Trump the Fighter
I am perpetually amazed that seemingly millions of Americans go to sleep every night and wake up every morning and thank God that Donald Trump is fighting a lonely, uphill battle to preserve Democracy whose stakes could not be higher.
These cultists genuinely seem to believe that if Trump does not prevail in overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election against impossible odds then life as we know it is over and in only a few weeks our country will become a brutal Communist dictatorship pretty much overnight.
Trump’s true believers inhabit an alternate universe that looks very much like ours but operates much differently. In this bizarre realm Trump is not a petulant man-child obsessed only with power, popularity and validation but rather a selfless, Godly man who is not agitating for his own selfish needs but rather fighting for the common man, first and foremost, but also waging a deeply moral campaign against political corruption and cheating.
The soon to be ex-president’s acolytes admire him because they see him as a fighter who will be as aggressive as humanly possible in order to win. For Trump, it fundamentally does not matter what is being fought for, only that there is an intense, aggressive fight.
Fighting so hard makes Trump sleepy!
A good example can be found early in Trump’s presidency when one of the very first things he had spokesman Sean Spicer do was angrily insist that Trump’s inauguration crowd was much bigger than it actually was.
To me, that seemed insane. Who cares about the size of the crowd for Trump’s inauguration other than Trump? But in Trump’s mind, this was something not only worth fighting for, but something worth fighting for as aggressively as possible for the best/only reason: winning.
To Trump, inauguration crowd size was important because it was a way of showing that he had won, that despite what the press insisted, he had the biggest inauguration crowd size, and consequently “won” something nobody in their right mind would even see as a competition.
On a similar note I recently listened to a leaked call from Trump to the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia in which the Celebrity Apprentice host tried to threaten, bully and intimidate the politician into doing the impossible and having the Peach State certified as one Trump won decisively, by hundreds of thousands of votes after the state was conclusively given to Biden.
I was of course mortified. It struck me as both pathetic and deeply disturbing, the desperate move of a deluded man-child whose crazed narcissism won’t allow him to admit to himself or the world that he lost.
Trump’s followers see it differently. For them, there’s nothing corrupt or amoral about Trump’s words or actions. Instead, they embody what his fans adore about him, namely that he’s a fighter for whom it’s impossible to be too aggressive or single-minded because he’s fighting not just for himself but for his country.
These devotees don’t hear a desperate man motivated by selfishness and greed but rather a hero who will never stop fighting to win at all costs, like Rocky or Rambo or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’s Mr. Smith.
For Trump’s fans it’s impossible for Trump to fight too hard, or too dirty, or for him to be too aggressive. They love that he hits below the belt, that he mocks the disabled and the dead and members of his own party and cabinet.
If Obama were to “joke” that he likes soldiers who weren’t captured, the way Trump did about John McCain, Conservatives would be so enraged that they’d picket the funerals of his great-grandchildren with signs reading, “Anti-American Obama hates veterans!” on the basis that his transgression was so extreme and unforgivable that his distant descendants would share in its guilt.
Instead the draft dodger’s bad-taste crack was seen as evidence that Trump was a bold truth-teller and Muhammad Ali-level fighter who’s too politically incorrect to hold his tongue even when it means callously insulting prisoners of war.
For Trump’s base, nothing Trump could do to win the 2020 election after losing decisively would be too aggressive, too extreme or too much, up to and including declaring martial law, suspending the constitution and having Biden assassinated for treason.
For Trump’s die-hards, it’s impossible for Trump to fight too hard or be too aggressive in winning on their behalf as well as his own. It’s only possible for him to not fight hard enough. It’s all about the fight and the win, and if the Republican Party and Democracy both suffer terribly in the process, that’s a trade-off Trump is not just willing but happy to take.
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