The ultimate Trump piece

First: I'll probably have some thoughts about the unrest in North Carolina before the day is out. It's a horrific situation -- protest is certainly valid, but violence will only serve to elect Trump. And yet: What right do I have to tell anyone "Be calm"...?

So let's talk Trump. Drew Magary, writing in GQ, says everything we've all been dying to say. Decades from now, this piece will be quoted as the warning to the nation as it plunges into the abyss.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold uncovered yet another Donald Trump scam job, in which he used over $250,000 in charitable donations to help pay off his legal bills. And, because this is Trump, that sordid (and almost certainly illegal) bit of money laundering is just ONE despicable detail of the story. There are many more, including Trump’s club trying to welch on a $1 million hole-in-one payout (out of all of Trump’s bad qualities, his steadfast refusal to pay people what he owes them, while bragging about it, is the most enraging), along with the old bit about Trump blithely ignoring local ordinances so he could put a big, dipshit flagpole up at the Mar-A-Lago club, with his lawyers stating—with a straight face—that a smaller flag “would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s . . . patriotism” (NOTE: Until recently, Trump didn’t know what the stripes on the flag symbolized).

None of this is surprising, of course. Trump is a liar and a crook, and he commits abominable acts at such a frenetic pace that they get lost in the fury surrounding whatever horrible thing he does next. Keith Olbermann needed over 17 minutes on this site just to list a fraction of the atrocities Trump has staged during election season, and he’s gonna need 17 more minutes to cover what happens between now and Election Day. Remember when Trump said he would get rid of food regulations? That was Thursday.

Regardless, in the end, people are still gonna vote for this man. Maybe not enough to get him elected, but still: it’ll be in the tens of millions. (Note to the people causing the polls to fluctuate: What the fuck is wrong with you? I gotta meet the five percent of people who saw Hillary come down with pneumonia and were like, “Forget her, gimme the dictator with dryer lint hair.”) Nothing that Trump says, no damning piece of Trump reportage, and certainly no opinion piece like this one will stop his voters from pulling the lever. Nor will anything stop Trump from being the officious, braindead goon that he is. He will never answer for his crimes, and there’s a frighteningly large portion of the electorate that will always love him for that.

And so I’d just like to say to that portion of the electorate: Fuck you. No, seriously. Go fuck yourselves. I’m not gonna waste any more time trying to convince you that you’re about to do something you’ll regret forever. I’m not gonna show you old clips of Trump saying rotten things. I’m not gonna try to ANNIHILATE Trump by showing you records of his hypocrisy and greed. I’m not gonna link to a John Oliver clip and be like, “THIS. So much this.” Nothing’s gonna take down Trump at this point, so I’m not gonna bother. No no, this post is for ME. I am preaching to the sad little choir in my soul here.

Because while Trump is a miserable bastard, YOU are the people who have handed him the bullhorn. YOU are the people willing to embarrass this nation and put it on the brink of economic ruin all because you wanna throw an electoral hissy fit. YOU are the people who want to revolutionize the way America does business by voting for its worst businessman, a disgusting neon pig who only makes money when he causes problems for other people instead of solving them. YOU are the thin-skinned yokels who clutch your bandoliers whenever someone hurls the mildest of slurs at you (“deplorables”), while cheering Trump on as he leaves a bonfire of truly hateful invective everywhere he goes. YOU are the people willing to overlook the fact that Trump is an unqualified, ignorant sociopath because DURRRR HILLARY IS BAD TOO DURRRR.

The old saw is that people get the politicians they deserve, and I’ll be crestfallen if Trump wins and proves this to be true once more. If you vote for him, you’re not making America great again. You are killing it. You are telling the world that America isn’t worth it. You are telling the world that all of our big talk about freedom and unity and ideals is just a load of shit, and that you would prefer a smoldering dystopia where freedom is just a flimsy cover for evildoing, led by a man who believes that strength is measured only in killing people. You are handing the most important job on Earth to Napoleon from Animal Farm. And you are revealing your breathtaking ignorance to everyone except for yourself. I can’t believe you can’t see this. I want you to see this. I wanna shine a big fucking light in your face and scream at you that Trump isn’t even qualified to be human, much less President. How are you gonna change the system if you elect some corrupt idiot who has no clue how to DO IT, huh? Can’t you see this? Haven’t you heard this asshole talk? THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Daily Kos linked to this article. The comments touched on the key role played by conspiracy theory in this election...

I enjoyed reading it but somehow I kept thinking… really? There is really nothing that can “happen” to change Trump supporters mind? How about we delve into sci-fi or Utopian scenarios? What if someone where to find a video (it has to be a video because his supporters do not read) of a Trump conversation with Putin, Trump laughing about the idiocy of his supporters and laughing that ISIS is good for his business and asking Putin how to be a good dictator and if he can have access to Miss Russia for a night?

Interesting question. Response:

They’ll say it’s been doctored or that it’s a Trump body double or something equally insane. Seriously — when I showed my Trump supporting animal loving mother the pictures of the creepster Trump boys with their slaughtered safari animals she got angry at ME instead of them and insisted that those pics were fakes made by left wing propagandists. Yes, this really happened.

I believe it. When I posted the video of the interview with the architect that Trump hired and refused to pay, my Trump-supporting aunt insisted that the interview was “Photoshopped”. Which, I guess, shows she knows as much about Photoshop as she does about politics.

Conspiracism has become the new opiate of the masses. It is the mechanism by which the people eradicate the reality that is and replace it with the reality they want. I urge you to read this profile of Steve Bannon's lieutenant, Milo Yiannopoulos:

“We live in a post-fact era. It’s wonderful,” he says, pointing to various web pages on his giant computer screen that show photos of, supposedly, Bill Clinton’s grown black son. “The Washington Post gives a truth check, and no one cares...."