Op-Ed: Trump ‘dictatorship’ is an insult to America. Meanwhile – Who owns Trump?

Former US president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump made the comments at a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, on November 11, 2023 – Copyright AFP/File JOSEPH PREZIOSO

A Trump ‘dictatorship is making a lot of news lately. There are many reasons for worrying. It’s said the US could withdraw from NATO, for example. Trump’s ignorant previous disastrous clash with NATO and EU leaders wasn’t exactly harmonious.

It would also help push Putin’s agenda of disrupting the West. What a surprise. America’s self-image would crash and burn all too easily.

The “dictatorship” idea is getting a lot of attention worldwide and in the media. Just check those links if you want to lose a lot of weight in a hurry. It’s also a big image play that appeals to his vanity and the redneck rabble that supports him.

“Hey, he could be a dictator!”

“Well, hey, pass the fried cockroaches and hand me the BB gun for some protein! Build a big shiny cardboard box for the people! Let them eat donuts! Hurrah!”

Meh.

You can see lots of useless guys stomping around in uniforms and singing jingles. It’s Goebbels for proven morons, American style. There’s no substance to any of this drivel. As usual with Trump, it’s noise about him, with hangers-on. It was the hype that made it real in Germany.

Dictatorships all have one thing in common; they all fall to pieces fairly quickly. How quickly depends on the stupidity of the supporters.

Dictatorships are supported mainly by criminals and insiders who use the dictatorships for their own purposes. Hobbies include genocide, persecution, and corruption on a national scale. Nazi Germany was already going broke before World War 2.

The weak inevitably continue to follow, and the strong inevitably resist. It’s a sort of instant civil war, another Republican platform.

That’s not a great option for the US. The blue states could secede and take the vast majority of the national revenue with them. The rest of the nation would be instantly broke. Add a few nutcases, and you’ve got a civil war.

Happy?

Dictatorship is an image that does fit the narcissism and the vainglory of Trump. Weak leaders need weak followers, and he’s well oversupplied with weaklings of all shapes and sizes. It’s like the little rat-guys that follow the school bully around in elementary school.

It’s also exactly the sort of beat-up that instantly creates a contrast with the perception of chaos America has been happily playing along with for decades. Image means more than reality in this mediocre form of America.

Trump seems more certain than ever of his invulnerability with these statements. Bear in mind that’s in the face of so many indictments and so many civil cases against him. That matters.

It also means he’s quite likely to feed his ego with a dictatorship that will solve everything for him. Psychologically, this guy is a sort of massive caricature of over-compensation. He fails so badly at so many things, so this is his big shot at compensation for those failures.   

He does have other image problems. As a billionaire, he’s a used Kleenex. He is simply not in the same league as the big-money guys and never was. A Trump “dictatorship” might be bad news for them, too. They don’t seem to have noticed yet. The Nazis made a lot of money helping themselves to everybody else’s assets.

Ah, well. That couldn’t happen in America, now, could it?

Who owns Trump?

In this case, the question is more important than the answer. Americans are often far too savvy for their own good. Instead of asking this very obvious question, they’re “handling” it. There are some disturbing reasons for that.

Americans are typically diplomatic, obliging, and very socially adept. They will present anything and everything like the Land of Opportunity didn’t commit suicide in the 1980s with the Me Generation. They’re much too good at superficiality, and that superficiality is now at potentially lethal levels nationally.  

They always “know people”, at least according to them, like Bernie Madoff. They know how things work behind the scenes. They routinely shut up about the obvious. These are just a few of the factors which have made America the happy carefree place it is today.

Trump is just a handling exercise, like everything else, you assume? You just go around the conflicts and the disasters, as usual, right? Maybe not, this time. You need to know where Dodge is, to know how to get out of it. Let’s leave it at that.

Trump is a low-tier guy in any sense you care to name. His financial dealings have been appalling at best. He’s been the author of How to Make a Train Wreck more than a deal.

To get out of these self-made catastrophes he needed money, and a lot of it. All that money and a presidency suddenly arrive from out of the literal ashes.

Why?

How?

What makes Donny Boy the Staggeringly Uninteresting and Questionably Solvent suddenly so valuable to anyone at all?

It’s not his personality. It’s not his skill sets. It’s not his inability to know what state he’s in or what he’s talking about for years on end.

He’s a face and a noisemaker. That’s it. He’s also “manageable” by anyone with a phone.

He has no comeback to his managers. “No money, no Little Donny”. He has nothing to make a deal with except the image they made for him. He walked off that cliff like Wile E Coyote years ago. The one thing he’s done right is to hire and fire nobodies who aren’t around long enough to get a full picture.  

His public image is all he has. It’s for morons with no clout and less influence. It sits well with banks and countries who lend him billions on the basis of it. It’s useful to nations that are actual enemies of the United States, like Russia and anyone else with a few minutes to spare.

All that cash came from somewhere and it’s still coming. Where does the big money come from? Russia in several ways, according to Kushner, but obviously there are local inputs, too.

The image of a wannabe dictator in the pay of a hostile foreign country or minority extremists would destroy just about anybody in a healthy United States.

That might even work in this ridiculous version of what was the country.

Just remember that if you get a dictator, you didn’t do enough to stop it.