Donald Trump’s laptop

| 12:01 pm EDT October 19, 2020
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I just randomly found Donald Trump’s laptop in a dumpster behind a Red Lobster in Mexico City, and I can’t wait to tell you what’s on it. No, I’m just kidding, of course. And you knew that before you had even finished reading that sentence, because things like that don’t just randomly happen.

Yet the tall tale that Rudy Giuliani has cooked up about “Hunter Biden’s laptop” isn’t really any less unrealistic, and Trump supporters have lapped up that gibberish as if it were some kind of perfectly logical smoking gun. It really does speak to just how far down the rabbit hole the Trump cult has gone.

Conservatism has always been based on lies. But they’re lies of convenience, logical fallacies that allow selfishness to feel like moral superiority. What we’re seeing with the Trump cult is something entirely different. They’ll believe anything. In fact, the more unrealistically over the top this laptop fantasy becomes, the more eagerly they lap it up. The absurdity seems to be the point.

Then again, Voltaire once said that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Sure enough, Donald Trump’s entire foray into politics has consisted of selling a segment of people on absurd things that they know can’t be true. Once Trump gets them to let go of the truth, he owns them. Next thing you know, they’re raiding a pizza parlor at gunpoint, or trying to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

So it’s disturbing but not surprising that after four years of a steady diet of increasingly false information, those who are still with Donald Trump are eager to believe senile Rudy Giuliani’s incoherent tale about a Biden laptop. Will these Trump cult members ever come back to mental competence? We don’t know. But first we have to vote Trump out in record numbers and put an end to this literal madness.