"It's always DOOMSDAY in my world": Trump's desperation is both comical and dangerous [View all]

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"It’s always DOOMSDAY in my world": Trump's desperation is both comical and dangerous
Trump's recent fundraising emails are ludicrous, grotesque and apocalyptic. Can he keep that up for six months?

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED MAY 7, 2024 5:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) The first weeks of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan have not gone well for the former president. Key prosecution witnesses such as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, attorney Keith Davidson and onetime White House aide Hope Hicks have painted a damning portrait of Trump's plot to hide embarrassing information from the public, with the evident goal of impacting the 2016 election. At this point, it would require some arcane or technical point of law or jury nullification (thanks, perhaps to one or more MAGA-friendly jurors) to save him from being convicted.

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In this dynamic, Trump’s feelings of peril are shared by his die-hard followers. By implication, those negative feelings can encourage or legitimate violence as the natural and reasonable response to a (nonexistent) existential threat. Of course, it is only Trump who is in personal jeopardy because of his reckless and unprincipled behavior, not his millions of followers.

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Cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has proposed that the divergent political personalities of conservatives and liberals are deeply rooted rooted in family structure, parenting and perceptions of morality and the common good. In a 2003 interview, Lakoff explained his view that "the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family" and the assumption "that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that":

On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

Conservatives, on the other hand, follow a "strict father model," in Lakoff's view, rooted in an assumption "that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good":

The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

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https://www.salon.com/2024/05/07/its-always-doomsday-in-my-world-desperation-is-both-comical-and/