The 2024 Republican National Convention featured Hulk Hogan and mirrored professional wrestling itself, which is based on a lie – the lie that the victor is legitimate – versus a carefully choreographed spectacle with a pre-determined winner.
Everything about Donald Trump is spectacle, from golden athletic shoes, to Star Spangled Bibles, and everything from his lips is a lie. There were never thousands of Muslims in Jersey City cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, Iran never violated a nuclear deal, North Korea is still a nuclear threat, Putin is not a genius for invading Ukraine, and January 6, 2021, was not a day of love but a day of violence.
A malignant narcissist is capable of warping reality, coercing others to do their bidding, whether a sadistic platoon leader who starts the massacre of innocent villagers, or a world leader who gives a Christian nation a legacy of death camps.
In the military we have a separate psychiatric discharge for character disorder because they are maladaptive to rules and regulations, and it’s an incurable condition. We know that disaster is inevitable if they are retained. They are not capable morally or ethically to lead others and America certainly never had a personality disorder become Commander in Chief until Donald Trump. Impeachment was inevitable, acquittal was an insult, an assault on truth that put our nation in peril.
January 6, like Pearl Harbor, is a day that will live in infamy. 140 police officers were wounded by a mob orchestrated by Donald Trump, incited by Donald Trump, and, at the end of the day, loved by Donald Trump. One officer, Brian Sicknick, died the next day. For 24 hours both Democrat and Republican leaders had clarity. Mike Pence refused to violate the Constitution, so Trump’s mob hunted him and Nancy Pelosi for execution. Republican Senate and House leaders, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, made speeches blaming Trump for the insurrection. Two Cabinet members, Elaine Chou and Betsy DeVos resigned, like Attorney General William Barr, rather than be associated with a coup. Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s most loyal supporter, made a speech in the Senate Chamber, saying that he’s come a long way with Trump but “count me out, enough is enough.” And he declared that Joe Biden was the legitimate president.
Three years before, Senator Jeff Flake announced his retirement and warned his colleagues, comparing Trump to Stalin, that if they accepted what was clearly abnormal, as a new normal, they were complicit. He was referring to the pathological lying. The Soviets drafted their Constitution based on the American Constitution with all its guarantees of individual rights. Then the Soviet Union became a lie, and the Soviet State media, Pravda, became the Orwellian voice of Big Brother. Pravda in Russian means truth (and Trump’s social media platform is called Truth Social).
On January 6, 2021, America became a lie. Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill was ransacked, members of Congress were hunted like dogs by Trump loyalists who believed the Big Lie of election fraud, and who, to this day, are called patriots and promised pardons by the leader of the insurrection — a man who is banned by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, from holding any federal office, for fomenting a violent insurrection and aiding and abetting the insurrectionists.
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Trump’s presidency, tried repeatedly to educate Trump as to the virtue, the raison d’ etre, of America; how we rescued Europe in WWI and WWII, how a new world order was established which secured peace and stability never before imagined. He tried explaining the huge advantages to health, economics, and to our security, by having friends/alliances, by the establishment of NATO and the United Nations. But in the end General Milley learned that Trump is a “Fascist to the core,” and, like Hitler, believes and is committed to vanquishing an “enemy from within.” That enemy is an enemy of “wokeness”, of diversity and equity, of women in combat, of multiple faiths (or no faith at all), versus Christian Nationalism. And he has stated repeatedly that this enemy is a bigger threat than our two greatest enemies, the dictatorships of Russia and China.
READ: The MAGA Movement Betrays the United States Military
January 6 is one of the darkest days in U.S. history because it is the day we allowed America to embrace a lie – a lie of election fraud and white supremacy; a day when Proud Boys and Holocaust deniers were called special by the most powerful man in the world. We allowed the greatest traitor since Jefferson Davis to not just survive but to resurrect, like a German Corporal from a Bavarian jail cell, to grasp the reins of power once again, allowed him to re-invent America in his image, where fiction is fact, a free press is the enemy of the people, bigotry is normality, where global warming will not be a problem “for about 500 years” and where violence is love.
January 6, 2025, is a sad reminder of the Frankenstein we’ve created, the obscenity we have fostered, the absurdity of electing a convicted felon when the criteria for impeachment is high crimes and misdemeanors, the betrayal of all those who have fought and died for this country by failing to expose Putin and Trump conspiracy theories metastasized through social media– especially those concerning Russian aggression against our Ukrainian ally.
This January 6 it is important to remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, MLK in the Birmingham Jail, Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Alexei Navalny returning to Moscow, every American who stormed the beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima, and so many places around the globe where tyranny seemed to have established the upper hand. We must, like Churchill, never surrender, never succumb to enemy conspiracies, foreign or domestic. We must not forget Abraham Lincoln’s words to Congress about our union or disillusionment, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
