A Masquerade of Strength: A Weak Man trying to project himself as a Strongman

We are experiencing the total abandonment of any semblance of a Social Contract by the GOP in Washington, DC and the orange menace in particular. Without the underlying foundation of a Social Contract, there is NO legitimacy in, for, and by a government. Donald Trump has tried, unpersuasively for the most part, for the last nearly four years, to project himself as a strongman in the mold of historical figures Hitler and Mussolini. He has emphatically expressed admiration for modern day "strongmen" such as Putin, Turkey's Erdogan, and most notably Kim Jung Un of South Korea.

But he's not strong. He can't admit it. But we can figure it out anyway. 

Please listen to the thoughts of Anand Giridharadas, publisher of The Ink newsletter:

He is a weak man who has always longed to be a strong man, and he is a weak man’s idea of a strong man, and right before he got sick he made it clearer than ever that he intends to be a strongman. Some, knowing their history and knowing the pretensions of weak men and strongmen and weak men who become strongmen, have warned us about this potential from the beginning. But others, more cautious, more trusting in the power of institutions to save us, waited until recently to begin sounding the alarm. This is how democracy ends, they began to whisper. This is how it happens. He is attempting to do this right before our eyes. 

Into the whispers landed a staggering story about his taxes. Here, again, the dyad of strength and weakness that defines Trump’s mind was at play. It seemed at first like a classic tale of plutocratic rigging. That’s how I read it and others read it, and there was much reason to read it that way. A man who manages to pay $750 in federal income taxes in a calendar year while, at that very hour, running for president on the basis of his special powers as a billionaire is the picture of a system that is conned, gamed, manipulated, overpowered. But a couple days after The New York Times story broke, two of its authors, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, went on the podcast The Daily and reframed their own story. This wasn’t a story about Trump’s cunning but about his brokeness, as Craig explained:

You know, rich people have great accountants. And they’re able to do all this wizardry to get a tax bill down. And we do see evidence that he’s employed accounting maneuvers that have helped him do that. But this is not a case of a rich guy hiding profits. This is a case of a man who runs businesses that year after year lose tens of millions of dollars.

There is, in other words, a kind of tax avoidance that represents strength at rigging things. But this was not that. This was a tax avoidance of weakness — a man just not that good at business. “There’s just basically nothing left to tax at the end of a year,” as Michael Barbaro, the host, summed it up.

Then, two days after the taxes story broke, in the longest week anyone can remember, came what swiftly became known as the Worst Debate Ever. At first, watching with my little boy, I was terrified. Trump’s performance of faux-strength was vulgar and crude, reckless and unpresidential, if that word still means anything. But it seemed to me it might work. Biden looked good and kind, but maybe he did look weak by the standards of the form of battle Trump had shown up to fight. And the moment I began to calm down was the moment when I realized how vast is the coalition of people who have been on the wrong end of that kind of fraudulent, hollow flexing of power. The women talked over in meetings, the men who as boys were thrown into lockers, the workers whose intelligence is overlooked, the people roughed up or worse by the cops just for being Black. I began to wonder if, by inflaming those memories and those sentiments, Trump doomed himself.

Read the rest of the article

Since I first heard Professor Frans de Waal's TED Talk on Alpha Males two years ago in July, I instinctively or, perhaps, intuitively knew that Donald Trump was a loser and that he was (in my words) going down. In Greek, the word sunesis, refers to understanding. Decades ago, when I was studying the Bible, I was taught that sunesis was like the rivers of one's understanding flowing together. I also see it as "connecting the dots," so to speak.

In the video above, Anand describes how he started connecting the dots. 

Trump is going down. I'm going to I DID cast my vote later today at an early voting center near my home in Maricopa County, Arizona. I am a voice. I will be heard.

 

Make sure your voice is heard. VOTE.

That is how we restore the Social Contract, or at least begin to do so, and how we ensure that Trump does, in fact, go down.