Incarceration did me no favors in understanding the changes of the past 14 years. In particular, this fascination for Trump, or for the effects of COVID. 

No, I do understand the effects of COVID - you people were banged up in your houses, told to wear certain items of clothing, removed from gainful employment or entertainment of your own choosing, and are resentful at having to toe a line established by governmental authority that restrained your behavior. That is life in a prison. Think about that the next time you start talking about locking everyone, or anyone, up.

Trump is far more inexplicable. I can understand the pro wrestling fans canonizing him. They immerse themselves in fakery that basks in its falsity. The same for the reality TV crowd. These are people in full retreat from reality, making a beeline for the warm confines of delusion. The problem is that on January 6, 2021, their madness erupted into violence.

I see Trump on TV, I see a face where hate replaces charm. When I hear him speak, I hear a whiny billionaire complaining about his life, as if he had to struggle to find a job, keep a job, or pay the bills. When I listen to him speak, I do not see his words corresponding with reality, so they must represent what is in his head; anyone talking like him and not a billionaire would be on medication, if not in a padded room.

Reading Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setoodeh review – how Donald Trump’s big break changed America from The Guardian reinforces my observations of Trump. 

On The Apprentice, as in the White House, Trump disdained preparation and refused to read briefs, “purely focused on maximising his screen time”. The only protege to whom he paid attention was the back-stabbing diva Omarosa Manigault Newman, who saw herself as a female Trump. He subsequently eased her into a job at the White House, where what Setoodeh calls her “weaponised incompetence” soon caused her to be marched off the premises in disgrace. Although she then underwent a “total Trump detox”, he still speaks of Manigault Newman admiringly. He tells Setoodeh that in her first season on the show “she was evil”, which from him is high praise, then adds that the next year “she tried to be evil – and when you try it doesn’t work”. It’s a revealingly self-reflexive remark: is Trump himself authentically malign, or just pretending to be? He probably doesn’t know. As one would-be apprentice puts it, “Trump conducts himself like an actor playing Trump”; to further complicate matters, he plays the part badly.

I still do not understand why he transformed America. This leaves me thinking he did not transform America, that, instead, he latched onto an America that existed before him and used it to put him into the White House. That there is an America that does not believe in its creed of equality and inalienable rights, we have ignored. Or we put it down to being small groups who hung out over there and were avoided as strange.

 We have been fools. 

There have been nativists since, at least, the Know Nothing Party, and there have been racists since the first slave ship dropped anchor at Jamestown. The North ignored its own racism as the Klan lynched its way through time. Jim Crow ruled the South, but the North segregated and discriminated, and inflicted violence on its African-American population. A century ago, the Klan held power in the North. Henry Ford trumpeted anti-Semitism and got a medal from Hitler. And George Wallace had friends in the Midwest. Boston rioted over integration in ways not seen even in Mississippi. There has always been a Trump constituency. Now, they want the old days back. They do not aspire to the greatness of the country only putting their bigotry back in power.

MAGA wants a revolution. Then those who think that Mr. Lincoln was right at Gettysburg need to stand up and fight for those ideas. We cannot placate, we cannot equivocate. What Lincoln and the Unionists fought was the slave power. That was a despotism as opposed to the Declaration of Indepence's creed of equality as MAGA. Fascism is just another face of despostism. Some Americans want to worship at the altar of despotism, they do not stand for the best in America.

Just in case your education failed to include Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, here it is:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863

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