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

By David McElroy · August 25, 2023

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.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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