Trump’s rabid defenders selling their souls for a narcissistic liar

Political loyalty appears to rot brain cells.

I’ve observed this phenomenon for years, from people of every political point of view. Once a person has decided on a position about an issue, facts no longer matter, at least for most people. They make emotional commitments to a position — for all sorts of reasons — and they keep doubling down on why they were right.

Many of Donald Trump’s opponents did this as soon as he was elected. Even before he took office, there were some people calling for him to be impeached. Before he had done anything. In the early parts of his administration, there was a massive effort to come up with some charge that was plausible enough to make it stick. The first set of impeachment charges were mostly nonsense, so Trump was not convicted and wasn’t removed from office. That was a reasonable outcome.

But the idiocy and dishonesty of the crowd against Trump had an odd effect. Otherwise-reasonable people were so incensed by the idiotic and dishonest drive to remove Trump from office that they turned into equally irrational defenders of this narcissistic liar.

It’s reasonable to believe that Donald Trump is an immoral thug who operates like a gangster — and who violates whatever laws or rules get in his way. It’s also reasonable to believe that many of his opponents are just as evil at heart — and to believe these people would do anything, fair or unfair, to destroy a man they hate.

Both things are true. An honest and reasonable person doesn’t have to choose sides. It’s reasonable to detest the leftists whose actions are taking our country closer and closer to the edge of the cliff of destruction. But it’s not reasonable to support Trump because you hate his enemies.

Donald Trump is a criminal. He’s a selfish and evil narcissist. And he deserves to be shunned by decent and principled people — even if you also hate Joe Biden and his friends.

It’s idiotic to choose sides in a war for control of a cesspool.

I’ve seen quite a number of otherwise-bright people defending Trump lately. I’ve read their arguments and dug through their angry rhetoric. I believe many among this crowd are going to wake up one day and say to themselves, “How could I have been so bamboozled by this man?”

When it came to Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial, I believed the the evidence didn’t support the charges which should have been necessary to find him guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The most you could convict him of — at that point — was playing political hardball. The things for which he were charged were pretty garden-variety politics.

But ever since he lost the 2020 election — and he did lose, fair and square — Trump has engaged in criminal activity that was designed to keep him in power. And then he engaged in sheer idiocy in order to make it plain that he didn’t think he had to obey any authority. That’s why he kept and shared secret documents. He had no rational reason to do this. It was simply narcissistic ego.

Trump tried to subvert longstanding rules that governed the transfer of power. He didn’t care that he had lost an election. His diseased and dysfunctional ego had to come up with some way to cling to power. The sane and reasonable people around him refused to participate. They refused to lie in the service of his need to hold onto power. Instead, he embraced insane people who pretended they could ignore reality and somehow get their way.

Trump and this band of buffoons broke laws. They lied to everyone. They did real damage to the political environment of the country. And they don’t seem to care that they have done long-lasting damage to the ability of sane people to oppose the political left — because they’ve allowed most everyone to believe you’re either a wingnut of the Trump camp or else you’re a radical leftist who’s intent on destroying the country.

Their actions have made it impossible for intelligent, thoughtful conservatives or libertarians to influence public policy — because more and more people believe that you’re either part of the political left or else you’re on the Trump train.

Those who are defending Trump right now keep repeating precisely what the liar-in-chief keeps telling them. They say that Trump has done nothing wrong — and if he has done anything wrong, it’s nothing compared to what Democrats have done. They refuse to look at the actions Trump and Co. have actually taken and they refuse to see just how outraged they would have been if a Democrat had done the same things.

These people are intellectually naked. They are defending a narcissistic liar who doesn’t care about them. They are making it impossible for a rational Republican opposition to the Democrats to function. They are hurting the very positions they claim to be fighting for.

Worst of all, though, they are selling their souls to defend an evil man.

I detest everything that those on the left stand for. I detest the dishonesty and moral depravity that’s pushed by the political left. But I realize that both of these groups are evil.

The fact that Biden and Co. are liars who have evil ideas doesn’t make Trump any less evil — and I’m painfully aware that his malignant narcissism makes Trump a special brand of evil. If you don’t acknowledge that, you are in self-denial — and you’re in the service of evil.