Meanwhile, in the Real World

Last week we saw the six-month anniversary of Joe Biden's inauguration as president. Leading up to that event in January, I saw some MAGA folks on Facebook predicting that Biden would not "last six months". They were very confident. They had no doubt about this. They didn’t specify, however, why they thought Biden would not make it this far in his presidency (I asked one – they chose not to explain).

So, I was left to speculate. I think there were 3 possible scenarios those folks on FB were implying:

1) The Plausible. Biden was so old and feeble that the pressure of being president would kill him. In other words, these MAGA folks had bought into the “Geriatric Joe” narrative peddled by Trump and his supporters. Strangely, Biden has not dropped dead.

2) The Sinister. By this point, Biden would have been killed by some righteous Trump-lover unable to abide the abomination of Biden illegitimately occupying the White House. Maybe some of those MAGA fortunetellers secretly (or not secretly) half-hoped this would happen.

3) The Even More Sinister, Plus Insane. Biden would be “bumped” off by forces aligned with Kamala Harris as part of a Democratic ploy to install the extremely radical Harris in the White House by first winning the election with a more-acceptable candidate (Biden). You have to be deep in the Qanon rabbit hole to believe this, but many Trump supporters are really that deep in that hole.

Needlessly to say, none of these Trump-cult fever dreams have played out. Maybe MAGA folks have conveniently forgotten that they ever predicted Biden would NOT be president by this time. Or maybe they have just moved on to now pinning all their hopes of the expected “reinstatement” of Trump on August 13th. That’s only a couple of weeks from now.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait a whole six months to see those high MAGA hopes dashed on the rocks of reality, you know, here in the real world.

This is a Cult

Okay, the level of crazy during the Trump presidency has always been high, but boy in the last week or so, it’s been upped a couple of notches. Some of the highlights:

Lindsey Graham claimed that the witches of Salem were treated better than Donald Trump has been during the impeachment investigation. He’s talking about women accused, imprisoned and sometimes hung because some of their neighbors acted hysterically. Until I see Donald Trump on a scaffold with a noose around his neck (which for the record I do NOT for a moment wish to see happen), I’m going to say it’s Lindsay Graham who’s acting hysterically. And ahistorical. Graham belongs to a cult.

Tucker Carlson admitted that Trump did indeed lie about how many people attended his inauguration. The president lied to the American people on Day One. But, Carlson basically says, this is okay because Trump is a “salesman” and, as we all know, salesmen lie all the time. My take-away from this is that we should never trust anything Trump says. Of course, this has been my conclusion for years already, but now Carlson has given his Fox News audience permission not to believe anything Trump says. In fact, they would be foolish to do so. Carlson belongs to a cult. Or else Carlson is just cynically playing to his most devoted fans, who do belong to a cult.

A recent poll shows that 53% of Republicans think that Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln, the man who led America through a civil war. This is mind blowing. This is mass delusion. Next, they’ll want to put Trump on Mount Rushmore. These people belong to a cult.

Donald Trump retweeted a picture of his head photoshopped onto the muscular body of a boxer (Sylvester Stallone from the movie “Rocky”). Juvenile and not exactly presidential, if you ask me. What’s worse, when the Washington Post -- stating the obvious -- mentions that the photo was “doctored”, the Trump reelection campaign hits back, accusing the Post of having no “evidence” the photo was doctored. As if, without some proof to the contrary, we are expected to believe the body of a 73-year-old obese man looks just like that of a 30-year-old champion boxer. This is a cult.