-by Nigel Best
Hearing his henchmen turn on him, ridicule him, and mock him during these televised hearings from Washington must really be getting under the skin of election loser Donald Trump.
So under his skin that, like a rabid dog, his ego must be becoming a fertile breeding ground for horror.
The perception of attacks to his already fragile state of mind will have the effect of turning the narcissist into a very violent individual who will seek his revenge. That revenge will not just be against those who spoke out against him, but against a country he will now see as being just another entity that has cast him in his mind as the villain.
If Trump were ever to become an elected official again, a new terror will emerge.
Donald Trump and the future of the United States sit on the precipice of a giant abyss. The January 6th hearings and its outcomes will decide which will topple into the void first.
If Trump is not charged, he will return as an animal intent on ripping apart "the traitors," and the country itself. He will have unfettered power believing that he is beyond any law.
If he is charged, the country, already divided, will still feel the man’s vitriol through his followers. It will take a Herculean effort to not see rights stripped away, the rise of unfettered white supremacy, and, ultimately, the tearing down of civil society.
Trump’s been a despised man in New York for a long time. He has been the punch line to jokes; he’s the racist taking out ads calling for the death penalty for black youths charged with a crime for which they were all later exonerated; he’s the guy who would phone newspapers pretending to be someone else with a Trump story; he is the perpetrator of lies about Muslims celebrating on rooftops the fall of the Twin Towers.
Trump likes certain potentates from the Middle East, and, no doubt, would like to emulate the autocratic tendencies he sees on display when he visits such places. One of those countries is Saudi Arabia.
Trump really got cozy with Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s crown prince. Trump refused, despite evidence, to condemn the country, or its crown prince, for the death and dismemberment of the Saudi-U.S. journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
Interesting that during the time of the death, no-one seemed to want to mention that just a number of years earlier, Trump, being ridiculously overstretched financially, had sold his family’s private yacht to Khashoggi’s father. Make of that what you will.
(It bears noting, for the more conspiracy theory folk out there that Khashoggi’s uncle was a middleman in the Iran-Contra arms deal, and that Khashoggi’s cousin’s name is Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend of the late Princess Diana, both killed in a car accident in a tunnel in France. Make of those connections as you might.)
Trump’s army of Proud Boys may want to be cautious of becoming Minutemen to the Donald should he return to office. History was not kind to the brown shirts of Hitler. After using them to do his dirty work internally in Germany prior to World War 2, Adolf rounded most of them up and had them put to death, feeling perhaps that the organization may turn itself upon the German leader. Don’t doubt for a moment the self preservation tactics of a man like Trump.
These are dangerous days for the United States. It needn’t have been like this. If only those who are speaking out now hadn’t been greedy for the monies from book sales of memoirs of their time in the West Wing. Maybe if loyalty to telling the public the truth at the time of events happening had taken precedence, perhaps this ugly moment wouldn’t be upon us.
Perhaps!