Satirical humor columnist Dave Barry would sometimes find unimaginable situations or events to put in his column but to keep his readers from assuming they were fabricated, he would write, “I am not making this up.”
Yes, I am not making this up.
One of the most reprehensible and dishonorable characters in our nation’s political history now holds its highest office.
A few days before he was elected, he pantomimed fellatio on a microphone to a crowd of cheering bozos.
It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t funny. It was yet another intentional attack on decency, on civil discourse, on good behavior, on all those things that glue together this nation of strangers.
People who laugh at Trump’s demeaning behavior are themselves demeaned. In spirit, they join his club of thugs.
People who simply shrug off Trump’s behavior miss his message. The message is nihilism. The message is that nothing matters, so Trump can say or do anything — and by extension, anyone can say or do anything.
He’s deliberately sowing chaos. There’s a reason for that.
Before they become dictators, fledgling tinhorns like Trump don’t mind riling people up, inciting “riots,” putting down protests and the like. Enough strife — real or contrived –gives them reason to “get tough on crime,” bring in jackbooted troops, declare martial law, suspend habeus corpus and pitch the constitution out the window.
That’s how the rise of dictators generally rolls in democratic nations.
Trump has promised he would be a dictator. Considering that four years ago he nearly overthrew the results of a national election by inciting an attack on our nation’s capital, maybe it’s time we take him at his word.