The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of us snowflakes out here in the New Wilderness keep asking ourselves how a guy like Trump ever got to be president. We just find it hard to believe that fellow Americans could vote for a guy who acts more like a third world dictator than a spokesman for the Land of the Free. So we figure they must be stupid. Or deplorable. I admit, I think that way most days.

But the truth is more prosaic than profound. Donald Trump is a rich guy. He thinks in terms of money. It’s the only coin of the realm, the one thing that matters, the driving force behind everything else. Money is power, not vice versa. He can no more understand some schmuck who would willingly work for a capped salary in, say, government than he could imagine squirrels building skyscrapers. Public service is not only alien to the man, it’s idiocy. Who the hell would give their lives to some agency in a vast bureaucracy where the most they could possibly make for salary is chump change in Trumpocracy? Bright people should be making millions, if not billions. Salaries are for Losers!

Trump is John Galt. He himself may never have read Atlas Shrugged, but he thinks he’s one of those self-made men, a Captain of Industry (or at least real estate) who drive the economic engines that make life at least tolerable for the Little People and make the country great. Again, if necessary. Morals, virtue, decency, forgettaboutit, a Real Player works the system to bend it to his will. Call it arrogance if you’re a wage earner or a salary man, but this is how big league capitalism works.

The folks who vote for this Atlas, well, I’m not psychologist enough to really understand. It would be easy to say they want money too, even the crumbs, and they hope those great coal mining jobs are coming back, or the textile mills will start up again, or at the very least he’ll keep immigrants from stealing all those high paying jobs. He’ll crank up the economy, he’ll keep the women in their place, he’ll cut off welfare to the cheats and the lazy, he’ll turn back the clock to Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller’s time.

Money talks and some folks listen. Maybe they think they’ll win the Lottery. They did, after all, buy the Powerball ticket.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2018 at 2:38 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.