Response to Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man

(See: Just Above Sunset: Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man)

Really, why does Donald Trump act like such a jerk?

He apparently does it on purpose. There's actually a whole philosophy about this, that the bigger an asshole you are, the more successful you’ll be, and Trump has openly hinted at believing in it. He may be the first card-carrying proponent of “assholeism" to ever be elected president of the United States, but he’s not the first human being ever to think that pissing people off is the most effective way to make them do what you want.

For example, maybe Mexico would, without any prompting at all from anybody, work a little harder at keeping refugees from coming to the United States, but why not threaten them with a possible border closure, just to make sure? Just think of the quote, “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone”, which either originated with Al Capone or possibly Professor Irwin Corey, nobody knows for sure.

But an even better question is, why do all these Republicans, with all their piety and talk of morality, allow Trump to get away with being such a jerk?

I think the answer is, mostly, they’re afraid of the dark. And when I say “the dark”, I mean they’re afraid of the unknown. Trump may be a big arrogant brat — very sure of himself, although near-totally clueless — but these Republicans, although equally clueless, are all stumbling around, while somewhere in the dark, they seem to have lost possession of their moral compasses.

Although they may have learned as kids, maybe in Sunday school or even from Hollywood movies, that "you should always do the right thing”, once they grew up and found that doing the right thing was rarely a winning strategy, they learned to improvise — which, often as not, meant not being a goddam “goody-goody”. Nobody likes good people. Nobody wants to admit it, but good people are weak, and nobody is afraid of them, because they’re too nice. As famous tough guy Niccolo Machiavelli once said, "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” And you can’t.

When it comes to political discourse, I think of it as having two levels:

The best known of these is what some call “the horserace”, but what I prefer to call “the game”, since the object of the game is to win, and when it comes to elections, everybody seems to think that winning is all that matters.

That’s one of the reasons you pretty much only hear “the game” being discussed on TV, rather than serious seminars on history or civics, or even science. After all, it’s safer to form an opinion about who will win an election, and what it takes to do it, than to opine about, say, whether we should raise the minimum wage, based on whether it would be good for the economy or not.

Which brings us to that other level, which is, “The way things ought to be”. (I need to find a pithy one- or two-word description for this level, but for the time being, this is all I got.)

And the most important thing to remember is something sort of surprising, and this is that the second level — “the way things should be” — is the top level, and "the game" discussion belongs below it.

An example?

What would happen if, say, in an NFL game, one player took out a gun and just shot to death the opposing quarterback?

First of all, is there anything in the NFL rulebook that says he can’t do that? Maybe “unnecessary roughness”? I’ve seen the rules on this ("Penalty: For unnecessary roughness: Loss of 15 yards. The player may be disqualified if the action is judged by the official(s) to be flagrant”), and take my word for it, there’s nothing there about not being allowed to shoot another player to death.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter. The refs don’t need to get in a huddle to discuss what to do about this, since the cops will eventually come in and arrest the guy. And this is as it should be. You can't get away with saying that all that matters is the game, and that “the way things ought to be” doesn’t figure into it at all.

So if you believe in morality, or maybe even in some God that determines right from wrong and how humans should behave, then doesn’t that take priority over the rules of some stupid game?

We need to give conservatives something to think about. But still, what if they still don’t come around and help us do something about America’s only (to date) asshole president?

Well, then screw it! In that case, we just crush ‘em!