Is he Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, a winner in a race already in place (somebody had to win) or a creative genius finding and exploiting dark desires previously unmined in the American psyche? Nothing is written--that is my starting point. Nothing in human affairs is determined or inevitable. Someone created this mess and the old rules of interest always apply. To whose benefit is it all occurring? To the long term benefit of no one, I think.
Hence the perversion. But, in the shorter run, the monied forces are making out. Trump is their man though they may have recoiled at first at his coarseness and lack of control. Trump was produced by a society running amok on money and rooted in a puritanical belief in immanent justice, that God's will and approval are implicit in worldly success, despite what the Bible says. Trump's "talents" are in sociopathy and aggression, not insight.
He is less constrained by conscience than any person ever so successful in our public sphere. Such people have long achieved supreme authority in other cultures but never, I believe, in ours. They have desired it but never succeeded--not with the backing of all of the structures of power and the commanding of all of the branches of government and the coopting of a deluded electorate, as has Trump. He is the head of a criminal enterprise.
Trump won because he was willing to play dirtier than anyone else. He isn't a prodigy he's a punk. But he's a mirror on American society: the ugly, sociopathic thing we have become. Horrifyingly, Trump is us. We are a nation blinded by greed and our good fortune and defensive about its origins, insisting, like Trump, that we are endlessly deserving of an inheritance and compulsively clamoring for more. We are exceptionalist swine.
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