My Blog Week: October 18 to October 24

A Word on the Week

Blame to Go Around

A subdued debate this week, or modestly subdued. Trump’s advisors flagged in advance that he would show a different character after polling badly following the first debate, losing in the ratings following the town hall substituting for a second debate…

But is subdued really a better strategy? Not that most of us care, but Trump’s enablers are more at fault than Trump himself…at least, Trump viewed as Godzilla stomping blindly here and there for sheer lack of human feeling, sheer inability to comprehend consequences, is a different narrative from Trump convincible that something important is at stake, something that matters, and at last exercising self-control. If self-control has been possible for him, but its preferability never apparent until he reached a certain pitch of worry as to not being reelected, then the needless of the 225,000 American deaths from COVID, the children separated from their parents at the border, become weighings of personal gain, and panderings to the base whose votes promise more personal gain.

Whereas if we grant Trump freak status, and assume he really can’t muster anything in himself conciliatory, never mind compassionate, his enablers remain the people they always were, for calculatingly making use of him…always having held stake in their personal reputations, always wanting to be seen as decent and normal, if within some framework of bought-and-sold Republicanism. As discussed here last week, party above country is treason.

And losing an election isn’t really losing, even for zero-summers—it’s being chosen second by more people than your opponent. That doesn’t merit hissy-fitting America to its destruction.