June 22, 2024
Dear editor;
Some thoughts on upholding a useful idiot.
After Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he wasted no time getting Americans accustomed to his lies. He claimed, “It was the largest crowd ever!” at his presidential inauguration then he shamed White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus into continually repeating this lie despite ample photographic evidence completely to the contrary. The vehemence of these lies concerning so inconsequential an issue as crowd size would be harbingers of the future. Soon, we saw a televised and staged cabinet meeting where each secretary expressed creepy adulation to the new Commander and Chief.
Not long after, came the “Russian Collusion” scandal. Despite being called a Democratic Party “witch hunt” or “hoax”, two dozen criminal cases were brought; 12 Russian intelligence agents were indicted for hacking into Democratic Party computers, 13 for tampering in the 2016 election, with the Trump campaign welcoming the help. Six of Trump’s close associates pleaded guilty, including campaign chairperson, Paul Manafort, National Security advisor Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer.
Meanwhile, an attempt to repeal The Affordable Care Act failed in Congress when former Navy pilot and Vietnam war hero, the late Senator John McCain, previously castigated by Trump for having spent five years in a prisoner of war camp, cast the deciding vote with a memorable “thumbs-up”, the signal exchanged by the pilot and his ground crew prior to carrier launching.
The COVID-19 virus ushered in 2020. Trump was quick to call it another Democratic Party hoax but, hospitals overflowed and people died. He told us the virus would just disappear, like the flu and that the alarming death count was simply “dishonest-media” exaggerations. During a daily update he mused out loud to his medical team and with the sincerity of a seven-year-old, whether we might just ingest bleach, cleaning fluid, or somehow shine an ultraviolet light within to rid our infected bodies of the virus. That is, a seven-year -old with the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal in his toy box, and who, a few months later, after losing his re-election and after his failed attempt to illegally-overturn its results, would play “show and tell” with top secret mishandled government documents at Mar-A-Lago, and then obstruct the government’s attempts to reclaim them!
Trump’s hold on the G.O.P. is such that congresspeople and senators, and those running for office must say they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, “The Big Lie”, as though few, if any, believe it. But their constituents do believe it. Repeating lies often enough causes them to become believers. After Fox News lost its $780 million lawsuit against the voting machine manufacturer, even television host Sean Hannity believed Trump’s accusations were false.
Though Hannity’s support of Trump was diminished then, Hannity supports Trump now; Russia, China, and North Korea, do too. June 20, seven billionaires joined the cause. Why? Trump threatens to tear-up the U.S. Constitution, become a dictator on his first day back, pardon the jailed January 6 seditionists, dismantle both Medicare and Social Security, fire 30, federal civil servants and, replacing them with Trump loyalists, and for good measure, abandon NATO.
Nickey Haley, his only competitor in the Republican Party primary once called Trump, “unstable, unhinged, unfit to be president”, but, May 26 she said she would vote for him! Why?
Trump’s monumental human weaknesses, not the least of which are greed and avarice, along with his affinity for criminal enterprise and transaction made him Putin’s golden boy. The former KGB agent was and still is no match for Trump in the political or propaganda arenas and has probably been grooming Trump to be his useful idiot since Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant days. Trump’s narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies and his willingness to denigrate daily our rule of law and justice, the backbone of our democracy, have made others take notice. China, North Korea, autocratic European nations, not to mention Republican Party politicians, business moguls, judges, and Arabian princes, want their own useful idiot in the guise of the American president. In the past eight years Trump and his sycophants have endangered the American Experiment more than all our enemies, foreign or domestic, a useful idiot indeed!
Please, go in peace and have a Happy Independence Day!
Dave Hoehne, Aurora