Cometh The Savior, Again

Clearly produced by a randomly-editing, drug-addicted monkey, a video released by Ron DeSantis’ campaign is equal parts homophobic, homoerotic, anti-Trump, incomprehensible, and one hundred percent bizarre. No wordled description can convey its mystifying content. It must be seen.  

Asked for comment, openly-gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded thus: "I'm going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders..." Then he got down to it, the defining question of the 2024 campaign; one that must be asked of every Trumpublican, which includes all candidates no matter how they do or don’t defend Trump. They all repeat his lies and attacks on otherness, offering nothing substantive: “Who are you trying to help," asked Pete, "Who are you trying to make better off, and what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?” To which he provided compelling examples of what President Biden, he, and others in the administration have done; and what Democrats stand for. 

That ought to be the motivating question for all politicians: what are you for, as opposed to what and whom you’re against? In what ways do you intend to make life better, and for whom?

Trump made his policy emptiness even clearer than DeSantis in a campaign ad in which he walks resolutely toward the camera, a grim-faced, stony savior of the self-pitying and fearful, to the sound of his voice reciting, biblically, with cheers in the background, “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will abolish the Deep State. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that (ed note: projection alert) hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” 

Wow. Fascism, cubed. Plus Stalinist purges. Scapegoats. Mortal enemies. No free press. No independently-thinking, experienced government employees. Made-up monsters for haters to hate. It’s a campaign brazenly pushing fear and grievance, lacking anything positive for anyone, except revenge for those shadowy threats his voters have been made to believe, through relentless lies. “Deep state.” “Communists.” Marxists and (projection alert #2) fascists. The cheering says it all: Trumpism is nasty, projectile negativity, the promise of apocalyptic vengeance against id-iot nightmares. It’s why they love him.

Trump and his congressional personifiers call upon the worst of us and it’s answered with enthusiasm from the depths of Trumpistic animus. If DeSantis’ video was more obtuse, his message was the same. It’s about destroying certain people, not building anyone up.

It’s also why Trump pretends his two indictments (so far) are badges of honor: “They want to take away my freedom because I’ll never let them take away your freedom.” To which a former RNC Chairman, from when the last shreds of integrity hadn’t yet been dispatched with prejudice from his party, responded, “What utter bullshit.” If Trump sold crucifixes bearing his suffering image replacing Jesus, the cultists would pay any price, and wear them as talismans of their fealty. But how might they process his words, spoken when running against Secretary/Senator Hillary Clinton, regarding her over-hyped, under-illegal emails? “If she were to win under felony indictment it would grind the government to a halt and create a constitutional crisis."

The answer, of course, is they wouldn’t care. Any room for dissonance in their headedness has been displaced by bone; logic and facts are distractions, if noticed at all. Which is why their candidates and alreadys can project a world opposite to reality, believed by their irremediably Foxified legions.

“We’re a nation in decline,” says Matt Gaetz, expecting, presumably, our radicalized Supreme Court to remedy it by continuing to promote Christian nationalism, removing Constitutional protections from everyone else.

“OUR ECONOMY IS IN SHAMBLES,” all-capsed Trump. Tim Scott, supposedly a rational Republican candidate, declared, inverting reality like an hourglass, “Three years ago, our economy was thriving. Today, we’re all worse off." By no metric is that remotely true.

But, counting on cultivated incuriosity, he’ll be believed, against facts as available as air, that Trump inherited a failing economy and left it in great shape. It’s a lie as big as Trump’s stolen-election bogosity, turning truth on its head. 

Running as retributive messiahs, Trump and DeSantis are sides of the same counterfeit coin. Meanwhile, Republicans who voted against President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, which plays a central role in the unequaled recovery our economy is experiencing, greater than any other country (including lower and lowering inflation), are rushing to take credit when money from the bill arrives in their districts to fund important, job-producing projects; more in red states than blue. In a rational universe, they’d be laughed off the stage.