‘White People Have Lost
Their Damn Minds’
Mad dogs, ideologues & 2-year-olds in Crazytown
by Thomas Adcock
Copyright © 2018 – Thomas Adcock
NORTH CHATHAM, New York—U.S.A.
Even now, twenty-one months into life under a White House crime syndicate facilitated and funded by Kremlin spies and oligarchs, I cannot wrap my head around a seemingly minor statistic here in the land of Trumpistan: On Election Day 2016, fifty-three percent of white female voters—fifty-three percent—decided that a man with a ludicrous yellow hairdo and a hamburger gut who appeared on television calling women “fat pigs,” “slobs,” and “dogs” should be president of the United States of America.
On television he said this.
I know, I know. Compared to events of this month and last—back-to-back tell-all books about the contemptible Trump regime, and a bombshell essay in the New York Times that reveals a secret cabal of White House aides who have taken charge of the executive branch of the U.S. government in the cause of protecting the nation from a president they view as a functioning lunatic—the white lady vote of two years ago may be small potatoes. But honestly.
—I shall get to those books and the quasi-coup d’état later herein. Meanwhile, consider the subject of addled Caucasians, of both genders.
According to post-election polling by Business Insider magazine, white women voted for Donald J. Trump despite his noxious code of amorous conduct. During an audiotape chat with a giggling male TV host one month prior to Election Day, candidate Trump said: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. …I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
That’s not all. Of his encounter with a married woman during and after a social function at the soon-to-be president’s Palm Beach estate candidate Trump added, “I moved on her like a bitch. …I did try to fuck her. …Then all of a sudden I see her [and] she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.”
On audiotape he said this. Four weeks before he won the white women’s vote.
White men were even more comfortable with the idea that an orange blowhard, deadbeat, and Bankruptcy Court habitué should be president, again according to Business Insider. It pains me to say this of my own racial category: Sixty-three percent of us voted for Mr. Trump, whose bona fides for assuming the highest office of the land are his sunlamp, his ever-ready snarl, a bag of golf clubs, and several crates of hairspray.
Sixty-three percent.
Motivations underlying this unholy number of my countrymen who preferred Mr. Trump to his opponent, former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton, are threefold:
- Millionaires and billionaires, that crafty swarm of overwhelmingly pale-complexioned bores allegiant to little more cause than money, know a useful kleptocrat when they see one.
- Misogynists would sooner stab their eyeballs with sewing needles than vote for a female presidential candidate.
- Heretofore closeted nazis and kluxers know a brother bigot when they see and hear one. Eager to proudly declare themselves freunde des Führers, they demonstrate lowbrow fealty by flocking to the American version of the Hitler-era Nuremberg rallies—Hillbilly Nuremberg rallies, let us say—where spittle-spouting mad dogs and ideologues jeer at journalists they denounce as leftwing liars, in the very language Third Reich jamborees: “Lügenpresse! Lügenpresse!”
*
White conspiracists drawn to Dear Leader Donald, and dedicated to protecting him from detractors, have long been stalwarts of the Republican Party’s sizeable kook wing. Latest of the ilk are followers of a 
mysterious, unseen prepotency known as “Q-Anon,” or simply “Q.” Presumably, the moniker is a mash-up of “Question” and “Anonymous.” Whoever he or she may be, Q signals true believers with seductive hints of evildoing among leaders of the Democratic Party. In a bow to bipartisanship, Q posits that all U.S. presidents prior to the Sunlamped One were or are members of a secret global ring of pædophiles.
But never fear! Dear Leader Don is working behind the scenes (naturally) to expose kiddy-diddling Democrats and see them off to prison cells.
Further, so it goes, special counsel Robert Mueller is not actually looking into alleged criminal and traitorous actions by Donald Trump and his goombah confederates. The so-called Mueller investigation exists simply to distract the “fake news media,” as the citizenry of Trumpistan have it, from a covert Mueller-Trump alliance in the cause of stamping out the scourge of Democratic pædophilia—as first detected by Q back during the 2016 presidential campaign, who then let it be known that a child prostitution ring was being run out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor by Hillary Clinton.
Hordes of white Americans believe this bullpucky, fed by an ever-increasing presence of Q-Anon fanatics who show up at Trumpian shindigs to provide fertilizer for their fevered fantasies.
—But could the fantasy be a spoof at the expense of the kooks, that ready market for Q-Anon geegaws assembled in Chinese sweatshops and hawked at Hillbilly Nuremberg rallies? It is not difficult to imagine how a huckster—a man like Donald Trump, say—might appropriate an irresistibly crackpot fantasia and monetize it.
Twenty years ago in Italy, three leftist gadflies published a short novel titled “Q,” authored by a collective nom de plume: Luther Blissett. The gadflies—Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, and Federico Guglielmi—cooked up a yarn wherein a mysterious, unseen force dispatches inscrutable hints of a worldwide pædophilia network and a secret, heroic rightwing effort to crush the lefty perverts. In an interview with the online magazine Raw Story, the authors of “Q” said of their plot vis-à-vis theories propounded by the Q-Anon rabble, “Coincidences are hard to ignore.”
*
Adolescent impulse and all-grown-up narcissism are prevalent among worshipers at the lilywhite Church of Trump, where instead of yarmulkes or khimars or fascinator headwear the congregants wear bright red MAGA hats—for “Make America Great Again,” twenty-five bucks a pop, thank-you; all proceeds to the Trump Gift Shop at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The faithful see in their weirdly coiffed messiah an image of themselves, or what they imagine of themselves if only they had the bling. As noted by a contributor to the online magazine Daily Kos whose byline reads “Beerfinger”:
It’s obvious that for most Trump voters he’s a [mirror] reflection …His entitlement, his resentment, his intransigence, and the juvenile way in which he conveys all of that. These human traits [that] are typically reviled [are] for a Trump voters his assets…In other words, it’s not just that they have no compunction pulling the lever for a supremely unqualified and undeserving con man, it’s the fact that this is precisely WHY they pulled the lever…History and future be damned.
The satisfaction they obviously get out of burning it all to the ground. The glee with which they’re perfectly willing to set a match to something that millions of people died [in] building and protecting. The ease with which they’re willing to betray their fellow citizens…and then turn around and question the patriotism of others. That’s what gets to me.
My 2-year-old behaves this way sometimes. The only difference is I expect he will grow out of it some day and develop some emotional maturity, something for which I have no hope when it comes to an adult-in-size-only wearing a MAGA hat.
*
“Occam’s razor” is the common tag for an ancient philosophical principle developed by the English theologian William of Ockham (1285-1347). It is customarily used in the context of scientific research. As William defined it, in Latin, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necesitatem—or, “More things should not be used than are necessary.” Briefly put, and widely in use nowadays to address situations well outside the scientific universe: The simplest explanation is usually best.
Does Occam’s razor explain Trumpistan?
Let us turn to a contemporary theologian—namely, Eddie Glaude Jr., favorite son of Moss Point, Mississippi and a professor of religion and history at Princeton University.
The great bulk of America’s political punditry would have us believe that the question of Donald Trump and his cult groans with socio-economic complexity. But as Mr. Glaude sees it, the matter is as obvious as the dangerous absurdity of a Hillbilly Nuremberg rally. In a recent interview with the news magazine Vox, he professor said:
Demographics aren’t destiny, but they damn sure change the bottom line. The reality is that [America] is not going to be a white nation in the vein of Europe anymore. I think what we see is that [racial] anxiety joined with economic anxiety [has been] joined with the idea that government is taking things from hardworking people and giving them to undeserving black and brown people….All of this anxiety generates a kind of fear that resulted in the election of, by my standards, a neo-fascist.
Bottom line, as Mr. Glaude declared during a late August appearance on MSNBC-Television, “White people have lost their damn minds.”
*
Donald Trump’s avalanche of lies, insults, and repugnant pronunciamentos began in June 2015 when he claimed that Latino migrants are drug dealers and rapists, and that a continent-long wall on the Mexican-American border was an absolute must to keep out the brown-skinned riffraff. The execrable behavior continues to this day, capping a week in which Americans somberly observed the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.
Some of us remember Mr. Trump’s disgusting lies about that day. He lied about seeing “thousands and thousands” of Muslims “cheering” as the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan collapsed in the bombing, then he lied about “helping a little” as rescue workers in gas masks and hazmat suits risked their lives searching through flaming rubble for possible survivors.
—Donald Trump has never soiled so much as a finger in aid of anyone in distress. How he thought we could believe him able to discern the religious affiliations of non-existent “thousands” may only be parsed by the aberrant logic of his black heart.
Last month, Mr. Trump was pointedly uninvited to the funeral of an American military hero and Republican statesman, Senator John McCain of Arizona. As a U.S. Navy pilot during war in Indochina in the 1960s, Mr. McCain endured more than five years of daily torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Every day of his sufferance, he refused to betray the names or whereabouts of comrades in return for an end to the torture; to the end of his life, Mr. McCain was unable to lift his arms to the level of his crippled shoulders. In July 2015, shortly after his comments about Latino migrants, Mr. Trump said of the late senator: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
—In the ‘60s, Donald Trump was hardly in danger of being captured by enemy soldiers. He was exempted from military service due to “bone spurs” on one of his feet. When questioned by journalists about the affliction, Mr. Trump said he couldn’t remember which foot was impaired. In a 1997 radio interview, Mr. Trump, now age 72, characterized his promiscuous sex life as a ‘60s-era bachelor as “my personal Vietnam,” during which time “I felt like a very brave soldier” by avoiding venereal disease from the “potential landmines” of vaginas.
At the McCain funeral, the sitting president’s bipartisan White House predecessors—Barack Obama, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican—delivered eloquent eulogies to a man with whom they tangled in the course of invective-free political rivalry. The tributes were seen by Mr. Trump, correctly, as personal rebukes; they are seen by Washington panjandrums as prelude to a far more serious rebuke on the near horizon.
Come January 2019, Mr. Trump’s Republican vassals in Congress will likely lose control of at least half the government’s legislative branch. All national polls predict a tidal wave of Democratic newcomers tacitly determined to launch dozens of criminal investigations into the president’s murky machinations in Moscow—his alleged money laundering at the behest of Russian billionaires, said to be the main source of capital for the Trump Organization, his corporate holdings entity; Kremlin agents of Russia’s ruthless G.R.U. military intelligence service allegedly in league with the Trump campaign organization; his refusal to release income tax returns for public examination; his use of personal property as high-priced venues for official functions hosted by high-rolling foreign potentates, in violation of Article I, §9, Clause 8 under the U.S. Constitution.
—Oh, and his attendance at the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a runway show of young female pulchritude then owned by the Trump Organization. At said event, according to a dossier drawn up by Christopher Steele, a British spy and sometime American C.I.A. operative, Kremlin-harvested kompromat included a videotape of Mr. Trump being entertained in a hotel room by Russian prostitutes urinating on his bed.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr. Trump will get out of Washington voluntarily before he’s given the bum’s rush. He has run away before, after all—from responsibility for numerous debts, disastrous gambling casino ventures in Atlantic City, real estate follies in New York and elsewhere that left investment suckers high and dry. He has acquiesced to court-ordered settlements of lawsuits that cite racist and/or fraudulent business comportment, he has paid a pornographic film actress and a nude model to remain hush-hush as to details of sexual liaisons with him—namely, porn queen Stormy Daniels (pictured at top right) and Karen McDougal (below).
In August of 1974, the perfidious ex-President Richard M. Nixon hightailed it out of Washington when it was made clear to him—by impeachment hearings in Congress, and ultimately by a delegation of Republican éminence grises—that his time was up. That was then. By their abject failure to rein in Mr. Trump, today’s obsequious Republican-run Congress has forfeited credibility. And today’s president is impervious to shame, or even embarrassment; he honestly believes in his dishonesty.
Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard University, believes Mr. Trump qualifies for prison—and impeachment, the political parallel to criminal prosecution. She reminds us that The Donald is an unindicted co-conspirator: Last month in Manhattan Federal Court, he was implicated in felonious campaign finance violations when his consiglieri, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to brokering illegal hush-money deals with the good-time ladies—on orders from his client in the White House.
“What else he has done, and what can be proved, and what Republicans are willing to do about it remain to be seen,” Ms. Lepore wrote in the September 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine. “[M]eanwhile, Trump’s entire presidency, from his cabinet appointments to his foreign policy, lies in a muddle of money-grubbing, kowtowing, and influence-peddling.”
For her essay, Ms. Lepore interviewed William E. Leuchtenburg, a prominent scholar of presidential history and professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina: “However much Richard Nixon deserved impeachment and the end of his presidency,” said Mr. Leuchtenburg, “what he did does not match the Trump presidency in its malfeasance, and in the depth of his failure as president.”
*
The sorry state of affairs under the presidency of a thoroughly disgraceful man is told in a hot-off-the 
press book by legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward—“Fear: Trump in the White House.” In his exhaustive 448-page report, drawn meticulously from one hundred recorded interviews with high-ranking Trump officials, Mr. Woodward tells of an administration collapsing under the burden of a defensively ignorant, near psychotic, semi-literate, lonely, embittered president prone to violent outbursts—a man frequently and thankfully ignored by the Pentagon; a man whose top aides do what they can, furtively, to prevent him from harming the world and himself.
Mr. Woodward packs his book with tales told out of school by the president’s men and women. Here are three of the juiciest:
General John Kelly, the president’s frequently exasperated chief of staff, said of his boss: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.”- When told that the U.S. military establishment suspected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of launching a domestic chemical attack in April 2017, Mr. Trump’s dangerously intemperate reaction was: “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”
- Former chief of staff Reince Priebus describes Mr. Trump’s bedroom in the White House—where the president tweets nonstop insults fueled by rightwing cable TV hysteria; where he sleeps each night apart from his nominal wife—as “the devil’s playground.”
Immediately preceding Mr. Woodward’s book was “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” by Omorosa Manigault Newman—commonly known by a single name. An ex-star of the popular 
reality-TV show “The Apprentice,” produced by the Trump Organization, she was hired by Mr. Trump’s to drum up support among African Americans for his presidential bid in 2016. (She garnered an underwhelming 8 percent of the black vote for her man.) Omorosa was subsequently hired for White House duty, and given a vaguely defined communications rôle. Nowadays as she flogs her book on television, she presents herself as a journalist of sorts concerned about the mental capability of a president she has witnessed doing and saying decidedly squirrelly things—such as eating paper in the Oval Office.
Confirming the thrust of both the Woodward and Omorosa books was a New York Times essay published on September 5, headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” An editor’s note explained that its anonymous author was a “senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to [the Times] and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.”
In a largely self-congratulating tone, the essayist outlined the “dilemma” of an executive staff that largely agrees the president is gaga and therefore works “diligently from within” as “adults in the room” to prevent Mr. Trump from acting on his “worst inclinations” and “misguided impulses.” Further—
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision-making. …[T]he president’s leadership style [is] impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
[S]enior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in-chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meeting with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions…
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. …[I]n private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained…though they are clearly not always successful.
Like many others, I judge the claim of insider “resistance” as more aspirational than accurate; affirming of public assumptions, though hardly anarchic. Nevertheless, the anonymous essay has sent Donald Trump a-fuming. He tweets ever more hysterically from the devil’s playground:
Mr. Woodward’s book, according to the Unhinged One, is full of “made up frauds.” Omorosa is a “dog” suddenly gone “wacky and deranged,” says the president who hired her—not once, but twice. And the Times essay is a “total piece of fiction.”
The Times seems to have raised the presidential hackles to the level of Louix XIV’s declaration, “L’état c’est moi.” Of the hated essay, Mr. Trump tweeted in his customarily odd prose fashion: “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!” (sic)
Soon enough, Mr. Trump and the freak show that his presidency will be gone—one way or another. The cult he leaves behind is what deeply concerns me: those thumping majorities of white women and white men in a majority white country who voted for him, who continue to venerate a man of vile demeanor; a man who said that some among the mob of nazis and kluxers engaged in last year’s violent rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia are “very fine people.”
Like Mr. Glaude, I smell the stench of fascism in the American air.
According to the nonpartisan Gallup Poll of September 8, forty-one percent of likely voters think Mr. Trump is doing a swell job as president. Forty-one percent. True, that is a minority. But it is plenty enough to power a stench.
The late Basque novelist and poet Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) prescribed antidotes for two of humanity’s curses: “Fascism is cured by reading, racism is cured by traveling.” It is doubtful that the cult of Trump does either.
—Thomas Adcock is America correspondent for CulturMag
Additional photo credits
Donald Trump—fyimusicnews.ca
Q-Anon logo—newnationalist.net
Q-Anon demonstrators—NBC News
Man in MAGA hat—YouTube
Eddie Glaude—msnbc.com
Stormy Daniels—weeklyhumorist.com
Karen McDougal—pinterest
Bob Woodward—wikipedia
“Fear” book cover—amazon.com
Omorosa—hollywoodreporter.com
NY Times logo—wikipedia
