Ken MacDougall
Note: In my June 27 column, I missed correcting a “typo” error maintaining that Christopher Lake entrepreneur Kerrie Elliott was encountering difficulty in establishing a locally innovative health care facility for youth since first developing the concept and business plan in “1921”. The corrected year is, of course, “2021”, and I apologize to Ms. Elliott for not catching this error in time.
I have never been able to understand how cultist creators such as Charles Manson, George Wallace, Senator Joe McCarthy, or even so-called “Christian” evangelists such as Jim Jones (918 dead in Jonestown), David Koresh (Waco), Kenneth Copeland (constant fundraising for a “new” and bigger private jet), Joel Osteen (prosperity Gospel), as well as Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker build their followings.
It’s almost as if there’s a textbook out there, a “Cult-Building for Dummies”, that tells them just how this should be done. Mind you, the basic plan of action IS “basic” – seriously so. First, the potential “leader” must find a topic to which a substantive minority of society finds grievance, and then synthesize its causes into “sermons” that articulate its origin as a form of social ill, all while setting the table for the next round of homilies that will articulate pathways to resolution and inner peace.
Before the rise of Trumpism, the standard approach utilized to “convince” potential membership “candidates” was to “dumb down” religious tenets and moral outcomes as might typically be found in any “holy” book, for our list of hosts that being the Holy Bible. In the pre-Trumpian world of cult leadership, their philosophy also allowed itself to be tied to some grain of “truth” that allowed such “prophets” to effectively polish the veneer that fed the growth of the cult in both in numbers and societal influence.
In the case of Donald Trump, however, no such foundation exists; instead, sensing that certain segments of society have an issue with the policies of government, he has “sold” his “deal” by attaching himself not to his potential follower, but to the perceived grievance itself, thereby allowing him to say “I am on your side.” Once this fastening is secured, he can have this recruit virally working on his behalf to assure that his own needs and agenda meet with success and remain unquestioned.
This failure to provide evidentiary support of that position is unique to Trump, deriving its origins from his salesman past and the psychological practices he experimented with during his tenure as host of the television series, “The Apprentice”. In adapting that personality, he has somehow managed to convince vast segments of the American public, “Christians” in particular, that he “has their back”, when all he’s done is establish a following more than willing to accept him as the fount of relief and good government that for long has abandoned them – even if it meant that they must occasionally “compromise” in defining their understanding as to how “democracy” really works and is attained.
When in May of 2016 conservative pundit Ann Coulter declared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” that Donald Trump would defeat heavily favoured Democratic candidate for President Hillary Clinton come November, I laughed. The existential portion of me believed only a fool would miss how his platform was overblown with blowhard claims of personal achievement and diplomatic skills unequalled in history.
What I could not see happening was what was to follow, that being how our normally critical media, instead of providing critique to future utterances by Trump, instead allowed their political “contributor” spokespersons to speak to the absurdity of Trump’s words, all while sucking the oxygen out of the story and failing to construct an “alternative universe” just to demonstrate how “wrong-thinking” Trump really was.
And so he won…
Over the next four years the world’s democratic leaders got the Trump response to their perceived “authority” and involvement in such affairs of state. Whatever accomplishments President Obama had achieved in eight years became a target for change or repudiation, no matter how beneficial such social achievements were (ObamaCare) or maintaining world peace (the cancelling of a treaty with Iran limiting its involvement in any future research and production of nuclear arms). Fortunately, with every shoving aside of world leaders so that Trump could be front-and-centre in press photographs or increased utterings of respect and almost “love” for world dictators such as Russia’s Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Americans started to get an uneasy sense as to the direction Trump was taking, and in 2020, when Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden decided that “enough was enough” and turned on the fire hose to flush away the façade of truthfulness fronting Trump’s agenda, he was successful at doing just that – but only for a little while.
It should be obvious by now that despite being a convicted felon, Trump today still represents the greatest threat to the tenets of democracy that supposedly guide America’s political agenda. As recently as three weeks ago, President Biden, who’d made it known that he intended to again run against Trump in the 2024 election – and win – that claim was being challenged by a recent poor debate showing, pathetic polling numbers, poor health and an increasing volume of concern coming from Democrats questioning Biden’s decision at every opportunity. When on July 21, Biden declared his intention to step down and endorsed Kamala Harris to replace him as President, Trump’s vision to become the United States first Leader-for-Life finally hit a wall of reality.
While that declaration may have put a halt to the previous “inevitability” of Trump gaining a second term as President (from being 10 points up in polling numbers over Biden, Harris and Trump’s ratings are virtually even). Trump has wasted no time in shedding the veneer of friendship he cultivated in 2016. Having been invited to attend a National Association of Black Journalists conference on July 31, Trump came out swinging, spraying fiery attacks upon Harris’s “blackness”, her “India-ness”, her record of achievement, especially on immigration issues and his alleged having done so much for the American black community.
Trump’s NABJ performance left the electorate with no doubt as to whom he was channeling with such an approach for their votes, and while his cultivating extreme views may be the strong seeds sewing either success or failure of his campaign, there is no question whatsoever that irrespective of whatever campaign promises have been made in the past, a woman’s role to be played in the framework of the democracy movement would be ground to a total halt.
There is a lingering question now entering my thoughts, that being as how so many Canadians seem to be ambivalent as to the potentially adverse influence upon their lives a second Trump presidency might have, whether Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who takes most of his campaigning style straight out of the American MAGA/Republican playbook, might just try to tone down his often vitriolic attacks against his opponents Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh, especially given that similar language utilized by Trump’s team has already led to an assassination attempt upon Trump – and from a registered Republican supporter, at that.
Our “conservative” leaders play too many “copycat” political musicals – and maybe that’s a trend that we should now start monitoring, less we too lose our perspective on just what the word “democracy” means to our own struggling with an identity crisis Canadianism.
