Cracking the Trump Code

           Cracking the Trump Code

 

I may have cracked the Trump code. The key is: humans love fictional villains, who’d repulse us in real life, because being fictional, they’re not us, so we can safely love the flaws they share with us, without feeling guilt or shame. Well, Trump cultivates an aura of unreality. His evils are over-the-top precisely in order to be cartoonish, and therefore seem safely unreal. Alas, he is real, but by the time a fan sees it, they’re caught in a shame trap.

Most manipulators project an aura of reality to virtues that most people possess but they do not; that way most people can egotistically admire the manipulator for those supposedly shared virtues. Such manipulators are garden-variety hypocrites; they lie but are ashamed of those lies, and so try to avoid exposure.

But other manipulators try a worse tactic. They project an aura of cartoonish unreality to everything that they do and are, except for their sincerely bad qualities. Those bad qualities are ones that they share with many people, but which those people do not acknowledge, to protect their good image of themselves. Upon seeing such open display of wickedness, most people would be repulsed; but the cartoonishness of the manipulator’s vice makes it seem unreal; which gives the viewer permission to admire without moral qualm.

It’s fun to love a villain if he’s fictional; so certain real-life villains seek to confuse fiction with reality, in order to be loved for what they should be hated. Such manipulators are absolute in their hypocrisy. They are proud of their lies, and exposure strengthens them. They say - and ultimately believe - that up is down and failure is success, in order to fail upwards. Truth condemns them, so truth itself is their enemy.

Therefore absolute hypocrites must commit what I call ‘crimes against reason’. This has two meanings; crimes against reason in the fool sense, and crimes against reason in the crook sense. Crimes against reason in the fool sense are badly planned and executed, and therefore fail in the perpetrator’s own terms. They do not deliver the crooked goods; they are against reason in the sense that they were committed for no good reason. Whereas crimes against reason in the crook sense target Reason itself. The crook aims to disable the victim’s ability to reason, and thus make that victim vulnerable to other assaults and predations.

Everyone lies to a crook, so they become fools; fools lie to themselves, so they become crooks. Therefore the two senses of crimes-against-reason tend to meet in the middle. The Dork Lord sincerely becomes as idiotic as he pretends to be; and his dork minions abandon the pretense of virtue. This sets them on a death spiral. They actively seek out disgrace, dishonor, insanity, evil, and failure.

The prognosis is grim. The correctives that normally restore human sanity work in reverse for absolute hypocrites. This cannot last; they must collapse; the question is what they get to destroy along the way.

Survival in the face of such insanity is difficult. Humility and integrity are key. Humility, to recognize one’s own shadow side in the Dork Lord, and so reject his perverse appeal. Integrity, to hold to the inner light that absolute hypocrisy would extinguish. A sense of honor, and a sense of humor, also help, for the absurdity of absolute hypocrisy is both criminal and comical.

Keep the faith. Two plus two really is four. Remain yourself, and you will probably suffer, but it will be you who suffers, and not a shoddy imitation of you. In the end you will have the unenviable honor of rebuilding from the ashes.