It’s said that cats are blessed with nine lives, which is cool, because it gives cats time to reflect on past mistakes and make improvements for when they get to their ninth, and I assume final, life. It’s also a thing that cats apparently have the uncanny ability to land on their feet no matter their original configuration or the twists and turns they display on the way down.
Sometimes, I guess, it’s just cool to be a cat. Plus, they can be kind of cute.
Donald Trump is like a cat although there’s absolutely nothing cute about him. Throw the entire criminal justice system at him from multiple angles and he just keeps on landing on his feet, often in better shape than he was before. This passes as strange to me, but of course Donald Trump is no cat. He has too many lives to be a cat.
The United States has devolved into the most powerful, externally anyway, third-world country on the planet. If anyone messes with America on the world stage, the Americans can muster more than enough righteous fury and military capability to squash whoever was stupid enough to piss them off in the first place. The Americans don’t solve their external problems, they overwhelm them. But internally, on the home side of the fence, Americans are seemingly more inclined to treat their democracy as a chaotic joke. The picayune nature of their justice system is such that law and order, rule of law, and a legal system in good repute are things that just don’t seem to matter anymore.
Politics, never a pretty picture to begin with, is now grievance politics, or activist politics, as the population has polarized into fringe positions on both the left or right, leaving the middle ground wide open.
Trump is the caricatured poster boy for all this. Here we have a person who is almost certainly a serial criminal standing as a candidate for President of the United States. What’s worse, this same man, essentially the same in 2016 as he is today in 2023, was voted in as president and served a four year term despite two impeachments. Yet here he is again, on his feet, the frontrunner of a completely morally bereft and hapless Republican Party, with fully 35% of Republicans swearing obeisance to him. With all kinds of other Republican candidates in the race, the guy with the locked-in 35% is almost guaranteed to be the Republican nominee in 2024, provided he’s not in jail.
Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Access Hollywood, Putin and Kim ass-kissing, tax evasion, election interference, January 6th insurrection, classified documents, several rape trials, the list is exhaustive and, sadly, that’s just the stuff we know about.
There was once a time in America, not all that long ago, where any one of these transgressions would have sounded the death knell for a presidential candidate. But no more. The MAGA crowd cheers ever more lustily at each case of Trump twisting and turning in peril only to land firmly on his feet again. He’s their guy. He was sent by God, just like Abraham and Moses, to lead his people out of the morass. Except his lunatics don’t realize, nor do they have the willingness or capacity to realize, that they themselves are the morass.
Every time the justice system takes aim at their boy, the email fundraising blasts go out looking for money to assist “President” Trump as he fends off the witch hunt from the “woke left,” to borrow one of many right-wing terms that folks in their tinfoil hats like to trumpet. Currently facing 37 criminal indictments on just the classified document file alone, Trump has raised over $7 million to date from die-hards who seem to need to die hard before they see the damage that they do to democracy. It’s the same thing after every case of Trumpian criminal peril, the fundraising generating millions of dollars of unaccounted-for money, often from people who can’t afford it in the first place.
This is called grift, another name for swindling, another name for fraud. People from modest or lower level incomes contributing money to a billionaire with no questions asked. Sounds like good work if you can find it, but honestly, if you or I were to try it we’d find ourselves talking to a detective in an OPP interview room. But Donny can get away with it cause his billionaire status allows him to throw so many curveballs and smokescreens that he can, to date anyways, obfuscate whatever allegations are made against him. Which is very unlike all those idiots who stormed the barricades at his behest, many of whom are now living their best life behind bars bleating that they’d been tricked by the very man they admired. None of them are billionaires, so they went straight to jail.
It absolutely blows me away how people who identify as religious, particularly Christians, who support this charlatan with their vote. His antics, his language, his total disrespect for everyone and everything, his absolute moral emptiness, none of this bothers them. Or if it does, they’re okay to hold their noses and look the other way, because Trump will be the guy that loads up the Supreme Court to launch an assault on Roe v. Wade, an assault successfully undertaken and completed.
Donald Trump does not give one goddamned fuck about abortion, one way or the other. To him, it’s a means of getting the Christian vote, particularly the Evangelical Christian vote, and it’s been wildly successful for him. He cartoonishly suggests that he’s a man of God, despite having no clue as to which end of the Bible is up. He attends prayer breakfasts with Christian leaders, but won’t discuss his faith because, as he says, it’s a very personal thing for him. Too beautiful, and many Christians eat it up like pigs at a trough. At least Ron DeSantis is willing to talk about his faith, but he’s Catholic, and the Pentecosts might not like that, since for them being a Catholic is an unforgivable crime against God.
Donald Trump is a reprehensible, abhorrent and repugnant demagogue displaying the very worst of humanity. He has no love for his fellow man, only love for himself in the way of a classic narcissist. And he leads millions of otherwise good people along by the nose, cutting them loose when they’re no longer needed.
Jesus stood up to the elites on behalf of the suffering, the victimized, the disenchanted. He was not above hanging out with gentiles, women, fishermen, prostitutes, and tax collectors. He advocated for the poor, the hungry, and the sick. He was kind and decent. He inspired hope and brought people closer to the salvation of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Donald Trump is no Jesus, and if there is any decency left in the Christian world, that should be last time those two individuals end up being in the same sentence.
MAGA Christians please take note: Jesus is love, not hate. I would have thought you’d have known that by now. You can’t be a part-time Christian, a selective Christian, or a Christian of convenience. You can’t be a Christian on one issue and not on another. So if you’re okay looking the other way, if you have any personal integrity at all, maybe it’s time to stop calling yourself Christians.
A little harsh perhaps, but there it is.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 