The Perpetual Grievance Candidate
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I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. You can “follow” me to never miss an article.
In his latest Op-Ed, Charles M. Blow captures perfectly the essence of Trump’s appeal to his die-hard followers[i]. I quote: “Trump allows his supporters to feel and experience their full range of emotions: He entertains them; he channels their rage; he reflects their repressive urges; he’s an oracle of their self-perceived victimhood and their model of a warrior against a government and culture that they feel is turning against them.”
For another, a big part of Trump’s appeal and that of the other Republican candidates is their promotion of the lie that America is not steeped in Systemic Racism. In short, not only does it not exist, but it never did.
The rewards of Trump’s winning again are huge. He would be able to blunt the Federal and State investigations against him. In short, he has no qualms about “breaking the country to save himself, that patriotism is a distant second to self-preservation”.
Summing up, Blow notes with more than just a touch of bitterness that if we thought that the last two elections were ugly, the upcoming one will be even worse.
[i] Charles M. Blow, “A Flood of Unprepared Presidential Hopefuls,” The New York Times, Thursday, May 25, 2023, P A23.
Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His most recent are: Techlash: The Future of the Socially Responsible Tech Organization, Springer, New York, 2020. The Psychodynamics of Enlightened Leadership; Coping with Chaos, Co-authored with Ralph H. Kilmann, Springer, New York, 2021. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid 19, Springer, New York, 2022.
