Donald J Trump - A Whole New Ball Game Now

I don't typically do sequels, but today I must. What happened at the Capitol building somehow says everything and nothing at the same time. Everything, because it is the culmination of 4 years of lies, hysteria, and delusion. Nothing, because the runes have been suggesting this endgame for a while. You all know that Trump disgusts me, but what are my views on his supporters? My feelings are mixed, to be honest. For his enablers, those with whom he shares power or seek to use him to pursue their own vain ambition I have contempt. They are terrible, dark, insidious people. But what of rank and file Trump supporters? To them I feel a certain sympathy mixed with an everpresent frustration. You see, back when I was losing my evangelical faith in 2006 I came to value evidence and reason and the need to go to multiple sources for my information. It showed me that Christianity was a charade and easily dismantled. It taught me that you have to seek out the truth and never be wholly dependent on other's to provide it. This, I suspect is why so many Christian's have climbed aboard the Trump train. They here the siren song of a man who, whilst an imbecile, does have the ability to con the credulous and the charisma to pull it off. The average Christian is a trusting soul. Kind and generous, wanting to give a person the benefit of the doubt. Under normal circumstances this would be a fine quality, but when it encounters a creature such as Trump, who is good at making the right sounds and whispering the right platitudes, it does render them vulnerable. My understanding is that 82% of evangelicals carried Trump in 2016, and many remained for the 2020 vintage. They are his base, and it was those he sent in the direction of the Capitol building. Imagine having a hoarde of easily disposable followers that hang on your every word. An army of the credulous, a phalanx of well meaning fools. You may have heard the term "Useful Idiot" before? It refers to a person who tends to be in lower ranges intellectually, but sufficiently well placed to serve a purpose for those with malicious intent. Well what you saw yesterday was a hoarde of useful idiots, all fired up on the rhetoric of a chronically obese orange pied piper who had been playing them a tune that was irrisistable. He used them. They are pawns. I can find little by way of malice for them. Malice should be reserved for Trump himself. In error I once thought of him as merely a fool. Now I am quite sure he is a monster. He is a giant inverse bat signal, shinning high into the Gotham night. A warning of what happens when the unthinkable meets the succeptible. All that said, it does appear that many of his enablers have jumped ship overnight. The majority of them, in fact. Leaping from the flaming prow of the good ship "Imbecile", seeking refuge in the freezing cold waters of conventional wisdom. We should not give these individuals a free pass. We should remember that they were complicit in history. I for one am entirely fed up with the sheer amount of history we are living through right now. Covid-19 still rampant, our nation adrift from Europe. And Trump, King of the fools, finally self destructing like a firework on New Years Eve. So what do we learn from this? For me, we challenge evil, we stand against it, we never let it get comfortable. It will make a home in us if we let it and we often will not realise until the damage is done. I take some comfort from the fact that there is enough kindness and decency in the world to see us through these darkest of times. We will rise. We'll drag each other up by the bootstraps. We all share a common humanity. We need to encourage one another to be the best versions of ourselves. And as for the 45th President of the United States? He has become a footnote. Our descendents will look back in astonishment and horror at what almost happened. It was a terrible day. Tomorrow will be a better one if we can just find the courage to make it so.