#RevThread # 104
Trump Attraction Syndrome (4 Part)
Part 2: Joyful Hatred
1/ If you can stand watching Trump rallies, you’ll see a kind of perverse liturgy...
Trump Attraction Syndrome (4 Part)
Part 2: Joyful Hatred
1/ If you can stand watching Trump rallies, you’ll see a kind of perverse liturgy...
2/...There’s always a sea of white faces, with one or two black men just behind Trump, so it looks a little integrated. Lots of flags right there for hugging...
3/...Lots of MAGA hats and pre-printed signs to hold up. “Women for Trump” “Blacks for Trump” (Sometimes they have a vacant looking white person holding that one up.)
4/ Trump wears his boxy suit with the extra long, bright red tie pointing like an arrow right at his dick. He’s all id. He talks in a ramble, moving from one golden oldie to another.
5/ All Trump's apparently disconnected insults of others and bragging about himself are loosely related to the following theme:
6/ “Power and privilege and position and prosperity mostly belong, by right and by nature, to white males, especially to me, and you and I have this great movement going to make that happen again.” (Earth to Trumpsters: it never stopped.)
7/ Trump is not a master of history or science or religion or economics. His speeches have no content that challenges anyone to think a new thought. Neither his purpose nor his interest have anything to do with knowledge.
8 / But Trump is a master at something else. His first wife recalled that the only book she ever saw him read was a collection of the speeches of Adolf Hitler.
9/ Hitler didn’t have much going for himself either -- looks or education, for instance. But he had figured out how to create a movement through speeches.
10/ What Hitler’s life showed Trump was that in a country where the majority of people experience a steady decline of their life’s quality, there lurks, just below the surface, a lot of hidden rage and a desire to blame some “other.”
11/ More importantly, what Adolf showed Donald was how to use words to provoke a sudden, joyful release of previously forbidden hate-filled thoughts and feelings.
12/ Trump’s audiences are filled with folks who have these two perceptions:
(1) those in charge of the government are in it for themselves and neglect people like me completely;
(1) those in charge of the government are in it for themselves and neglect people like me completely;
13/..(2) those in charge of the culture disdain people like me, my feelings, and my ways of expressing myself. (If you want to read a compelling account of these dynamics in 1930’s Germany, check out Hans Keilson’s amazing brief novel, “Death of The Adversary”.)
14/ When you’re filled with all these half-registered grievances, and suddenly a really rich guy who talks a lot like you do begins saying out loud everything you thought you weren’t supposed to say, some big things happen inside you...
15/..You feel a surge of power. All around you are thousands of people yelling freely that the speaker is right...
16/ The decisive moment comes when you open your own mouth and begin yelling too. “You’re goddam right!” You feel freer, you belong, you’re validated. You’re at one with all these people who finally dare to yell the truth.
17/ And then -- guess what? 
18/ This famous rich guy who is now the most powerful man in the world, this very guy, sends you, many times every day, his inner thoughts...
19/.. He confides in you, and in all the others who are now with you, his struggles to overcome the terrible people who won’t let you and him succeed in "making America great again"...
20/ Fifty-one million people every day get these flowers of evil from the one they think is the lover of their soul. And the detached media marvel that Trump voters do not lessen their support for this mobbed up President.
21/ I don’t marvel at that. I know something about the power of liturgy.
22/ Trump is planning 50 more rallies before November 6. His folks will be very ginned up by then. It will be very hard for the D’s to take back the House. The media is making the same mistake they made in 2016. "Surely his support will dissipate?"
23/ An authentic Fascist movement is taking place before our eyes. Releasing these hatreds and bonding people together in them is powerful. This is not the hour for us to relax and be complacent. We have a steep hill to climb.
24/ Do not be discouraged. Jesus, when he received his disciples back from their first attempts at ministry without Him, listened to their excited accounts of what God had done and exclaimed, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” (Luke 10:18)
25/ Vote, recruit others to vote, and help make lightning fall again.
