Triumph of the Shill: The Pestilence of Trump and His Supporters

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A Donald Trump rally of the faithful to celebrate a remarkable 70-plus year streak of never being wrong and never making a mistake may very well feature more beaming smiles per square inch than any other place in the world at the moment the rally is taking place. The values to which a rally to celebrate the gloriousness that is Donald Trump attempts to appeal can be intuited as much by the unsmiling faces which are absent as the jocularity of those attending. The inclusion of smiling faces and the exclusion of unsmiling faces both serve to reinforce the point that what ultimately unites every happy person there is a universally shared opinion that they represent the American that was meant to be—which, of course, excludes anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump for any reason.

The Trump calculus is simple: agree with me and you are good; disagree with me and you are horrible.

The steady construction of Donald Trump as the perfect realized human form of the ideal potential of the American character serves to create a subtle and partly unconscious associational linkage dependent upon the audience to become a complicit partner joyously existing only to serve the whims of the man up on on the stage. A man–barely a man; closer to a demigod–that they see as perfection even if absolutely everyone else on the planet sees him as petty, narcissistic, cowardly, stupid, vulgar, childish, petulant, selfish and vile. The call upon the audience to become an interactive participant in the glorification of Donald Trump has already begun to a leave a stain upon the American character that everyone but Trump and his supporters can see and smell and worries has a very good chance of settling in a permanently in a way that can never be completed eradicated.

The most pestilential residue of the Trump processing into the White House (he did not WIN an election; you do not WIN an election by coming in second; he benefited from the most ill-conceived process for democratically choosing a leader that has or will ever be known)  is the perhaps not-entirely-conscious apprehension by his supporters that the obstruction to their gaining influence is no longer dependent upon being in the majority. A minority—a fractional minority–of painfully like-minded people are currently mapping out the next twenty-five years of America’s future. This represents a corrosion of the very foundation of democracy. Whether Trump serves out his term or is re-elected or not is beside the point: what we are witnessing here is the final obliteration of the idea that America is a place where will of the majority–no matter how distasteful that will may be to the minority–is the fundamental requisite for wholesale change in the direction of the country. I’m not entirely convinced that Trump supporters are consciously aware of this, but they will continue to behave as though they have grasped its ideological significance.

Until the system–not the people in charge of that system–gets changed….AMERICA IS SCREWED.