Future historians will look back at the United States in the early years of the 21st century and find it very difficult to understand how the people of the most powerful, technologically advanced nation on the planet selected a childish, trash-talking, morally corrupt oddball to be their president — twice.
Long before we knew quite how odd he was, back during the Republican primaries in 2016, the Los Angeles Times sent me to Arizona to attend a rally for Donald Trump. My editors in LA could not quite fathom Trump’s appeal and they tasked me with talking to his supporters to find an answer.
Most of the people I chatted with at the rally were reasonably friendly folk, even if they were a bit suspicious of a guy from the hated mainstream media. I found that there were two things they all had in common: seething resentment and belief in all manner of conspiracy theories.
One young couple in particular still stands out in my mind. The pair exuded a countercultural hippy vibe and both were quite jovial. I liked them. When the man told me he had a deep distrust of Fox News, I thought we might find some common ground — until he went on to say where I could find the real truth: Infowars, the rabidly right-wing radio show run by the notorious conspiracy monger Alex Jones.
In 2016, Trump, the consummate con man, morphed himself into the avatar of the resentful and conspiracy-minded voters and the rest is history. Now, though, do they still want to claim him?
Trump seems to have no time to spend following up on promises he made to his voters. Instead, he is obsessed with putting his name or face on everything from national park passes and coins to half the buildings in Washington, D.C., even if, like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, it is already named for someone else. He unilaterally — and illegally — decided to rip down the East Wing of the White House in order to erect a huge, golden ballroom that he will certainly name for himself.
When not raking in billions for his family through cozy deals with Middle Eastern potentates and shady crypto kings, he spends hours on social media posting angry rants about his perceived enemies and ridiculous boasts about imagined triumphs. He has also kept himself busy reworking a row of presidential portraits lining a corridor at the White House, inserting insulting, self-serving language under the images of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and replacing Biden’s photo with an image of an autopen.
Trump is not a mature man, not even close. His actions and obsessions are those of a petulant 14-year-old who screams if he does not get his way; a childish bully who thinks posting an AI image of himself dumping feces on protesters is hilarious.
I wonder what those Trump voters I met in Arizona back at the start of this nightmare think of him now. Are they embarrassed that they fell for the fakery of this greedy brat? Would they admit it if they were? Or are they sticking with him? If that is the case, I believe the answer for future historians to explain Trump’s rise is that a whole lot of Americans are as immature and loopy as their president.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
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