The Witness Chronicles, July 27, 2024 (v2)

What can I say? It’s been a busy news week

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

“We'll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

~ Donald Trump, July 26, 2024

A political week like no other

Chilling words from a lunatic running for re-election as President of the United States. He said this at a rally in Florida on July 26, 2024 and people cheered. Or did they? I don’t know but to me they tell us everything we should know about the mental state of this man. He is insane.

It would be easy to dismiss him as a crazy person out of touch with reality. But there were thousands of people there to see him. Cult leaders are always crazy, but they still manage to build a rabid following, often of people who feel left out of society, who find that cult a family that welcomes them.

Our need for acceptance is so powerful that we can be willing to discard our core selves to find it. Donald Trump instinctively saw this and realized it was his ticket to the highest position in the land and possibly the world.

An irresistible temptation to a narcissist willing to do or say anything for attention and acceptance himself. An ego monster powered by inherited money and a canny monkey brain willing to use any means to achieve his goals, legal or not.

Now, with a statement like that we know he has set his sights even higher. He now wants absolute power and appears to believe he has powers above and beyond normal humans. He promises to solve intractable problems but never explains how he will do that.

And he attracts those who would use such a man for their own purposes, recognizing that a narcissist can be controlled by telling him what he wants to hear, all the time. Trump is a tool and he either does not know it or does not care.

But he is in decline. And some voice inside him knows this and is doubling down, hoping or believing he can turn this around by taking his schtick even further. It’s a fundamental mistake that may bring him down.

I say ‘may’ because a lot of us have always underestimated this person and, perhaps, overestimated many Americans’ ability to see what he is. That was our mistake but we know now how he works, and I believe others are starting to see what a monster their fearless leader is.

The past week in American politics has been like no other. Only days ago we saw Republicans exultant over their chances in this election as they finished their nominating convention. But it ended darkly with Trump’s triumphant victory speech devolving into a litany of lies and gibberish.

Nothing new, but this time millions witnessed it. Some had to realize what this man has become. That was the start. And then Joe Biden, the sitting President and Trump’s rival in this election, shocked the Republican Party by an act they apparently never saw coming. He quit and handed the campaign over to Kamala Harris, an opponent the GOP is not equipped to handle.

A woman of color, younger, experienced, a criminal prosecutor, and a stark contrast to a doddering old white egotist who is recycling his language of hate and fear, language that no longer shocks and appeals as it once did.

It is revealed as what it always was, baloney delivered by a conman while his accomplices run around picking the pockets of suckers.

It was a remarkably good con while it lasted. But it saw the light of day in his speech to the American people, all the American people, and we saw what he really is, a tired old man running against another tired old man. But that other tired old man is not a liar, not a con artist, he is still a savvy politician and he did the right thing. He stopped playing the game.

A lot of us have begged our apathetic friends to wake up and see what these people on the right are doing to our democracy. But the Republicans bet the house that they would not and Biden called their bluff. And somehow, everything changed in a matter of hours.

The marvelous thing about the last week is the amount of pent up frustration there was in the electorate, frustration that turned into immense relief and then excitement that we were not doomed to more of the same. It has restored my faith in many of my fellow citizens that we have not given up.

The change has been so drastic that the Republicans a week later are still floundering, trying to figure out what to do. But they seem incapable of actually understanding why their world collapsed and can only fall back on the messages that now seem so crazy, and a man we all know now is actually crazy.

I’m guessing many of them wish he would disappear, but that would not solve their problem. They have no viable replacement because Trump’s ego has demanded they all be eliminated. A Liz Cheney could have led them to victory but they viciously committed political assassination on her at Trump’s bidding.

So they find themselves in this place.

Meanwhile, in Kamala Harris’s choice of a vice Presidential running mate, we see the depth of the Democratic Party and the breadth of her options. And we see something the Democrats have not been known for, unity.

Unity is the enemy of division, and division has always been Trump’s only strategy. But a lot of us really didn’t like it and now that it is being revealed for what it is, fear and hatred, it is losing its power.

As Churchill said, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning. But it may be the beginning of the beginning.

Maybe we need to pull out those Obama placards with the word Hope on them. Because now hope is a reality.

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