Double Down:
...to significantly increase or strengthen effort, investment, or resolve toward some goal, strategy, or action so as to maximize the potential yield as a result.
Trump supporters who prize his doubling down as part of his attack on “political correctness” and on propriety and decorum, mistake an “antibody” for the venom. Trump cannot pretend to uplift the political discourse by doubling down on unprincipled banalities. With the core of the Republican establishment holding their noses while invoking their own unprincipled dissent upon placing nation over party, the good soldiers march on placing their self-interests over their own better judgment. The echoes to a former era of war, pestilence, and intolerance are deafening now. They are doubling down on a darkened history and in deep-seated pangs of conscience. Pangs that should be forever mindful of a time when all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not avert the darkest time in recent history. Trump supporters, “loyal” Americans, good soldiers all, blinded by the white rage of diminishing privilege, can only hope the rest of us save their asses and stop the insanity.
Given the alternatives, and even offering the benefit of the doubt, the confluence of the most recent events and disclosures strongly suggest their “white knight” is a tarnished traitor. As his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen joins team America and discloses the dark underbelly of all things Trump, the soulless godfather, is losing his touch---and his composure. Anyone watching his televised rebuttal to reporters who sought his reaction to Cohen's defection could see it. Trump has lost it. Cohen's revelations while pleading to a single count of fibbing to Congress received an outsized blabbering from the orange and tan temporary resident of the nation's house. With the nuance of projectile vomiting, Trump waded through a long dissertation which amounted to calling Cohen a weak, dumb liar who was seeking a lesser sentence for his crimes in service of Mr. Trump. What Trump did not say was how shit-scared he was of the day’s events. Almost simultaneously to Cohen’s plea, agents raided the office of Trump ’s former tax attorney, Edward Burke, who represented Trump on property tax assessments at the Chicago Trump Tower, saving him more than $14 million.
The FBI confirmed the raid … but noted warrants were executed in “multiple locations today.” That included both Burke’s law offices and his City Hall office. Office windows in both locations were covered in butcher paper after the FBI entered.
As the walls close in on Trump’s Crime Family, the godfather tries to bluff his way out of town as he headed to Argentina to attend the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires. After boarding his flight, with his aides scrambling to mitigate the harm done first by Cohen, then by Trump, his press aide announced that Trump had canceled his meeting with Vladimir Putin scheduled during the meetings. Also scratched were meetings with the now-toxic Saudi prince, MBS. Trump would meet with virtually no world leaders at the G20, allowing for a long vacation also known as “executive time.” Trump’s aides would no doubt be searching for a Slingbox so that he could watch a comforting version of what had just occurred in NY and Chicago in English.
Trump’s tweets today included several book recommendations touting friends’ new volumes, citing his favorite scofflaw Judge Jeanine among others. These are all books he was sure never to have read during his free time. With this in mind, I am suggesting that we somehow undo the “double down”— by deconstructing the myth of Trump’s own making.
First, let’s drop the suggestion that he is somehow very good at anything. A serial bankrupt developer has little in common with genius. Comparing him to an “evil” genius or referring to him in any terms that suggest even a cryptic “brilliance” is a mistake. He is simply a bad person who has no qualms about doing evil things. To wit:
- ripping families apart at the border for his own political benefit
- denying the impact of climate change
- weaponizing language to support hate and racism
- attacking the free press and other democratic institutions
- abusing the rule of law
- supporting despots and his abandoning of allies
- please feel free to add to the list
The above traits and behaviors do not suggest “evil genius” or any sort of malevolent cunning. As he proclaims a self-asserted brilliance, he is openly demonstrating a profound insanity. Trump is not normal. His actions and words are not normal. He is, as Lindsey Graham once suggested in a moment of clarity, “batshit crazy.”
Lest we believe, because he has a following within the populace and support within his party, that this somehow offers comfort --that there are protective “guard rails" reigning in a runaway presidency. Instead, Trump’s behavior most resembles the nature of cult leaders--think James Jones, David Koresh, and, Heaven’s Gate prophet Marshall Applewhite in well-tailored suits. All had created and lived in alternate realities that demanded their followers place their full faith in them. All spoke in an alternate language—in tongues— using words like code, like dog whistles, to describe their pretend realities. Orthodoxy required blind loyalty, unfettered leaps of faith, based solely on the willingness of apostles to trust them and question convention while denying facts and evidence. To this mix add the pursuit of fame and money—lots of it— which is uniquely the credo of Trump’s religion.
The false prophet attracts the crazies, the unaligned, and misinformed who are longing for a better reality --one that explains their own failure and discomfort in the here and now. Followers are programmed to react not as individuals, but as a group in march step with “the prophet”. Groupthink almost always includes conspiratorial beliefs which confirm a disassociative break from standard reality. In Trumpworld an aberrant reality invites crackpots--- climate deniers, birthers, white supremacists, racists, flat-earthers--- to believe their own absurdities without having to accept others’. Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi are examples of the type of acolytes this world requires. They “make things up” for others to believe creating little “churches” complete with their own bibles, mythologies, and a creation story to fit the tenets of their leader.
Corsi’s birther movement, for example, was a faithless church. Its doctrine served racists and bigots, who would worship with ill-intentioned Republicans for whom “victory at any cost” was dogma. Trump doubled down. First, he used “birtherism” as a wedge to enjoin Corsi’s true believers into a political base for his own purposes. Then, by accretion, he expanded the following by inviting others of similar stripe, weighed down with imagined grievances. In the end, this church grew to a cathedral, housing willing followers all in search of a false prophet. His faith offered an alternative reality based upon personal intolerances. They called this religion eponymously naming it “Trumpism”. Terms like "Witch Hunt," “hoax,” and "No Collusion" echo a common mantra that invigorates followers, lighting their way to Trump's own alternate reality. His garbled and nonsensical language and syntax, his version of “speaking in tongues,” is mindlessly interpreted by his base as treasured "truths" that are in conflict with prevailing wisdom and fact. Counter-intuitiveness run amok.
Most cults run out of steam because they cannot sustain their self-created breaches from reality. Often, cult leaders fall due to an inability to sustain an illusion of sanity. Often, as their confidence game unravels, these false prophets sacrifice their closest followers on altars of expediency. This looks like where we are at with the Trump cult that has somehow taken over our government. For those who have drunk the Kool-Aid, their fate is sealed. For the rest of us, we rely on our patience and relentlessness to persevere. We are the acolytes of Robert Mueller, the high priest of proper order.
In this game between Messers. Trump and Mueller, the deck is stacked. As the evidence of Trump's treachery and criminality mounts, as the president doubles down, increasing his risk, the odds will prevail. The insanity will end when truth catches up with the lies and deception—when the double down goes bust.
