a phenomenon known as the “illusory truth effect.” It suggests that if something is repeated often enough, people will come to believe that it is true. The left-leaning media and Mr. Perry use this phenomenon often. They continue to repeat over and over how bad things are and how bad President Trump is for the country. This was used with great success during and after President Trump’s first term and was the primary reason for his defeat by President Biden. Since then, the American public has awakened and realized how biased the “fake media” is and has since started relying on alternative sources for their information. Realizing how they were fooled, Americans re-elected President Trump to a second term. But Mr. Perry is not willing to relent and continues to try to convince us how bad things are. We know differently.
Mr. Perry, you hit on a topic that horrfifies me to ponder. It now seems to me that no matter how much progress we make on racial or national origin or religious relations, the differences will always drive a certain percentage of people to dislike and distrust others and blame them for their own limitations. My brother is one such individual. He has long been distrustful and wary of myself and another brother. You see, my brother is a truck driver who has struggled with drugs and alcohol. He’s not educated and he’s poor. My other brother and I are educated and relatively well off. Every time I communicate with him, he mentions how he knows that I have a Masters degree, but… And the “but” is followed by some reasoning why he believes Trump is the best president we’ve ever had or some reason why he’s being held down in life. Usually, his venom is directed toward people he perceives as very different from him. Before he voted for Trump, he voted for Obama. However, he always explains that this vote was his effort to give the black man a chance and somehow Obama failed him. I have come to believe that millions like him are first, very rarely introspective – they never examine their thoughts or their own actions as the reason for their failures, and second, they fixate or are led to fixate on people that they perceive are getting a life benefit that they are not and they are prone to believe conspiracy theories to explain their particular discomfiture. Part of me acknowledges that these people always existed, but another side wants to know why. Trump is an expert at seizing on this feeling of inadequacy and exploiting it. His strange statements about being their retribution seemed odd to me, but obviously it resonated with his base. The people in his base are almost gleeful with Trump’s attempts to tear up norms and replace them with anyting else – and I mean anything. I think that is why none of the core blink when he shatters convention. I often wonder what comes next and how will they respond when their savior (Trump) is out of office or dies.