Donald Trump is projecting
Donald Trump and his deranged followers want it both ways. On one hand they characterize President Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” senile, doddering and too demented to effectively run the government. On the other hand he’s the cunning and sinister head of the “Biden crime family,” pulling Machiavellian strings that reach all the way to the DOJ and into the hearts and minds of secret grand juries everywhere.
This seeming paradox is nothing new to conspiracy theorists. In the surreal fantasyland of the conspiracy theorist villains must be both superheroes on one day and incompetent buffoons on the next. Their specific alter egos are recruited as and when they are needed to fulfil whatever role is required at any given moment.
That’s how it was possible for NASA (according to Moon Hoaxers) to pull off the greatest hoax in history on one hand, and yet be so stupid and incompetent as to allow the wind to get into their supposedly sealed-off studio and flutter the flag the astronauts planted on the moon on the other. Convenient, huh?
The truth of the matter is that President Biden is neither senile nor sinister, and there isn’t a shred of evidence for either. Wishful thinking can be used to make anyone appear that way at any time if you cherry pick instances in time and show only those instances that cast them in whatever light you wish. The Biden-haters fervently wish that the President made just half the gaffs and incoherencies of their Trump god. If he did then they might have something.
No, arch criminals who are incompetent commit their crimes right out in the open. They tweet them and post them and confess to them against the advice of their lawyers. And when they’re caught they blame others for their crimes, throwing even their lawyers under the bus in the process. Such people are most emphatically not criminal masterminds. They are people who are ordinarily stupid and frequently incompetent who, for reasons that defy logic, have never been indicted. Until now.
Such people are, in short, Donald Trump. Trump has spent his life getting away with crimes he committed right out in the open for the simple reason that much of American society refused to see him for what he truly was. Millions wanted to believe he was the myth he invented, wanted him to be a self-made billionaire who pulled financial rabbits out of hats. They wanted him to be the New York real estate whiz-kid who succeeded in spite of the evidence, the bankruptcies, the self dealings, the ruined family businesses and cheated employees.
Trump is the real fraud, and now that he’s losing control of what little mind he has left he’s projecting the rest of his worst traits onto Joe Biden. And yet the tendency to believe much of what he says still exists in much of the mainstream media. Trump has even managed to make Joe Biden’s age a factor. It never occurs to anyone in the MSM (or elsewhere) that Biden is only 3 years and 6 months older than Trump and far, far more articulate and mentally competent.
Trump continues to pull those rabbits out of those hats, even making Biden’s age a factor when the difference is so inconsequential, because many of us continue to let him get away with it. There is a common perversion in the American psyche that wants to give Trump powers he doesn’t have. If I had a dollar for every time I heard some idiot proclaim that Trump has some special, magical gift, I would be richer than Trump claims to be.
Trump has no magical gift. He’s a buffoon. Any special powers he appears to possess were given to him, free of charge, by a gullible, credulous public. Fortunately those magical gifts will be invisible in a court of law. In court the emperor’s clothes had better be made of real, visible material, or they will not be admissible. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.