“Loyalty and obedience to Trump provides life and salvation to his followers.”
By
Salon (7/13/19)
Donald Trump is one of the best storytellers in recent political memory because of his skill in manipulating the emotions of the audience.
Trump enraptures and titillates his fans, true believers, and other followers.
Trump terrifies, upsets and enrages his detractors, critics and people of conscience.
Trump’s Fourth of July event was a great example of these gifts.
“As Trump’s polling numbers continue to improve and the likelihood of his winning in 2020 increases daily, the Democrats must empower a master storyteller of their own. Will this be the familiar in the form of Joe Biden? Or instead a new and more exciting voice? The Democrats must choose correctly. Time is running out.”
On that day, Donald Trump hijacked what should be an inclusive, nonpartisan civic holiday for his own craven, power-hungry and narcissistic purposes. To that end, Trump offered up a pathetic and childish military spectacle — one in which he embodied the state, and the country’s generals publicly pledged fealty to him. Throngs of faithful waited in the rain to be anointed by their Great Leader. He then spun a story about a country under siege by enemies, one only he can save — presumably by putting migrants and refugees in concentration camps.
Trump’s speech on that day was not noteworthy because of how it mangled basic facts. Such a narrow obsession is weak pedantry, a form of liberal Schadenfreude to mock Trump’s ignorance of American history and the deplorables who follow him. In any case, an adherence to facts is secondary to the emotional power of a performance. It was most important because of the way Trump “whitened” America’s history by removing the issue of immigration from the country’s sacred mythology. …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2019. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )