Posted on | March 11, 2024 | 2 Comments
Jimmy Kimmel and Donald Trump don’t get along. A back and forth about the viability of
Trump’s Truth Social site has been the stuff of legends. But Sunday night, the 96th Academy of Awards host might as well have informed his worldwide audience:
“Donald Trump is mentally ill. Say it out loud!”
As the Awards extravaganza was reaching its final “Best Picture” climax, Kimmel reappeared from stage left at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, and said he had an extra minute to burn.
As the spotlight shone, Kimmel said , “This show is not about me, and I appreciate you having me. It’s really about you, and Emma, and all these great actors and actresses and filmmakers, but I was told we had like an extra minute, and I’m really proud of something, and I was wondering if I could share it with you. I just got a review.
“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at The Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous. Blah. Blah. Blah. Make America Great Again.”
With the structured timing of a comedic pro, Kimmel waited as the laughter began to fade , and then said, “See if you can guess which former president just posted that on Truth Social. Anyone? No? Well thank you President Trump. Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still up. Isn’t it past your jail time?”
A tragic Donald Trump continues to dig himself into a hole that will eventually lead to some personal hell.
I think we are at a point where Trump’s mental illness is undeniable to most. Those who continue to support his candidacy now do so despite the risk to all of us, and for their own personal gain. There remain a few on the religious right who honestly believe that “God put Trump here for a purpose” (to support patriarchy, outlaw abortion, advance Christian nationalism etc.)
This past Friday Trump hosted hard-line Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. Together they celebrated Christian Nationalism, and found common ground in a reconstruction of 20th century European history where former evil strongmen were somehow divinely converted to victims, swimming upstream against liberal NATO currents.
Academics, Jurists, Priests, and Corporate CEO’s have been careful not to label Trump as mentally ill. But mentally ill he is.
Sadly, his words in 2024 remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.
Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature “idiolect”.
With the former Republican National Committee under Trump’s control, the new co-chair, daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, proudly announced, “As my father-in-law says, ‘bigly’ … We’re going to win!” The choice of Alabama Senator Katie Britt to deliver a “kitchen table” rebuttal also quickly turned sour. A schizoid of alternating styles and fabulist miss telling of gang rape, fact checkers went wild, including date (2023 vs. 2004), location (Mexico vs. USA), and president at the time (George W. Bush vs. Biden).
Loyal indeed, like zombies, Trump followers and the former Republican Party are following him into a basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale”, unless, that is, it be the destruction of our democratic form of government.
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March 13th, 2024 @ 10:56 am
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Excellent article as always. I might add that few today are aware that the first victims of the Holocaust were the mentally, physically and neurologically disabled people. They were systematically murdered by several Nazi programs specifically targeting them. The Nazi regime was aided in their crimes by perverted “medical doctors” and other experts” who were often seen wearing white lab coats. Branded as “useless eaters” and existing as “lives not worthy of life” people with disabilities were declared an unbearable burden both to German society and the state. From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a campaign of euthanasia known as the T4 program (an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4 which itself was a shortened version of Zentral Dienststelle-T4: Central Office T4). These most vulnerable of humans were reportedly the first victims of mass extermination by poison gas and cheaper CO2 from car and truck exhaust fumes. But first “a panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the euthanasia/ ‘mercy-killing’ of each person.
In the end an estimated quarter million people with disabilities were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms thereby providing “the model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialized murder within Nazi concentration and death camps.
Much has been written on this topic but few seem to know the chronology and diabolical history of how these “beneficial cleansings” of undesirables often start. The Nazi’s enlisted medical doctors to provide them with a veneer of moral justification for their atrocities.
Throughout history, authoritarian political despots have worked diligently to silence dissent and co-opt religion in order to assist in their mutual quests for total control and authority. And theocrats are convinced their particular splinter of a schizm is the ultimate authority on earth as well as the entire universe. Stonings, beheadings and the hanging of transgressors and non believers is mandated by arbitrary interpretations of their particular holy book. There is much to fear when politicians exploit the religious beliefs of medical professionals in order to pass laws denying the rights of others to control their own bodies. Such obvious pandering for votes on religious wedge issues results in leaders being deified by their followers. This is aided by a campaign of rationalization absolving them of their obvious failings. Such a campaign of apologetics by religious leaders is active and widespread in America as I type.
The current Republican candidate for President is on the record as being a believer in the “racehorse theory” –the idea that selective breeding can improve a country’s performance, which American eugenicists and German Nazis used in the last century to buttress their goals of racial purity. On September 18, 2020 he told a mostly white crowd of supporters in Bemidji, Minn. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” This is one of many such statements he has made regarding genetics that has resulted in his personal superiority and that of his family (though he neglected to explain his niece Mary Trump –a vocal critic of her uncle). The NYT reports “Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.” These statements combined with those “about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America should equate to a 100 alarm fire.
https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/disabled-people/
March 13th, 2024 @ 10:57 am
The voice of Randy Souders, a clarion messenger for the rights of the disabled and fellow traveler with Jean Kennedy Smith, offers a clear summary of past history and a concrete warning of the danger Trump represents to us all. Thanks, Randy! Best, Mike