#44 DEATHMARCH TO THE WHITE HOUSE!–Trump’s Karma Vs. Sanity

I wish I could ignore it all and live a life of relative peace.  But I can’t look away.

Within a few days, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump missed his skull by a half inch, further burnishing his heroic martyrdom with his base; his self-appointed judge threw out his stolen documents case, based on ignoring lavish judicial precedent; and Elon Musk committed to giving 45 million bucks a month to a super-pac dedicated to electing him.  Biden has remained entangled in a fixated news cycle interested only in his age and the Democratic hand-wringing on what to do about it.

It has the quality of dominoes falling toward a fait accompli of Trump’s election and the demise of America.

Donald Trump, from a Buddhist point of view, has extraordinarily meritorious karma, such that he was born into wealth, has lived the high life with multiple beautiful wives, had a national profile of fame and celebrity, such that it played out somehow to elevate him all the way to the American presidency, a position of tremendous power he had no business whatsoever occupying.  Until fairly recently he’s dodged every self-created disaster and blowback from his criminal schemes.  He even literally dodged a bullet that could have ended his life.  You can say God was looking out for him, but from this analysis, it was good karma.  His time wasn’t up.

Positive worldly accomplishments come only through merit and don’t come if you lack it.  That, of course, is past merit, from other lives.  In this life, he has been epically, monumentally, pissing away merit on a daily basis.  One wonders what he’s done to earn anything positive.  You can’t live a life of enormous egocentrism and deceptiveness, not caring who you hurt on your way to getting what you want, and accumulate anything but non-virtuous karma.  It is much like the mafioso boss whose good past karma allows him to build up a criminal empire.  He believes his evil has brought him prosperity, but it’s only setting him up for a very long fall.

So is that it?  Much like his 2016 campaign brought him to the White House over lifelong public servant, Hillary Clinton, does it simply not matter that he’s a square peg in a round hole?  Have all the karmic conditions come together such that he’ll rise to the White House again, regardless of how little he deserves it and how malevolent he’ll act the next time around?

What’s hard to make sense of here is how little actual reality there is in any of this.  Take the failed assassination.  With perfect predictability, the Republicans (J.D. Vance, first among them) blamed the Democrats for this.  Hmm.  Thomas Crooks, a twenty year old registered Republican, shot at Trump with a semi-automatic rifle that allowed him to get off a number of shots before getting killed himself.  The ownership company of the rifle brand, DPMS, received a rah-rah visit from Trump himself last year.  The extra bullets managed to wound two other people and kill a third.

Republicans have consistently blocked any Democratic efforts to ban semi-automatic weapons, though maybe it feels different when it’s one of your own who gets shot at?  Oh, the outrage.  As Joy Reid observed, machine guns have more rights than the people they kill.  That’s Republican doing.

Couldn’t we just argue that Crooks was exercising his First and Second Amendment rights?  That’s the kind of thing you hear from the right.  They love the idea that violence will solve political conflict, and goose it whenever they can.  If some wingnut busts into Nancy Pelosi’s home and fractures her husband’s skull with a hammer, that’s the basis for jokes.  Resorting to their usual double-bind, solemnly they intone that the attack on Donald Trump came from dire Democratic warnings about Trump’s push for autocracy.

Exactly what motivated Crooks to get up on that roof to take out Trump remains opaque.  It seems possible, based on FBI archaeology of his cell phone where they found pictures of both Trump and Biden, that he might be a “double hater” interested in killing them both.  He also had pics of Kate Middleton.  Did he plan to assassinate her as well?  If I had to hazard a guess, her pics were probably jerk off material…but I’m getting off topic.

Then we got, through mainstream media, the idea that Trump, thanks to this sobering brush with death, would help tone it down for the Republican National Convention, literally starting two days later.  Late night TV like The Daily Show had a lot of fun showing the media reporting on a new found tone of peaceful American unification by the Republicans, followed by a montage of the relentless aggression from Republican convention speakers.  It certainly had no effect on the single most popular idea at the convention, to judge by the many signs proclaiming: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”

The Republicans want to deport ten million illegal aliens from the United States…and then all our problems will be solved!

All the unbearable convulsions such an action would wreak upon our economy aside, do they not hear the echoes of, say, Stalinist actions in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc., and the many horrors of ethnic cleansing around the world this phrasing evokes?

No, no they don’t.  They don’t hear much.

That’s what’s so ghastly about it all. There’s virtually no reality to anything, and even the Republicans capable of seeing through it and saying so instead genuflect and grovel: Nikki Haley, Exhibit A.  Haley, who has at least at times seemed human and sensible, willingly sacrificed any personal integrity by kissing Trump’s ass.  Ron DeSantis, who has never seemed particularly human, the same.  But maybe the biggest hypocrite comes in the form of J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential pick.  In a very interesting discussion with MSNBC hosts during the convention, someone who knew Vance in college repeated something Vance said to him about Trump:

“Trump was the fruit of collective neglect by the Republican party, who was ignoring the working class, and that he was a demagogue exploiting the failures of his party.  That’s a sophisticated analysis that still holds true.”

But embittered in whatever ways by his life, he thinks Vance (a hedge fund millionaire) drank the MAGA Kool-aid,

“Rather than just being an empty suit who’s parroting MAGA talking points, he has let his anger really take over his life, and make him convinced that Trump is really the right choice for America….I think he’s so angry, so motivated by that spirit of revenge that Trump has publicly espoused, that he’s the perfect running mate for Trump.  And he’s really magnifying the MAGA moment and doubling-down, instead of being a more moderate pick.”

Which is worse?  Toadying up out of practicality, so that you can continue your ambitious career of power, fame, and money, or seeing the situation accurately but letting it transform your clarity into a vengeful attitude of self-serving delusion?

Self-serving delusion.  That’s what this whole, ever more grotesque charade is about.  One side here has, for better or worse, gotten itself into a spiral about the aging faculties of its candidate.  The other has a candidate convicted of 34 felony charges for election fraud; in civil trials was found to have raped a woman and stolen funds from his “charitable” organization; settled a class action suit against his fake university for 25 million; and lest we forget, violently tried to overthrow the government—plus really just an overly familiar list of sins so extensive and lifelong it drops like a scroll running out along the floor.

That’s who they were worshiping in the aisles of the RNC, praising him up and down, committing the votes of their followers, believing him to be a truth teller who puts it to the elites, believing him to be the hero that survives all assaults (and, in a way, he has), martyred to the legal system in how they feel martyred for believing in Jesus–or guns or money–believing in the white Christian way of life, most of all.  Or if you can’t get to the Christian part, just being white will do.

Thus the RNC comprised a brutal theater-of-the-absurd America, and when Trump finally went out as the climax speech, with as sympathetic and enthusiastic an audience as he’ll ever find, he talked for an hour and a half, setting the modern record for longest convention speech.  I could not listen.  Personally, I hate the sound of his voice.  But by accounts, while he did his feint at rectitude and “national unity” with the story of the assassination attempt on his ear, he went off the teleprompter (something he’s never been good at anyway) frequently and incoherently, as he returned to his ocean of grievances, swimming far out to sea. And of course he trudged through his greatest hits of lies. I’ll only quote here Chris Wallace:

“Frankly, it was a long speech. It was a rambling speech. It was a speech by an older man, and I couldn’t help but think that the people that are going to be happiest tonight are not the people at Trump headquarters, but the people, the Democrats, maybe at Biden headquarters.”

Trump came to his big moment to hit it out of the park, much like Biden had in their earlier debate, whiffed big and looked old.  Apparently the people in front of the stage started to check their phones long before he finished.

Biden, on the other hand, had been in a campaign to rehabilitate his image.  He had shown some fire, especially at this Detroit rally, where he didn’t look too old to make the case.  In his interview with Lester Holt, he complained, in a vigorous and charming way, that Lester was asking him about his age but wholly skipping over Trump’s 28 lies during the debate, clearly throwing Holt out of sorts.  That’s the guy we’ve needed to pursue this campaign, but is there enough of that kind of chi left in him to do it?  It seems like the Democrats have decided no, there’s not.  And in another jolting turn, Biden just today put aside ego and endorsed Kamala Harris to take his place.  Suddenly now this might be a rather different race.

Thus the whole fate of America, and with it our global prospects, balances on a knife edge.  In this volatile moment, it could go a lot of directions and it’s not a fait accompli, unless we all start thinking it is.  The madness that possesses the Republicans and the chaos gripping the Democrats edges us toward dissolution, yet what choice do the rest of us have but to find our feet and our sanity, and not just get sucked into the vicious cycle of hope and fear?  It’s hard, I’ll allow, not to fluctuate with every push and pull happening, but someone has to retain their sanity, regardless of the outcome.  Someone has to look out for our collective good, and it has to start in each one of us.  We can’t succumb to the Republican fantasy world and all the hatred that comes with it.  Our eyes need to be open enough to see beyond this toxic divisiveness to our shared truth.  The Republicans want no part of that, but who will be the grown ups in the room if not the rest of us?  That means feet on the ground, head in the air, and heart in the right place.  That’s where it has to start.

Maybe the Democrats will now sort themselves out, find a unified voice, and undermine what is, after all, a Republican agenda no one else really wants—even many Republicans themselves.  But if the Democrats fail and the old man hideousness that is Donald Trump ascends yet again, it will be down to our courage and poise, any of us who can rise to the occasion, to deal with what comes next.