Like many Americans, Carolina Giuliani was paralyzed over the prospect that Donald Trump — the man she blames for ruining her father and damaging her family — could be close to returning to the White House.
…
“It’s a hard phenomenon to understand. It definitely is,” Carolina Giuliani said. “I view Trump as a disease, and I think it’s really important to remember that with every disease, prevention is a much more effective strategy than treatment. … I thought we had cured ourselves of it the first time, but it doesn’t seem like we have.
“And I think if he becomes the president again, we may have a terminal illness in our country. And that really, really scares me.”
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Trump is the vector, not the disease itself.
The disease is the curdling rage of the (mostly) working class that’s massively failed to achieve the American Dream™ that was promised to them, which has been perfectly heightened misdirected and cultivated by decades of right wing radio talk show hosts, psuedo ‘philosophers’, outright racist and religious extremists, conservative ‘think tanks’ lending credibility to failed economic doctrines, 30+ years of conservative influence on our public education systems essentially ruining it to the point that now only around 10% of Americans are capable of comparing and contrasting news coverage critically… etc etc.
Trump was just the first presidential candidate to completely drop the pretense and show the country that its fine to go totally mask off with your inane bullshit falsehoods, that there is no real need for anything other than appeal via signifiers and cliches and dogwhistle.
Actual policy means nothing, only spin.
Actual hypocrisy means nothing, just sling more baseless shit at others.
Reality means nothing, everyone else is wrong, you know in your heart what I am telling you, no matter how contradictory or incomprehensible it is, is true…
… because it allows you to feel rightfully indignant.
This has always been the strong undercurrent amongst conservatives.
Trump was just the vector that metastisized it into basically mass psychosis.
She’s close. Trump isn’t the disease, though, he’s a symptom. The disease is Christian nationalism, and it’s been festering far longer than Trump has been on the national scene.
The disease lies in the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and a few other groups hell-bent on turning the US into a theocracy. They’ve been working on this for a very long time, and have been testing the fences for decades, like velociraptors, only making their move now they’ve found all the weaknesses they need to succeed.
It worries me how focussed people are on the threat trump poses, because even if he dropped dead today, it would only be a temporary inconvenience to these dominionists who have infiltrated nearly every facet of the US government. They will not stop if trump disappears, or if Harris is elected.
Please, watch The Family documentary. You’ll be amazed and likely sick at how deeply they’ve embedded themselves.
The disease is the dixiecrats, Christian nationalism is the latest syndrome after we tried to treat jim Crow and the KKK, which was what was left over after slavery went into brief remission during reconstruction.
The south will always find a new way to be evil and un-American, it’s their legacy.
This is all true, but there’s not clear line of succession after Trump, so they’ll splinter. Redirecting the fervor to some new dear leader will take a long time. The Trump thralls are entirely invested in him alone.
I think part of the danger here lies in ascribing too much power to the presidential office. I can easily name dozens of dominionists in Congress, thousands in state office, and they’ve captured the Supreme Court. They’ve infested government at local levels, too. The president is just icing.
I think people put too much emphasis on the president, and mostly ignore the real threat. Trump is absolutely replaceable. People make fun of trump’s ‘3D chess’ phrase as though he meant it as a metaphor for thinking ahead – but he got that phrase from Bannon, and Bannon wasn’t talking metaphorically. Bannon meant it literally, as they were moving ‘tens of thousands of operatives’ (his words) like chess pieces into local and state office over the past couple of decades, ready to move and checkmate the government from within. And they’ve done that.
Every state is a theocracy.
For those interested in more info about the Dominionist views: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/peers-of-pope-francis-criticize-steve-bannons-apocalyptic-worldview/
Here’s another recent article (2022) that goes into more detail: Who are the Dominionists backing conservative candidates?.
And another: Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight
Other notable dominionists:
Ron DeSantis
Ted Cruz
Kari Lake
Amy Coney-Barrett
Brett Kavanaugh
Mike Johnson
Mike Pence
Roger Stone
Tucker Carlson
Bill Barr
Pretty much everyone in Trump’s orbit.
There are hundreds more. This should scare the shit out of all of us.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on Christian Dominionism.
This is not fringe. It’s mainstream.
e: names
People feel wronged and betrayed by the system, and like they need that reflected in who they vote for as their representative.
He is that person for those people (hence why they love the mugshot).
The Republican side of politics knows this is the emotional driver, so they direct most of their media to that kind of grievance politics, and claiming they’ll “fix” these persecution issues in extraordinary ways.
People like Musk and Thiel fund these campaigns.
Trump thinks he can fix it all by breaking the system that he sees as persecuting him; the system of democracy and the rule of law.
So he wants all its powers. He wants to be a dictator. Then you’ll see his politics and only his, and there’ll be no more persecution, no more broken system. Just him.
That’s how the right wingers feel. They’re emotionally locked into this.
That’s why they’re still on board, for the political solution to their emotional disenfranchisement, for their own sense something’s wrong with everyone but them to he proven out with power. Being onboard with Trump proves there’s a broken system they’ve been wronged by, and someone powerful is in that boat with them.
It’s a cult, just as much as neoliberal compromise with the Capitalist forces of self-sacrifice is a cult.
This is the underlying article written by Caroline Giuliani: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/caroline-giuliani-trump-kamala-harris
