People like to try to understand the behavior of this complete asshole by saying things like, “He’s clearly out of his mind!” “The senility is obvious!” “Israel is controlling him, obviously! He would OBVIOUSLY not be supporting a genocide and a bunch of pedophiles and would instead be doing ONLY PRINCIPLED THINGS if he wasn’t being CONTROLLED BY ISRAEL, gosh darnit!”
People—young and old, conservative and liberal, smart and stupid, well-intentioned and acting on bad faith—will go to immense lengths to try to frame his behavior in terms of him “failing to understand,” being “desperate to avoid,” or perhaps will “need to accept” something that THEY clearly DO understand and accept. Or that he is “looking for a way out” of the war in Iran, that he’s “negotiating with himself,” i.e. imagining things (this is the characterization made by the Iranians themselves, so take that in context), that he’s clearly “insane,” “deranged,” “out of his mind,” or what have you.
Or they espouse the hope that he will “come to his senses,” “admit his mistake,” “find a way out before it’s too late,” or the like.
The fact is, there will never be “too late” for Trump. Why? Because Trump doesn’t care about any of these things. He’s not paying attention to things like winning or strategy in any conventional sense. He doesn’t care about “mistakes” he’s made; he doesn’t view them as mistakes. Because in his worldview and through the lens of his agenda, they are not mistakes.
They are well-designed and calibrated, if sometimes somewhat spontaneous, measures that entirely serve his personal interests. His decisionmaking has nothing whatsoever to do with the good of “America,” or the people of the world, or working people, farmers, or businesses and segments of industry from which he doesn’t directly benefit.
He’s also not concerned with his legacy, how Americans or the rest of the world see him, or how he will be remembered, at least not in the sake of how “posterity” will view him. People in that position consider how certain decisions they make will be judged. Trump doesn’t care about that. He wants to be celebrated, revered, immortalized in gold and stone and so forth. That’s not the same as caring HOW he is remembered. He just wants TO BE remembered. The manner, the how of it, is really not important.
He lacks the personal insight or depth, the empathy, and the capacity for abstract thought necessary to consider something like that, something like “consequences of actions” or how people will remember him. He is concerned with the here and now, with what confirms his image of himself as some kind of great guy, as a hero, as the cultural icon that he has been for the last thirty years, but on a global, political, epoch-defining scale.
Outside of that future-facing consideration, his only other one is personal wealth and the wealth of his family, and the kickbacks to people who have helped him get elected or will help him in the future.
He never meant any of the promises he ever made. Those were all hollow, simply a means of securing the vote from a vulnerable population that “the left” or the liberal establishment alienated irreparably long ago through two things: 1) the complete compromise of anything resembling principles in service to the neoliberal agenda, and 2), the use of identity politics to create the APPEARANCE of progressivism with absolutely none of the substance on top of the full-scale demonization and atomization of large groups of the population (not just men, not just white, and not just straight, but MANY groups).
That aside, Trump had absolutely no problem bald-faced lying to get elected. He has absolutely no problem taking huge superPAC money. He had no problem taking zionist money, or being supported by nazis, or by the “manosphere/Rogansphere,” who functioned as an entire media empire of useful FUCKING IDIOTS to serve his political gain.
He had no problem whatsoever lying to them and using them—and by extension their audiences—no matter the consequences: no matter if they criticizied him later, or even turned on him. NONE OF THAT MATTERED.
He is a felon pedophile genocidal mass-murder-empowering adulterer narcissistic psychopath cult-leader.
People like that have no scruples, no principles, and no capacity for personal reflection. They don’t learn; they redefine. They don’t change their mind; they change reality.
Anyone still trying to say that he’s “gonna have to understand” or “this war in Iran was THE huge blunder of his presidency” or that “He’s not America First; we thought he was but he’s clearly not,” or whatever other kind of ideological lipgloss they have to put on this pig in order to live with themselves, to sleep at night, to believe that a rational human being is running the country….anyone still playing those games needs to have a hard look in the mirror, and consider whether they’ve REEEALLLY seen the light with Trump yet, or if they’re still holding on to some vague hope that he is, in fact, a human being, and not a psychotic monster with absolutely no principles, feelings, empathy, insight, or interest in what YOU or ANYONE ELSE ON EARTH thinks of him, or how his actions affect them.
Because he doesn’t. He never did, and he never will.
And by the way, “America First” is a scam. It’s essentially a movement intended to shape and view America as an ethnostate. What else do you get when you take ideas like “let’s make our tax dollars work for us” and couple it with a rightwing ideology that categorically rejects any idea that even RESEMBLES the socialistic redistribution of wealth?
What you get is a corporatist, small-government state that uses populist rhetoric to convince people, just like YOU, to vote AGAINST the policies that would distribute that wealth; to reject immigration which would sustain and grow your country’s population and replenish its workforce; to pursue neoimperialistic foreign policy as long as it “benefits us” with no mind to the rippling effects of a state built on dehumanization, destruction, and destabilization; to be against unions and other collective formations; to be pro-billionaire as “symbols of true success” and what we can all “aspire to be,” and who are clearly the smartest and most meritorious among us….
In other words, you end up with a kind of, shall we say, a NATIONALIST state in the sense of viewing itself as superior and exceptional, with what could be described as leftwing-populist rhetoric about how how it claims to serve the working man. You know what, let’s just say, SOCIALIST rhetoric to it. So NATIONAL in substance, and SOCIALIST in rhetoric.
Hm. NATIONAL SOCIALISM. That’s kinda catchy.
Aulos Media 