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Just when you thought the world couldn't get any weirder, the "anti-woke" US President-elect decided to celebrate "Winning!" the leadership of the Free World by dancing at his own personal rally to the tune of a gay anthem and bleeding his fans of their cash with the launch of a dodgy cryptocurrency (slamming the campaign cryptocurrency they'd already bought).
But, hey, this is just the start. Wait til you see how it ends...
While teams of lawyers pore over Trump's latest droppings like big game hunters tracking their prey on safari, most pundits will probably consider these brazen acts as simply 'Trump being Trump'.
But Machiavelli will be pounding at the lid of his coffin. He advised that a good ruler should strive to appear wholly compassionate, loyal, humane, honest and religious, yet know how to occasionally act otherwise when required. A good ruler must not seize or steal their subjects' property or be seen as "changeable, superficial...." A good ruler's choice of ministers will immediately demonstrate to the country either "good sense or lack of it" - they must be intelligent people with permission to tell the ruler the truth, rather than flatterers. Above all, he wrote:
"...a ruler must avoid any behaviour that will lead to being hated or held in contempt."
...because Machiavelli had witnessed firsthand not even an army or castle can save a ruler who becomes generally loathed by the people (as the intervening centuries have demonstrated time and again).
Trump will not buck this trend. It's one thing to flip two fingers at prosecutors and blather about the 'swamp' and the 'deep state'. But it's quite another to flip from anti-crypto in 2021 to rabidly pro-crypto, hire a bunch of flatterers to your cabinet and then openly grab money from the people who voted you into office.
The Orange One's legion of followers are what Hunter S. Thompson christened 'the New Dumb'. Aside from the 'marks' or unwitting victims who actually believe all the nonsense, Trump's fans are drawn from among fauxpro-wrestling fans, conspiracy theorists and other keepers of the Trump's special brand of Covfefe 'kayfabe'. Moths to a populist flame fanned by fake news, behavioural targeting, bizarre fundraising schemes, meme coins and tacky souvenirs, televised rallies, criminal trials, and fat donations from self-interested vulture capitalists. These people are not "dumb" in the sense of being necessarily stupid or lacking in intelligence, but in the sense that they believe themselves to lack a voice in a complex world they see as run by, and for, a mysterious group of 'others' who are known only by epithets like the "deep state", the "new world order", "liberals", "libtards"...
But now these people can see that their Dear Leader is simply mistaking them for idiots and lining his pockets at their expense [update via CoinDesk here].
Writing in 2000 after years of successfully deriding Richard Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson never bothered to comment directly on Trump, presumably because he viewed Trump as just a symptom, if not a portent, of doom. Remember that Trump first openly talked of running for President in 1988 and actually tried in 2000. Thompson would merely have seen it as another confirmation of his thesis if he'd stuck around to see Trump eventually conspire his way into office twice - to Make America Groan Again - rising to power like a slow-festering boil during what Hunter Thompson described in his article on The New Dumb as "dangerously weird times". For that reason it's best to simply leave you with his words:
"We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. ... We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused.
The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic...
Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. ... There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no real Congress at all -- not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the "New President."
If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends..."
1 comment:
Time to sell your crypto I guess
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