Trump, a Patriot? No One Trashes America More
It is a miracle that anyone considers Donald Trump an “American patriot.”
It is a miracle that anyone considers Donald Trump an “American patriot.”
Because for the past 35 years, he has publicly and unabashedly shit on America, depicting it not a “beacon on a hill” but a nation forever in decline.
In fact, anybody who was taken aback by his attacks today on NATO shouldn’t have been. This has been his schtick from the moment he entered public life in the early 80's.
Everyone is out to get America. Everyone is ripping off the good old USA.
In every case, in every arena, America, to Trump, is always the quintessential victim.
People are taking advantage of us in trade deals. In arms negotiation. In security alliances.
He was literally saying the exact same things under Reagan that he said under Obama. Except he’d occasionally say that Japan was killing us because our tariffs were too low. Now just replace “Japan” with “China.”
But the sentiment is always the same. Everyone’s taking advantage of us. Everyone is beating us at some game we used to win. But we are too soft and weak and easily duped.
It’s why he sells his vision that all American urban areas are cesspools overrun with rampant criminality. It’s why our military is always weak and underfunded. It’s why so many of his policies are based on the underlying predicate that Mexican murderers are passing our borders and Islamic terrorists are swarming our airports.
For you see, only if you buy this image of American carnage, of American failure, of American capitulation, can this great snake oil salesman sell his base that only he can save America. From bad deals and bad hombres.
In Trump’s mind (and the collective minds of his minions), one must trash America severely before it can be saved. And obviously, he’s the only one who can save it.
This propagandistic leveling of the psyche of one’s own nation is right out of every autocrat’s textbook of the 20th century.
Coupled with actual economic anxiety at the end of the German Weimar Republic, Hitler was able to blame his nation’s “weakness” on German diplomats giving away the farm at the end of World War I in the famous “Diktat.” The Treaty of Versailles was signed with metaphorical allied guns pointed at Germany’s head.
Like Trump, Hitler had to first prove to Germany how weak they had become. And better yet, at the hands of other nations seeking to humiliate them, to rip them. Because then and only then could a strongman rise up to restore German pride, nationalism and superiority.
What’s amazing is how patriotic Trump supporters see Trump. And themselves. Yet their vision of America is wholly pessimistic bordering on dystopian.
What they have chosen to miss is that in order to make American great again, Trump had to first convince the greatest, strongest, wealthiest nation in the world that it’s a loser country, perpetually in decline. That our military and economic allies see as chumps that can be rolled over and humiliated. That our borders are porous, our intelligence agencies laughable and ineffectual.
This has truly been Trump’s greatest trick — repeatedly trash his country, then have people hail him as a patriot.
Because for close to four decades, no one in public life has more repeatedly, more unremittingly shit on America with greater fury and constancy than Donald J. Trump.