Phillip Frazer
In 2016 Hillary Clinton described Trump’s rougher followers as ‘deplorables’ – the ones who were openly racist, misogynist, and hostile towards new social/cultural trends, like uppity women, or foreigners.
Now, four years down the track, millions of Trump fans are thrilled to let their prejudices rip and shout factoids to justify them.
Last week, the day after Trump’s shock troops invaded the Capitol building, Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel gathered top-level officials to discuss the Party’s future.
The retreat, as it was aptly called, refused to acknowledge that their President Trump was inciting, and promising to join in, a violent takeover of the entire Congress building. He welched on joining the invasion but went on tele to say, hours into the mayhem, that the invaders were ‘special people’ and told them ‘we love you’.
What riled the Republican meeting?
Instead, what riled the Republican meeting was that the dastardly Democrats have deemed all Congress’s rules must be ungendered and non-binary; that means fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and in-laws are now ‘parent, child, sibling, spouse, or parent-in-law.’
Apart from the vast wealth divide, this is what divides America today.
Trump’s SP #3 with his hands in pockets T-shirt says 6MWE, short for ‘6 million wasn’t enough’, referring to Jews and others targeted and killed by the Nazis. Photos Twitter
Younger city-dwellers want words, flags, statues, rules, regulations, and school curricula to be cleansed of language and culture put in place by ancestors of the older more privileged and more rural folks.
The people who stormed the Capitol (mostly white males) are on that side, believing they deserve to keep hold of some privileges, like the privilege to chase after members of Congress to kidnap them or, in Vice President Pence’s case, to threaten to lynch him, kill a cop, smash windows, and trash offices and television crews’ equipment.
Many are ex-military, some were in costumes, and some had t-shirts that said Six Million Was’t Enough, referring to Jews murdered by Nazis. They smeared their own shit on walls and floors.
Congress has never been so breached
The halls of Congress have never been so breached, yet the instigator of it all, Trump, hasn’t been charged with anything. If they’d been black and brown people, led by former President Obama, they’d all be dead.
Trumpsters still don’t get that it’s only about him.
Aggrieved and angry Trump followers assume that his anger, about feminism or black pride or polygenderism or concern for immigrants, means that he also shares their belief that America’s wealth has also been unjustly taken away from them and given to all those people who want a new privilege allocation.
The tragedy is that they are wrong about that last part of the deal, the Trump deal. Donald Trump not only does not give a fuck about them, he hates spending his money via the tax system, if he ever paid taxes that is, on anything that benefits anyone but him and his family.
I said early in the Trump saga that a hundred million Americans share his wish to drain the swamp of Washington, but they were wrong to hire the orange monster from the bottom of the swamp to do that job.
They were right that their system of representative government has degenerated into one in which the representatives represent corporations and billionaires, not the people, but Trump represents no one but Trump.
So, can Biden and Harris and their Democratic administration – which should be in charge for the next four years at least – do anything real about improving the standard of living that the majority of Americans are stuck with?
Most Americans don’t have enough cash to pay a sudden bill for $1,000 for, say, getting treated for foolishly drinking bleach. Actually, Biden & Co’s first task is to control the COVID-19 epidemic which is affecting every single one of the 330 million Americans, physically and emotionally.
One more Trump warning
Meanwhile, Trump has one last week in the White House, with the nuclear missile launching iPad on his desk; which is why Democrats, a growing number of Republicans, most of the pre-Trump military bosses, many corporate honchos, and billions of people worldwide would like to lock him up, now.
Of the several thousand Trump followers who trashed America’s parliament, about 100 have been arrested, on charges like destruction of Nancy Pelosi’s nameplate – not cop murder, or sedition. And millions are still as mad as hell, some of them even more so since their bloated Saviour has gotten so scared of being impeached he went on television to announce that even though he loved them, they are guilty of breaking in, breaking things, and breaking the law – and they should be dealt with to the utmost.
He betrays everyone.
Of course he has since Parlered (that’s his new Twitter thing) that ‘we all’ must get out and do whatever it takes to stop them stealing the election he lost. And his hardcore battlefront brigade are openly calling for another day of ‘wild’ – meaning violent and armed – confrontation; in the centre of Washington and in the capitol buildings of every one of the 50 states, three days before the inauguration. That’s this Sunday, 17 January.
Will all those governments in America be any more able to prevent carnage than they were last week?
Whatever happens this weekend, and whether the inauguration takes place without violence on 20 January, whether or not Biden and Harris make it into the White House, the fact remains that America’s economic deprivations are unlikely to be fixed quickly enough to stop this second Civil War from… going viral.
And all the while the global eco-catastrophe comes at us like cosmic karma at warp speed.
Just saying.
Phillip Frazer writes at www.coorabellridge.com.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
