Guest Blog: The Malevolent Character of Donald Trump

I was alerted to the post by a close friend on Facebook and contacted the author for permission to repost it here on Blogging Blue. So here are some thoughts on the malevolent character and antisocial aberration that is Donald Trump from the pen of George Godwyn (adult language included):

I belong to several Trump groups. I watch them, I interact with Trump supporters, there and elsewhere, sometimes arguing, sometimes just observing. These are the hardcore supporters, I’m talking to. Some of them are consciously politicized, some aren’t, but they’re all pretty fanatic. Mostly they just don’t care what critics have to say. They either laugh, or accuse people of being snowflakes. Rarely are real political issues dealt with. Contentious points are just shrugged off, with a few exceptions.

Last February, during a speech, Donald Trump engaged in a series of motions that seemed to be a rude imitation of a disabled reporter with whom Mr. Trump had some disagreement.

This incident comprises one of the exceptions, one of the few topics that always, in my experience, brings real arguments out of his supporters, probably the most common. People who generally spend their time posting memes about “libtards” or college students needing safe spaces will suddenly trot out a nice, uncharacteristically comprehensible explanation of this incident.

These explanations are ultimately ridiculous, of course, because, as anyone who’s seen the video knows, he did it.

Donald Trump stood on a stage and openly, publicly mocked a disabled man. He actually insisted we look at the man, observe his disability, “Now, the poor guy, you’ve got to see this guy: ‘Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember,’ he’s going like ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said'”, and then he began to obviously, blatantly, horrifyingly, perform a stomach-turning dramatization of his perception of the disabled reporter, a man he knew, a man with whom he was on a first name basis.

The reason this requires attention on the part of his followers when it comes up is that they saw it, too.

There’s no amount of rationalization that can erase this fact. We all saw it. We all fucking saw it. We knew what it was the minute it happened. We, all of us, went to high school at some point. We knew those kids, the kind of kids who did things like that. We saw them do it. Not the normal bullies, not the jocks who would mess with you once in a while. The real creeps, the nasty fuckers, the ones who truly didn’t care about humiliating people, who liked it. We saw them torment kids, the vulnerable ones, make them feel like shit about themselves. Harm them.

Maybe you tried to stop it, maybe you joined in a couple times until you realized how fucking shitty it felt. Maybe you did it a lot but you grew out of it and you feel like shit about it now, as you should, maybe you were one of the targets. Or maybe you just stayed quiet because, fuck, you were a kid and you were scared and confused. But we all know what we saw, we’ve all seen it before. We all know what he did. All of us. Even his supporters, even the ones who say he didn’t do it. They know he did it. Somewhere, they know.

There’s nothing about the incident that’s out of character for him at all, it’s not incommensurate with what we know of him the least bit. He did it, we all know he did it, and anyone with an ounce of decency or character, supporter or not, somewhere in their soul, feels dirty for having seen it. The mask, torn and insufficient as it is, fell away for a moment and we all saw exactly who Donald Trump is, what he is.

Most of us understand, even at our angriest, that most of the people in high office have, somewhere, some sort of basic human decency, no matter how ambition and the office compromises or fades it. Over the course of my life I’ve chuckled and frowned a whole lot over the way people refer to any politician disagreeing with them, anyone on the other side of the political divide, as Hitler or Stalin or the antichrist. I don’t indict the basic moral character of people I oppose politically lightly. But this is different. Almost all of us know, somewhere, what happened on that stage in February, and almost everyone knows what it means about the man and the nation.

We’ve seen vile men on our national political stage, we’ve read about these men in the past, but nothing like this. Nothing like this. This man is something new, something truly, deeply, unclean. Worse than anyone in our lifetimes, our parents lifetimes, our grandparents, and further, maybe in the history of the Republic. He’s a ravening, bottomless void, a bawling, untethered id, intent on nothing but feeding his sense of self-importance and superiority, devoid of the slightest leavening shame or even simple, momentary embarrassment. The person in charge of this nation does not care one iota, one gold leaf bathroom fixture, about you or your friends or anyone but himself. If you don’t recognize Donald Trump for the singular, unique, malevolent figure he is, you expose your ignorance of history.

I kept stopping myself as I wrote those last lines, wanting to keep myself from hyperbole, but then I read what I’ve written again and I can’t delete it because it’s true. It’s just true.

Our system of government is representative, so ultimately character is what we’re electing, not programs or ideas, character. Without character, the agenda doesn’t matter, and we have elected someone for whom the term just seems like a bad joke. There’s none of it, he simply has none, or what little he has is bad. There’s a fox in the henhouse and the henhouse door is locked for the next four years. If you’ve ever been around a truly bad person before, you just know it. You feel it in your gut. The President of the United States, our President, is a kind of monster.

So far all we’ve seen is the man himself and his little band of third-rate hacks puking vitriol, inanity, and disinformation onto Twitter and cable tv. The real onslaught begins now, and the way it begins will be the constant, torrential streams of deceit piled on deceit, lie on lie, gaslighting so obvious it becomes a joke until, somehow, drowned in the flood of obvious mendacity, we start forgetting where we are and where we used to be. The pot begins to boil and we don’t notice till our flesh is seared away from our bones. Lies so large, so fast, so constant, they can’t be refuted and, anyway, what does refutation do against a man with no conscience? How can it really affect he or his most devoted supporters?

As this progresses, as the press conferences begin, and the Republican congressmen and cronies begin enacting his regime in true ernest (sic), when the other people at work decide maybe the wall isn’t such a bad idea, when your Democrat uncle says he thinks maybe it’s time to start registering Muslims, when everyone around you starts slowly caving in, forgetting, remember what you saw. Look at that video, keep the image in your mind of a 69 year old man who is now the most powerful person on earth standing on a stage in front of thousands of cheering Americans and openly, proudly, trying to humiliate another human being for having the temerity to do his job and the courage to live his life with an obstacle. Like the vilest, shittiest 16 year old punk in your high school, like the lowest form of barroom bully begging for a slap to remind him he’s dogshit. It happened, you saw it, you understood exactly what it meant about him and anyone who truly supports him.

Remember that. Remember that he’s the thing that’s gone wrong, not you, not the rest of us. However distant this day becomes, however normal the abnormal starts to seem, remember the way things are now, today, however imperfect. Remember today and remember that this is what we are, this is who we are, not what they’re going to try to make us. Keep your shit together, know what you believe, and do not allow the people around you to obscure what you’ve seen, what you know to be true. Do not give in.

Do not allow this man, this villain, to exhaust you, to make you into something like him, simply because you’ve forgotten the way things are supposed to be.

And fasten your seatbelts, motherfuckers, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Far better than I could have said it, thank you Mr. Godwyn!

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5 thoughts on “Guest Blog: The Malevolent Character of Donald Trump

  1. We’re used to that very same perversion of character right here in Wisconsin. We’ve been trying to keep it at least mostly washed off ourselves for seven years now.

  2. If you have this incident on video, you should show it before you post this very damning comment. Anyone honestly elected President of the United States of America should be given a chance to prove themselves in office before damning judgement ensues.

    1. You can’t possibly be saying you haven’t seen it. It isn’t a secret video, it was all over ALL of the video media when it occurred.

  3. Ed, thanks.

    I’m not here to defend Trump, but the GOP wants to impeach him, because he shut down the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Wisconsin’s economy depends on exports and a lot of Trump’s rhetoric will destroy it. His comments on the dollar–it’s too strong–are good for exporters.

    As bad as Trump legitimately is, based on what I know now, Pence would be a lot worse.

    Trump’s holding Ryan’s feet to the fire on replacing Obamacare, not just repealing it. Trump’s not as isolated on that in the GOP.

    The golden shower leaks sound like the start of the GOP’s attempts to impeach Trump.

    Would like Dems and the Freedom Caucus–wingnuts–in the house to push Trump to re-schedule marijuana. He could do it tomorrow.

    Will the same partnership push Trump to implement his campaign promises for infrastructure spending?

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