Trump, in a nutshell

Cruelty is intoxicating. Cruelty is contagious. Cruelty is empowering. This is the algebra of our politics now.

Donald Trump is the font of it all. A broken man, one of the strangest men in history. That fraying helmet of hair perched atop a fat, crinkled face that glows with peachy phosphorescence. A hulking bloat, draped in oversize suits or stuffed in tits-high pants and sagging acres of polo shirt. A man insanely insecure, so desperately in need of affirmation that everything he says contains, explicitly or implicitly, a wild boast and a relentless demand that he be praised to the skies by everyone around him at that moment. Anyone else, anyone normal, would be embarrassed to be Donald Trump.

But Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He is, literally, shameless. So he can parade his vivid inadequacies—his ignorance, his vanity, his physical grossness, his overall gaucheness—before the world, shielded by this power of shamelessness. But there are times he needs more, and so he protects himself from the mortal threat that someone might stand up to him and compel him to recognize his own absurdity with an armor of cruelty. He is cruel. He must be cruel, must lash out, must smash, must humiliate and dominate any person who dares to notice how ridiculous he is, how wrong, how unlawful, how ignorant. That has probably happened a lot in Donald Trump’s life, and it has made him a master of cruelty.

  Terry Moran

And there are too many minions who are drunk on cruelty.

America was ripe for a populist revolt, as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders showed. But Sanders is an eminently decent man. He lacked the elixir of hatreds, the cup of cruelty that Trump offers to all who follow him. This is the key to Trump’s demagoguery: He gives people permission to be the worst version of themselves.

[...]

The culture of cruelty is now the center of power in our country. The ideal of American solidarity, that way of life that recognizes we are all bound together in this nation, all brothers and sisters living in one shared national community, working out our differences under law through democratic debates—that’s a joke in Trump’s America. MAGA doesn’t even pay lip service to it. [...] The only community that truly matters is MAGA. MAGA is America and America is MAGA. You’re in or you’re out. And once you are in, you are complicit, because MAGA is built and bound together by the endorsement of, and the participation in, this culture of cruelty. There can be no dissent. Dissent of any kind is dangerous, because it exposes the truth: That the ecstasy of being cruel is a sickness, not a triumph.

Cruelty and fear.  America is failing.   

The first duty we have to our beloved country in this moment is to refuse fear, refuse their lies, and live in truth.

 

Brave and commendable.  Of course, she's now on their list and will be harrassed and targeted.  I hope she has a clean police record and her taxes are all paid up.