Human cancer is a little like Voldemort, the Dark Lord and Über Villain in the Harry Potter saga. Like Voldemort, Cancer is “he who shall not be named.” Very often, people don’t want to talk about cancer, when someone has it, when someone else has it, when one of us has it. I can’t see it, I can’t feel it, if I ignore it maybe it will go away.
Of course, one of the problems with not speaking the name of Voldemort out loud is that the evil he propagates grows best, like cancer, in the dark. And while it’s growing it’s spreading, metastasizing, poisoning the host body, which eventually becomes too weak to defend itself from the disease. Perhaps, given the events of the last few days, you can guess where this is going.
Don’t worry, we’ll get there, but first a few essential whereases:
Whereas the 2024 presidential election was one of the closest in recent history, with Donald Trump winning 49.9 percent of the popular vote, and with a winning margin over Kamala Harris of about 1.7 percent; and whereas that winning margin was the smallest since Richard Nixon won the 1968 election, therefore it is not only inaccurate when President Trump declared at Capital One Arena, “We achieved the most epic political victory our country has ever seen,” it was a blatant lie.
And whereas Trump told the nation during his dystopian inaugural address, “Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by … Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago, without even a token of defense,” that, as all Californians know, is a lie and a profound insult to the thousands of heroic firefighters and other first responders who have worked around the clock for weeks to stop the fires, rescue the victims and protect what’s left of people’s lives.
During his remarks to supporters Sunday at Capital One Arena, Trump lamented that the 2020 election was stolen. “They rigged the election,” he repeated, his favorite and most dangerous lie. And that lie leads us to the heart of this commentary.
Trump’s vote total in 2024 was 77.3 million (Kamala Harris got 75 million and, in 2020, Joe Biden got 81.2 million). So about half of the American electorate voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and that is a sobering reality, one that academics, pundits and pollsters will gnaw on for years to come. Clearly, some of Trump’s appeal is traditional GOP, betting on the market and the opportunity to grow wealth. Part of it also was a weird messianic/evangelical belief that God has chosen Trump to usher in Armageddon, the Second Coming and the Rapture.
And then there was his clearly white supremacist, Christian Nationalist, “smoke-the-woke” following, with vestiges of facism and smash-the-state political and cultural nihilism.
Trump has cynically and successfully insinuated himself into all these constituencies, and the ear-piercing assassination attempt merely confirmed the evangelicals’ belief that he is the chosen one. After all, before Saul became Paul and was zapped on the road to Damascus, Christ’s most zealous advocate was not a nice man.
But being not nice, and being compulsively, routinely and unapologetically dishonest, is a very long bridge too far. Donald Trump has destroyed the importance and the value of truth in the American body politic. It no longer counts, it no longer matters. And the fault is not Donald Trump’s.
Following Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, and his inexcusable failure to send the Capitol Hill rioters home in 2020, he could have slithered off into a corner of Mar-a-Lago, wrapped himself in a blanket of stolen state secrets and called it a political career. And he might have, if the callow soon-to-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had not gone begging to Mar-a-Lago seeking Trump’s blessing, and had not other Republican leaders, like Mitch McConnell, not swallowed their pride, their integrity, their very testicles and reversed course on Trump, Trump would not be president today.
Sorry if this offends you, but Donald Trump is a cancer in the body politic of America, a cancer in the country’s soul. That cancer has nothing to do with Trump’s often outlandish, ill-conceived, uninformed and ignorant policies and beliefs. It has everything to do with his dishonesty, which has now completely infected the Republican Party. If honesty no longer counts in this country, as it cannot count in the GOP, then what claim do we have for leadership, credibility and greatness in the world?
Donald Trump is married to, congenitally conjoined with, the lie that he won the 2020 election. It is a lie. Every state and federal judge who passed judgment on claims the election was stolen said it was not. Sixty times! But everyone in his administrative and political life must now either accept that lie, or repudiate Trump. And they don’t have the courage to call the lie a lie.
And so the cancer spreads. And spreads. And spreads.
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