No One Believes in Donald Trump

Let’s be honest: Nobody believes in Donald Trump. I don’t care what political side you are on, deep down we all know this is true. Of course this does not mean that plenty of people support him, people willing to excuse his clear and obvious self-serving corruption. After all, it is easy to condemn his opposition too, their mincing desperation transparently clear. Their grit-toothed mantra is some sort of fuck you to those legitimate assholes who voted for Trump.

Wait–wait wait wait. I know how such a statement will be taken by the handful of you (and I know you exist, our back and forth outside telling me respectfully what you believe) who like to pretend that Trump is working for you. Deep down you know that he isn’t, that he does not care about you, or about America, nor about anything at all other than some vague and often flawed idea about how to make money. You folks know this. You know it. You know inside of yourselves that the man doesn’t so much hate you or hate these United States as much as he does not care at all. No, what you vote for is cynicism, an attack on the urgent self-satisfaction of the opposition that you enjoy telling to fuck itself by voting for an asshole who will treat them like shit. This is the foundation of Donald Trump’s base, not a positive vision of a greater future for the nation, but cruel laughter over confused perceptions on how other people might take it.

No one really believes in Donald Trump as a savior, nor as even a patriotic citizen. The man has no interest in America. I challenge you to make an argument that if ISIS compiled enough money Trump wouldn’t sell them nuclear weapons and then boast about how he made the greatest and largest sale in civilized history. Put simply, the man only cares about money. He cares only about the vague idea of boastful personal profit (and we already knew this going back to the earliest days of his career.)

I want to offer you a few quotes from the man from his tome The Art of the Deal (which was written by somebody else based upon the rambling statements Donald Trump made between yelling at people and smearing them after they left the room). Just give me a moment, and I hope you see my point:

• “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”
• “One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.
• “[F]rom a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. It’s really quite simple … The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business.”
• “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion.”
• “[W]hen people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard. The risk is you’ll make a bad situation worse, and I certainly don’t recommend this approach to everyone. But my experience is that if you’re fighting for something you believe in — even if it means alienating some people along the way — things usually work out for the best in the end.”
• “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

These are all from a book that was published in 1987. Consider this brutal cynicism, this approach to business, and then compare it to the fate of the actual world today. Sure, some lying liberals have attempted to claim that Trump repeated a quote that actually belonged to Joseph Goebbels, “You tell people a lie three times, they will believe anything. You tell people what they want to hear, play to their fantasies, and then you close the deal.” But what he really said is far more American, based in self-serving greed and not so much in the destruction of others. Business–and I personally know this from my father, a successful and self-made executive, founder of his own company and smugly self-satisfied because he learned how to take advantage of other people’s weakness–business is a soulless enterprise, one exclusively trapped in the transactional world of give me this for that (defined as ‘quid pro quo,’ in actual translated definition), or maybe “you can have this if you give me that.” This is standard business practice. And while it might fly in the cutthroat world of indifferently making as much money as you can, it does not translate into the cold and hard society that all of us live within.

For those of you who believe that Trump is somehow “making America great again,” I hope, at least for a moment, you can back off from you cynical smiles or outraged hatred and take a look at something more down to civilized earth. People in America and people all over the world are at each other’s throats. They hate one another perhaps harder than they ever have before. The divide between belief has created something that Kellyanne Conway, several years ago, called “alternative truth,” perhaps the most cynical and damaging idea that has come out of this collapsing age. What that means is that people believe different things are real–and do not take me for some sodden leftist, worrying about how those on the right are wrong about everything. Of course they are, refusing to consider the numerous facts spreading out that our current President is in fact a criminal, but those on the left are vaguely desperate to force their opinion on us all without bothering to make a case. And they are most likely correct, at least in philosophical inquiry. Most of us ultimately have no doubt that Donald Trump is even guilty of treason. But the partisan divide, that petty shouting match that causes people to refuse to even listen to whatever might condemn their beliefs, this is what the final legacy of the Trump years will provide, whether he wins re-election or not. For this is a man that refuses to care anything about you; a man who never expected (nor even wanted) to win his office, but who has now reclined into a place of absolute destruction and chaos because that is the only thing that can keep him busy in a job he does not care for and in a place he absolutely despises. Donald Trump hates you, he hates all of us, and the fact that people support him only because he condemns those whom they hate is the final word on the man, the final say on this present collapse of a nation that I–and probably most of you–love far more than the crooked President. I do not claim that anyone running against him is superior (although, on a personal level, based upon my own biased views, I cannot imagine anyone being worse for the health of our nation). No, we are in a terrible place. But it is important to consider, I believe, that a vote against something is not a vote for anything. If all we want to do is laugh at people different from us then humanity is doomed. We are doomed. I hope that we are not doomed any longer.