Trump, Still Terrible But Far From Great
When will he just leave in a hot air balloon?
We’re not yet a full year into Donald Trump’s second nightmare term, which has gone as badly as any sensible person would have predicted. However, the one upside is that Trump’s support among voters is plummeting. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll places Trump’s current approval at a dismal 38 percent. That’s down nine points from a post-inauguration high during his fascist honeymoon period. The two asteroids sending his presidency to extinction are high prices, which he ignores and only makes worse, and his botched coverup of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which he’s tried to ignore but only made worse.
Trump has defeated common decency on more than one occasion, but it does seem as if the public is solidifying its contempt for him. Yet it remains astounding that the public ever believed his lies in the first place. They were so transparent. In Wicked: For Good, Elphaba confronts the Wizard of Oz, a despotic cult leader underneath the disarming guise of a huckster showman. He freely admits that he’s consistently lied to the public, but he insists it was “only verbally.”
The Wizard then implicates the public as his willing accomplices: “They were the lies they wanted to hear,” he says. (Watch below.)
All fascism is rooted in lies that people want to hear. They’ll willingly embrace lies about a group they already fear and distrust. As the Wizard tells Elphaba and Glinda, “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”
Trump’s campaign was filled with lies that his voters “wanted to hear.” He promised he would lower the price of groceries and end Russia’s war in Ukraine on “Day One.” He did neither.
“From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down, and make America affordable again,” Trump said in August 2024. “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
Of course, prices are not down. The cost of almost everything, including such luxuries as food, has steadily increased since Trump returned to power. Yet his authoritarian rampage only escalates.
Like Trump, the Wizard’s lies are hardly benign. He’s willingly smeared Elphaba, an innocent young woman who trusted him, as the “Wicked Witch of the West,” an enemy of the state. His lies fueled the oppression of a minority group, Animals — who once spoke and lived freely until he had them silenced and caged. They are no longer Animals but instead simply “animals.” There’s no evidence that he has any personal grudge against Animals. He lacked the power or insight to resolve Oz’s legitimate problems, so he used Animals as a convenient scapegoat. “The best way to bring people together is to give them a really good enemy,” the Wizard explains, already excluding the oppressed from the people he claims he’s uniting. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley observed that “fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.”
The animals had enough sense to recognize their enemy. No goats went around wearing “Make Oz Great Again” hats. Alas, some of the first people on Trump’s hit list supported him because they believed he was serious about lowering the price of eggs but just joking about all the fascism. They now have very expensive egg on their face: One father of a Trump-supporting Latino family in Florida was detained this summer and faces deportation. He heard Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric but convinced himself it would only apply to “criminals.” (This is the sort of detail so many doomed souls miss in classic “deals with the devil.”)
Last week, a Jeffrey Epstein survivor, Jena-Lisa Jones, expressed her disappointment that Donald Trump — a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist — had fought against the release of the Epstein Files until the last possible moment.
“I beg you President Trump — please stop making this political. It is not about you, President Trump,” Jones said, as if referring to another “President Trump,” one with a human soul. “Show some class. I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been a national embarrassment.”
I understand that not everyone is a single-issue voter, but it’s impossible to comprehend why a survivor of sexual assault would ever support a known sexual predator. The Trump Files have been in wide release now for decades. Unlike the Wizard, Trump has never made a compelling argument that he’s wonderful. (His limited dancing ability doesn’t help.)
“I never saw myself as a Solomon or Socrates,” the Wizard confesses. “I knew who I was: One of your dime a dozen mediocrities.” Trump lacks the Wizard’s self-awareness. Trump believes the great and terrible image he projects and has spent this year punishing anyone who dares challenge it. Unfortunately, rather than steeling themselves for battle, too many elected officials and members of the press stocked up on white flags.
The Wizard, as played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard Oz, Joel Grey in the Wicked musical, and now Jeff Goldblum in the film, boasts a superficial charm and affability that Trump lacks. During “Wonderful,” the Wizard almost wins over Elphaba and the audience until the true depths of his evil are uncovered. Trump doesn’t bother hiding his cruelty. He called a woman reporter “piggy,” while the chickens on board Air Force One said nothing.
What’s interesting to me is that while the Wizard doesn’t actually believe his own lies, Trump is often his own first mark. He insists that grocery prices are already lower than they were under former President Joe Biden, but reality greets Americans every day when they exchange money for goods and services. It’s why even Trump’s personal state media Fox News had a poll showing Trump’s disapproval rising to 58 percent — a record high for Fox. Voter disapproval over his handling of the economy is 61 percent, and his healthcare disapproval numbers have reached an all-time of 64 percent. Trump and the GOP are clearly to blame when health premiums explode next year.
Trump ignores all of this, preferring to live in a dream world. He said last week, “My poll numbers just went down, but with smart people, they’ve gone way up.” Normally, only the most pious liberals seek refuge in this particular delusion.
The Wizard tells Elphaba that “the most celebrated are the rehabilitated.” Last year, I would’ve applied this line to Trump who’d won re-election just months after his criminal conviction. Now, it might better fit Marjorie Taylor Greene, who defied Trump and helped deliver him a humiliating defeat with the Epstein Files vote. I wouldn’t quite throw any parades for her yet, of course, but it’s revealing that Trump’s most faithful flying monkey has turned on him.
When the Wizard is finally exposed as a fraud, he leaves Oz in disgrace, perhaps settling down in obscurity back in a dull, sepia-toned America. Those who enabled his evil are actually held accountable. Now, that’s fantasy for you. We tried banishing Trump once but it didn’t take, but perhaps Americans will at long last reject the humbug president and we can all finally wake up from this nightmare.
Trump is who he is-pathologically insecure and personality disordered. Other people don't exist on their own, only in relation to how he can exploit them. Which is fine, actually, when he was living in Trump Tower bankrupting himself time and again. But I will *never* in my lifetime understand how 1/6 was not disqualifying to 75 million of my fellow Americans. Yes, prices were way up and Biden was failing (I believe when voters saw Harris they really saw Biden) but honestly, up against a man who had proven just a few short years ago there was no bottom, it still should have been a no brainer. Americans are the biggest problem here, really. There seems no way to save ourselves from ourselves. Trump going away (and he will, eventually) won't change that. A huge cultural shift from the nation-crushing 40 year bearhug of Reagan is the only thing that might turn the tide and that won't happen in my lifetime.
Well when you add anti-Blackness to the list of attributes found in the subset of people who voted for him it makes a lot of sense. If one believes he'll destroy the minorities they hate, they're willing to overlook a lot of things. Heck I see videos by TabithaSpeaksPolitics for example that have people going, "He was going to get rid of the criminals" and then crying that "But he's only focusing on the Hispanics!"
Just like in Western Europe, there's people willing to destroy their own country just to make sure that people with more melanin don't have a modicum of comfort.
And again we've got polls here. I want to see what people DO, not what they SAY. You had for example people telling Ann Selzer one thing, but their fingers doing something else.