There's a simple insight which will completely change your view of Donald Trump: he's a heel. Not in the sense of being a bad person, although no doubt he is. Rather, he's a Heel in the sense of professional wrestling.
Do you know about professional wrestling? They offer a timeless battle between good and evil, using stage personalities. Faces are the good guys, the ones the audience cheer and applaud. Heels are the bad guys, the ones who hit the good guys from behind with a folding chair or illegally double-team a Face. It's all an act, of course. Sometimes Faces become Heels, or Heels become Faces...but it's all part of the show.
Trump is a Heel. He's always been on TV, even back when I was a teenager. He claims to be a businessman, but his real role has always been media personality. That's what he loves more than anything. That's why he can't shut up, even when a judge orders him to. He's a professional Heel, and he just might be the best one in the world.
Which is probably why Bill and Hillary Clinton approached him before the 2016 election with their Pied Piper scheme. Donald would run for the Republican nomination, supplanting all of the "legitimate" competitors. But he'd be so odious that Hillary, the designated Face, would crush him in the general election. Except...
I'm inclined to think that Hillary simply underestimated just how loathsome she was, and how much people hated her. Any experienced wrestling impresario could have told her that she wasn't Face material. They could have also warned her that even though audiences love to boo Heels, they also love them.
You know the rest. Donald Trump was probably as surprised as Hillary on Election Day. But he still did his best to play the part. And the Democrats shrugged and decided that they could raise LOTS of money for four years, campaigning against President Heel. Which is exactly what happened.
He's actually a narcissist, cunning but not all that intelligent. But he's great at being a Heel, which means he's great at judging an audience (in this case, about half of the American electorate) and giving them what they want. His Hitler quotes are a bit over-the-top, but that's what a good Heel does sometimes. The one thing a Heel dreads more than anything else is boring the fans. And of course when the media and the Democratic elite clutch their pearls and squeal, well that's just music to a Heel's ears.
The DNC makes money, the oligarchs make money, and the only people who get hurt are the ones who don't matter: the poor, refugees, civilians in far-off countries...the nobodies.
The DNC is still playing that game, of course. Donald Trump is Hitler. George W. Bush was Hitler. Ronald Reagan was Hitler. Don't get me wrong, these are shitty and evil people who did a lot of terrible things. But they were all in service of the oligarchs, who always get their way no matter who's in office. You'll never see a candidate on the ballot who doesn't have the approval of the oligarchs.
That said, it's worth remembering that for all of his bombast and threats, Trump (unlike most of his predecessors in office) never tried to start a new war. I suspect that his show-business instincts told him that a real war (unlike an occasional assassination) would be dangerous business, something that could turn the rubes against him fast. If he'd been President during this genocide in Gaza, he'd have made some grandiloquent speeches. The media would have clutched their pearls and squealed, right on queue. But he'd have shut down Netanyahu within a few weeks. For one thing, he and Netanyahu basically hate each other. I think the problem with them is that they're too much alike.
But in any case dying children is bad press, and unlike the mainstream media and the Democrats, Trump knows social media. A Heel has to know his fans; they're his bread and butter. More than that, they give him the attention he craves more than anything else.
My guess is he's going to be President again. Biden and the Democrats have managed to make themselves the greater evil; there's just no way to smooth over 10,000 dead children, not even with bulldozers (ask Israel!). He'll be a bad President, that's for sure. Hell, he might even try to stay in office past his term, assuming he lives that long - although with his diet and weight, that would be a surprise. But he's not the second coming of Hitler, and he's not going to start any concentration camps. He'll put refugees in camps, yes, and that's a terrible thing. But just a reminder, those camps were started by...Barack Obama.
All of which is just my way of saying, try not to freak out. The DNC is spending millions of dollars to terrorize you into supporting #GenocideJoe through sheer terror of Donald Trump. But bad as he is, I'm sure the next designated Hitler will be even worse!
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