Sympathy and empathy extend to others. Trumpathy, on the other hand, doesn’t leave the premises; it begins and ends with Donald Trump.
Take the kids in the cages. Trumpathy has it that no one was going to care how many brown kids from four months old were being taken from their parents and locked in cages because Trump himself doesn’t care and never will. These were just kids from shithole countries anyhow.
And the only reason he changed his mind was because the pictures looked bad, not for any vaguely human reasons. Trumpathy doesn’t go for bad press although it generates it non-stop and then denies or lies it away.
Trouble here was, Trumpathy misgauged the outrage and basic decency this nation is still capable of despite the unending efforts of Trump and his snake ranch of a White House to obliterate both outrage and decency. These are children and that is a line you cross at your own peril, both political and personal, Trumpathy or no.
Most white middle class women voted for Trump. White middle class women react very strongly to anything threatening children, no matter whose. Those same women felt very little empathy for the Trumpathy that sent the hollow reed that is the First Lady down to Texas wearing a jacket that said basically, “Fuck you, America,” whether she knew it or not.
Right in the middle of this ongoing moral crisis Trump takes off to a bustout convention center in the cosmopolitan center of Duluth, Minn. to deliver a little Trumpathy to the base. You know, jack up everybody’s spirits. No wailing kids here, just screaming big people.
Donald Trump represents to those kinds of followers the id unchained, their collective runamuck dreams and fantasies realized through the vicarious dark magic of their self-proclaimed messiah. Reality is not and never will be a consideration. He is their true Christ, the myth come alive at last, leading them to the Promised Land of the Eternal White Man No Matter What.
His Trumpathy is the signal that all their cherished and honored hates and prejudices can come from the shadows and flourish in the fertile loam of hate that oozes like a cancer from the Oval Office.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom,” Thomas Jefferson said and Trumpathy makes that price all the more worth paying. Trump has said he will stop kidnapping kids, but he will not return the kids he has kidnapped and will not tell you where they are among the 17 states they have been dispersed to in the dead of night. Despite the setting up a half-hearted agency to return the children to their parents, there was never from day one any consideration given to making this a reality – no data base, no paper trails, just criminality and secrecy.
Decency and vigilance among the citizens that Trumpathy so badly misjudged are the only true hopes for righting this wrong that has so deeply and brutally stained this nation’s soul. People must be vigilant for the internment facilities that might be in their very communities and they must come forth and report their suspicions to the media and trusted officials and agencies. We must donate our time and funds to the trusted organizations and agencies that are making desperate and ceaseless efforts to undo what Trumpathy hath wrought
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These children are a national matter and we are the nation.
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