I love Dystopian fiction. But I don’t like living in Dystopia, and that’s what the four years of trump were. A Dystopian U.S. We had an orange man so vain about his silly hair, so narcissistic, that from 2016 to 2020, it was all about… well, trump.
Sex scandals, alleged pee tapes, injecting bleach as a cure for Covid, separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in what amounted to concentration camps, from building walls to barring Muslims from the U.S, to being impeached twice, to inciting an insurrection…the list is long. And any single thing on this list would have put any other politician in office. But trump, it seems, has never been held accountable for anything he has done.
His technique is slick but it’s an old playbook that authoritarian governments and dictators on both the right and left have used for decades. Tell big lies and tell them often enough so that people begin to believe the lies are truth. Divide people by pitting them against each other, Sow distrust in government, in the media, in established institutions. Create conspiracies. If you’re attacked, be merciless in your counteract (his Twitter mouthpiece). If your followers are loyal, reward them by endorsing them for political office. Play to your base, whatever it is. Convince them that only you can save them.
But trump has been out of office for nearly a year now and the January 6 investigation is closing in on his inner circle, issuing subpoenas for people and documents that he’s trying to block legally. It seems he’s trying to run out the clock until after the elections of 2022 and 2024.
A recent article on CNN online pretty much said it all in the last paragraph:
“Altogether, the picture suggests that the realities of government are catching up to one of the most creative escape artists ever seen in American politics. The truth is out there. It’s coming soon.”
Right now, trump could be that picture of Houdini.. Can I get out of this? Huh? Can I? Yeah, of course I can, I’ve done it before… Houdini, of course, escaped. But this time, maybe just maybe, trump won’t slip away and will be held accountable, finally, for something.
