Mixed Metaphors: Trump vs. Obama in 2024
A reader accuses me of using ‘too many mixed-metaphors’. Well get ready, here they come again, tumbling down hill on broad-band internet cables that connect us to our friends and fellow Americans on Facebook and elsewhere from sea to shining sea…
A recent University of Chicago poll found that 47 million American adults—that is, 1 in 5—agreed with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, 21 million also agreed that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.”
7 million of these citizens of the gun-running Deep State already own a gun, and “at least 3 million have served in the US military and have lethal skills, the poll found.” 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
I like to think I’m in the discouraged minority that finds these numbers at least disheartening if not downright eerie, hardly the affirmation of the American values I was taught to uphold. Thinking about these 21 million people who think the election was ‘stolen from Trump I feel lonely, the sort of loneliness one feels when looking at a familiar landscape that’s no longer familiar: there’s a new building where the only building used to be, the old building being just fine, in need of some repair perhaps but solid, a beautiful example of the Louis Sullivan school..
(I know, you don’t just show up one time at City Hall and think by just showing up you’re going to affect change. Meantime, We the People are being, more or less, held hostage by a Congress than can’t split the atom or pass a budget to operate the Government in Our Name. And our name, The United States, is being besmirched by our leadership).
It’s all very incestuously confusing, a tangled knot of private and public failures, of the lies one side tells to the other and the other side compounds. So what we lovers of the idea of democracy are left with is mostly a complete paralysis of actual political accomplishment, and instead are offered a cascade of tell-all books written by people who served within the Deep State and are determined to make a buck from their service.
The Trump wing of the right-wing never misses a chance to burnish the legend. There’s yet another Trump book, Tales From the Press Conference That Never Was, that should get our particular attention. Written by a woman who studied under both Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronte and who served at the highest levels in the court of Donald and Melania Trump, the book is an ‘inside’ look at the White House that reveals Trump has a temper and is a congenital liar! Next? A Ken Burns documentary on PBS.
The center left right-wing counters with the news that Barack Obama’s broken ground on a presidential library in Chicago—The Barack Obama Presidential Center: pictures of Barack and Michelle, smiling, with groundbreaking shovels in their hands, are available on high-speed internet. The Obama’s his and her books netted the Obamas $65 million, enough to turn a shovel into the ground deeply enough to turn up worms.
First question asked in the next presidential debate, should Obama rise to the occasion and challenge Donald Trump in 2024: whose administration killed more people with illegal drone strikes?