Dead Man’s Hand

by Nigel Best

The way the press is reporting the post-2024 election victory of Donald Trump, one could easily get the impression that the United States has been dealt a Dead Man’s Hand. Maybe this is the case based on the fascist rhetoric Trump has used in his electioneering. He has used inflammatory speeches to rile up ideas of retribution against his perceived enemies. He has scared a lot of people who now fear a midnight knock on the door that indicates they are to be hauled off to a deportation camp somewhere.

Trump has convinced the MAGA cult that anyone other than a citizen of pure blood and white skin is an alien. And, true, he may use his absolute monarchial, Supreme Court-given powers to do as he pleases to whomever he perceives as a threat. One guarantee is that he’d like to send women back to some dark age where they are tethered to the kitchen stove whilst holding eight babies.

The fear-mongering may turn out to be real. Then again, with the perceived knowledge that he was bound to win the election, there really was nothing to stop him espousing his egregious ideas.

Content that the numbers would fall in his favour come November 5, onstage, he proceeded to give a blow job to a microphone. That, unto itself, should have scared away the devout, anti-gay religious section of his cult as it observed a grown man performing an intimate act on an inanimate object.

Also, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Trump had discovered that the path to the White House obviously hinged on a discussion of a dead man’s penis. Amazing, then, that the religious louts who tout Trump as a new Messiah do not seem to care that their guy is mesmerized by other guys’ ‘members’, and that extra large seems to be his preference.

All this aside, what is to be really despised is the lack of a single world leader stepping up in the last 48 hours to condemn this man. Every message was congratulatory. On bended knee, each world leader kissed the ring of a want-to-be despot.

Appeasing seemed to be the concurrent message from all quarters of the globe. Not one man or woman in a position of power had the nerve to call out this monster who has been convicted of the sexual abuse of a woman, lied and cheated, stolen, allowed rights to be trampled upon, is a philanderer, and who truly represents all that is loathsome in the eyes of anyone with any moral center.

This is a man so despicable that I don’t doubt even a devil would eject him from Hell.

(As an aside, will Trump be welcome to meet the current King of England? Traditionally, the UK monarch meets and eats with a newly-elected President of the USA. However, this is a king whose brother, Andrew, was, along with Trump, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein; Andrew having reportedly had sexual relations with young girls courtesy of said Epstein!) 

This appeasing of Trump is in every regard exactly how nations reacted to Hitler coming to power. “Don’t fret about him,” was the propaganda spewed by world leaders and the ever obliging press of the time.

Yesterday, even within the concession speech of Kamala Harris— and the whinging of most media— was a message of appeasement. To paraphrase Harris’ comments, ‘Not to worry,’ seemed to be the message. ‘Out of the darkness will come a light.’

Well, may I remind Harris and all those who bowed before this Yertle the Turtle mock emperor that in that darkness of those earlier times, millions died. It was appeasement and complacency that led to the horrors of a second world war, and extermination camps full of those who opposed the fascist regimes; those who were gay, had mental illnesses, Russians, Japanese, prisoners of the war, Romani peoples, and, of course, Jews.

It was the attempted appeasement of Mussolini, and the turning-the-other-cheek to Franco in Spain that allowed the fascist regimes to proliferate, resulting in the subsequent deaths of millions. As an example of the attempt to convince the public of the need to remain complacent and for appeasement of the Nazis, in 1937, after meeting Adolph Hitler, Canada’s then Prime Minister, MacKenzie King wrote in his diary that Hitler “is really one who truly loves his fellow man.”

King, along with others at that time, was either fooled by the Nazi leader, or besotted by his charisma, lies, and, as King wrote, “the smoothness of (Hitler’s) skin.” King would, like other leaders, turn a blind eye to Hitler’s words and ideas. The public were to be convinced to just appease the man and all will be well

Appeasement and complacency about naziism were the yard sticks by which the world leaders were duped before 1939. This feeling pervades the past weeks and months of Trump’s campaign. And, it reeks like rotting corpses on the words of world leaders over the last couple of days.

Do not be duped into this lie. Complacency should not the order of the day in 2024. For real change to occur, now is the time to look at the roots of the Trump win. Those roots are where the political fight needs to be. Debunking the myths of Trump and his party will need good investigative reporting in a time that is sure to be fraught with unease at exposing those root causes. Fraught, because it will take intrepid journalists outside of the normal avenues of media to unearth the rot that has brought the United States to this moment.

The first root is to expose the untrustworthiness inherent in the MAGA world. Exposing the lies and getting those duped by this organization will take a lot of work, and a lot of time. It won’t be easy.

MAGA is a cult after all, and it takes professionals and patience to extract members from a cult. To extract a cult member and place her/him back into a normalcy, first that person has to see themself. Only then can a cult member start to see the ways in which they have been manipulated.

As Anand Giridharadas points out in his book, Winners Take All, and I’m taking a slight liberty with the message, the top echelon are the very people who have created the problems that have screwed up the masses, and put them on edge. Those with the power and the resources manipulate those without.  

Then, like the snake oil salesmen of yore, they then come and bedazzle with cure-alls for their screw ups. What they’re really selling, though, are protections disguised as solutions; Protections for themselves. Protections to gain even more control.

The simple question to pose then, should be, “Did you really expect these piranhas to change the world for you?’ To answer this will be to dismantle the MAGA world of Trump and his cohorts. 

For now, it’s not the head of the organization that one needs to expose. No, the fight begins in the stench of the guts of this beast. In that dark and dangerous place there will be those willing to risk their careers, their families, even their lives, to expose these truths, and to reveal to the populace the error of their votes; To defeat this new fascist threat.

Throwing a term like fascist at a politician and the followers is easy, until you remember that Trump went out of his way in the last two weeks of his campaign to officially deny being a fascist. Which leads me to conclude in the words of the English journalist/writer Claud Cockburn, “Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied.”