Let’s play a holiday game: I’ll describe someone we all know without using their name, and you see if you can guess who I’m talking about.
Crybaby. Coward. Liar. Loser. Cheater.
YES! You got it…who else do we all know who can be recognized by all of those descriptive nouns? I found a fun story about the first of them in today’s Chicago Sun-Times where columnist Gene Lyons cites the former guy’s “holiday message,” hoping that several adversaries would “rot in hell,” as another indication that he is “the world’s biggest crybaby.”
Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core — with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept.
Pretty much every large-scale public movement, secular or sacred, has its share of extremists, and as the religious columnist Paul Prather has argued: “Remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.”
It’s another word for fanatic.
Most Trumpists call themselves “conservative,” which used to signify a belief in limited government, low taxes, free trade and freedom of conscience but which under Trump signals tribal loyalty and revenge.
This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement: that a congenital braggart who embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the seven deadly sins — greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath — has come to seem the totem of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals.
(snip)
Prather credits David French with defining fundamentalism’s essential nature. French argues that whether religious or political, all fundamentalist cultures exhibit “three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.” He says certainty is the key to the other two traits.
“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt,” French has written. “In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”
To add to the many examples (very many) of the former guy’s cowardice, add this one: the recent cancellation of his planned campaign appearance by an Iowa college – an Iowa Christian college, mind you – was because he refused to take questions directly from the students:
[Dordt University] opted to cancel the event after the Trump campaign disagreed about what the format for the event should be, according to a statement released Thursday.
The university opens events up to all presidential candidates, regardless of their political affiliation, to allow students to engage in a questions-and-answer style forum with candidates during the primaries. However, the Trump campaign desired a format similar to a traditional presidential rally, according to the statement released by the university.
“These events are intended to be educational in nature, including questions directly from Dordt students to the candidates. The Trump campaign started the process of lining up a campaign stop but desired a rally format,” the statement reads.
It’s not hard to find long lists of words used to describe you-know-who, but I was happily surprised to discover this list from Rupert Taylor on Soapboxie in which he reminds us of that famous, insightful visionary presidential musing: “I know words. I have the best words.”
As a professional writer for more than 50 years, I also know words and have written several articles here about words for each letter of the alphabet. Those previous offerings have featured random words; this time out they are themed around TFP and they are not intended to praise him.
A is for … agnotology. TFP would frequently refer to everybody not him as that body part hidden between the butt cheeks, but we can do better than that. Abrasive, absurd, and abysmal come to mind. But here comes “agnotology,” for which TFP would be a prime exhibit under the microscope. Agnotology is the study of ignorance about provable things for which doubt has been spread by misinformation.
B is for … bankruptcy. Our subject has developed an extraordinary skill at taking $413 million from his father, according to the New York Times, and turning it into six bankruptcies.
(snip)
D is for … dog-whistle politics. TFP is skilled at sending disguised messages to white supremacists that he is on their side.
E is for … epizeuxis. The forceful repetition of a word or phrase is a favourite of TFP’s rally pronouncements. “The election was stolen.” No it wasn’t.
F is for … falsiloquence. We will set aside TFP’s favourite off-camera F-word when dealing with his staff and go for something more eloquent. Falsiloquence is the use of deceitful and lying speech. “I won the 2020 election in a landslide.” “We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.” “I am a very stable genius.” Plus 30,570 other falsehoods during a four-year presidency.
The list goes on; do yourself a solid and have a look. And in the meantime, here are a few nuggets I’d like to share. Happy holidays!
https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1740370002094821884
https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1732868491504734318
https://twitter.com/jilevin/status/1732476044643364910
https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1732403223519260843
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