A grifter is as a grifter does. And so Donald J. Trump, the former, twice-impeached president of the United States, is doing this:
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday filed proposed class-action lawsuits targeting Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, as well as YouTube and its parent company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, in a Hail Mary move after being removed from their platforms. Courts have typically dismissed similar suits, and these are likely doomed from the start as well.
(CNN, July 8, 2021)
This is just Trump showing for the umpteenth time that he sees his supporters as little more than cash cows … and sacrificial lambs. And why not; after all, the same suckers donating tens of millions to his phantom reinstatement campaign will probably donate the same to this phantom lawsuit. And January 6 showed their willingness to even die (or surely worse, kill) for this gilded-tower grifter.
To be fair, though, his supporters are such easy marks because most are evangelicals. I am the son of an evangelical preacher man. So I know firsthand that, even before Trump, these folks spent their whole lives giving one-tenth of their income (and then more on Sundays) to pastors who were telling them the biggest lie ever told, namely that Jesus is coming back any day now to take them to Heaven.
But, when I see so many evangelicals sacrificing their souls at the altar of Trump’s political ambition, the fate of the Yazidi Christians come to mind. Because, for centuries, the Yazidis were variously assimilated and massacred by Muslim Kurds and Turks in Northern Iraq. This meant that the few Yazidis who remained gave meaning to the Stockholm Syndrome long before psychologists first used this term in the early 1970s to describe captives identifying with their captors.
Then, in a truly cruel twist of fate, their de-facto captors effectively handed over Yazidi Christians to even more diabolical captors, ISIS. The genocide of the Yazidis ensued – with rape of Yazidi women as the animating feature.
But likewise, in a truly demonic twist of fate, evangelical pastors handed over their flock to a New York charlatan – who makes snake-oil salesmen look pious. Granted, their flock may not be suffering the physical genocide the Yazidis suffered, but the Stockholm Syndrome effect – of being handed from one de-facto captor to another – is the same.
Of course, given the way some of these gullible believers in Adam and Eve worship Trump, you’d be forgiven the impression that his supporters believe he is the proverbial second coming.
Talk about the anti-Christ! But how’s this for another analogy: Trump treats his evangelical supporters like the counselor who sexually abuses victims of sexual abuse who come to him for treatment.
In any event, folks, that is what this lawsuit is all about: rank exploitation.
Even so, it takes a truly diabolical leader to get a Covid vaccine in secret just to sustain his political campaign about this virus being no big deal. But even now Trump stands alone among political leaders (Democrat and Republican) in refusing to urge hesitant or defiant Americans to get vaccinated. And this, even though the vast majority of those Americans happen to be his die-hard supporters.
In other words, with little or nothing to lose, Trump would rather save his own face than save millions of American lives. If that isn’t the very definition of diabolical, nothing is.
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