Trump: The Horrific Threat That Keeps Getting Worse
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.
Two articles in The Week and an Op-Ed in The New York Times document the Serious On-Going Horrific Threat that Trump represents[i]. Indeed, it gets worse by the day.
The article by David French in The Week is a synopsis of a previously published Op-Ed in The New York Times. What French dreads the most is how Trump’s re-election “would accelerate ‘the ongoing cultural transformation of red America”. In towns like French’s in Tennessee, Trump is more revered than any Pastor, Politician, Coach, or Celebrity. Thus, his fellow Christian Evangelicals treat Trump as a Prophet and thereby overly mimic and exaggerate his “grievance-filled extremism and boorish behavior”. In doing so, they’re deliberately “rude” thereby showing “how little they care about conventional norms”. Consequently, they more than justify violence against Trump’s opponents.
For another, in 2020 at the World Economic Forum, Trump said that “If Europe is under attack, we (the U.S.) will never come to help you and to support you…NATO is dead”. No wonder why European figures feel that if Trump is re-elected, they are completely on their own.
Finally, writing in The New York Times, David Kemp rightly notes that in “normal times” humor and satire “get us through our darkest hours”. Thus, citing the differences between the times when Charlie Chaplin lived and ours, he writes:
“The difference is that Chaplin, an Englishman who made his name in America, was operating from a position of moral strength. His adopted homeland was the world’s beacon of democracy, while the guy (Hitler) he was sending up ran a country (Germany) that had gone terribly wrong. This time, we, the United States are the country the risk of going terribly wrong… So let’s treat the situation as seriously as it warrants.”
Thus, even though he’s utterly ridiculous much, if not all of the time, the Threat he poses is far from funny. The idea that we could survive another Trump term is not only a delusion of the worst kind, but is itself a huge part of the Threat.
[i] David French, “How Trump transformed red America,” The Week, January 26, 2024, P 12; “How they see us: If Trump wins, Europe’s on its own,” The Week, January 26, 2024, P 14; David Kemp, “I’ve Told My Last Trump Joke,” The New York Times, Wednesday, January 24, 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 latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.
