Trumps
Trumps
How should we cope with Trump’s looming presidency? I think we need a conceptual switch: stop thinking of Trump as a man and start thinking of him instead as a disease. Trump is an epidemic that is sweeping the land. This disease has infected the minds of a great many people: they are suffering from trumps (like mumps). There is no vaccine for it; it spreads through the air (and airwaves); there is no known cure. It is borne by memes—all those tics and slogans emanating from the engorged Trump virus. The Republican party is completely sick with it. Ordinary people are coughing and sneezing with it. The media are awash in it, staggering along, bedridden with the disease. It affects every demographic, not just old people. So far children are immune, but doctors are warning of the spread to them too. The disease is fatal to good sense and decent morals—they wither in its onslaught. Women are as vulnerable as men. Bodies are snatched by it, minds captured. Even those not infected are afflicted with the disease: they see it all around them and wonder what damage it will wreak. It evokes fear as well as insanity. They could make a horror movie out of this malady. Covid has nothing on Trump. Variants are springing up already, mutations, new pathogens. The disease is on the march. Modern medicine is no match for it. Politics as we used to know it is the wrong model; this is politics by disease transmission not persuasion. It turns out that the human immune system cannot handle Trumps. We can only hope that we develop a natural resistance to it in time. Scientists are working feverishly to produce an effective antibiotic. So far, only humor and ridicule have shown any clinical promise. Some researchers are recommending a change of diet—no more bingeing on social media and cable news junk food. Maybe the whole educational system has to be reinvented.
My personal explanation of his insidiousness is simply that he leads his followers in group emotions (there is actually a British psychologist named Bion who gave me this idea): they feel part of a great venture (MAGA) and feek they are off to battle the liberal elites, and he never gets anything done, NOTHING.
What will it take for them to disconfirm their feeling? First, as cognitive psychologists observe, feelings cannot be disconfirmed and then there is cognitive dissonance.
There is no cure for Trump but rational thought and taking off the glasses.
That’s not going to happen.
I meant to say there is no cognitive dissonnace with Maggot Heads; more proof no real thought is involved in the matter
The current scientific evidence says you can only get the Trumps twice, the caveat being that Trumps itself could be just a symptom of some even more serious underLYING disease.
It is true that the latest research shows that Trumps and Liaria are frequently found together. And yes, you can only get Trumps twice, but it often turns into long-term Trumps and can be fatal, especially in those with an underlying morbidity.
It has been reported that in rare cases the disease expresses itself in an orange face and a croaky strained voice. If this happens to you, it is recommended that you go to bed immediately and watch a lot of CNN.
I used to believe that imPEACHment was a certain cure for an orange face, but sadly this has proven ineffective in recent years. Mind you if the patient starts self medicating by taking his own advice and injects disinfectant into his veins, we may not have to bother phoning up Lily the Pink.
That certainly cures Trumps, but it has side effects involving death. Still, better than having the disease.
With apologies to The Scaffold, Lydia Pinkham, yourself and …….everybody.
Donald Trump
Took a terrible hump
With the whole rest of the world
So they gave him medicinal compound
Now he thinks he’s Richard the Third
Well, you can’t beat a dose of medicinal compound.
I would dispute the notion you can only get Trumps once. There’s a real danger we might someday see one (or more) of his progeny ride that same wave that landed him in the Oval Office. The bottom line is that while our prospects for saving the planet didn’t look good even if he lost, they now look absolutely abysmal. And that fits in with that same disease analogy in that we can liken the situation mankind is in today to the situation a 2-pack a day smoker will find himself in eventually down the road (premature death). A massive overhaul of the educational system would be a step in the right direction, but presently, I wouldn’t trust anyone assigned with that duty to take it in the direction it needs to go. Unfortunately.
Of course, that is true–Trumps could become a chronic disease, if the virus mutates into a slightly different form (“Trumps19”). Vance could become the new carrier. Not only does the educational system need to be overhauled; the cognitive system (?) also needs to be. We are poised to become a Star Trek episode.
I suspect Gene Roddenberry was an optimist. The whole premise behind Star Trek was that our species became peaceful and spacefaring.
Yet still deeply flawed.
Oops, I meant to say I would dispute the notion you can only get Trumps *twice.*
On the topic of dealing with Mr. Trump- only James Bond comes to mind, and he might favor Trump, plus he is fictional. How promptly will the necessary “market correction” for Trump II come to fruition? I think we’re like inmates at a concentration camp fantasizing some savior.
Where is Christopher Hitchens when we need him? He would have been the perfect skewer.
Trump may be one of those inevitable things in life after death and taxes
Trumps is as ubiquitous as the common cold, but far more deadly. There is no vaccine for it. Only bed rest away from right-wing media can provide any alleviation. It can kill the soul virtually overnight.
You have one backer: the filmmaker Mike Leigh calls him “the disease known as Trump.”.
I’ve always admired Mike Leigh.