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“even a camel will drink poisoned water if it thinks it is dying of thirst”
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“This is what I want to make clear today. A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military. He says he wants to make America great again, but, more and more, it seems his real message is Make America Hate Again.”
Hilary Clinton
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One of the things I have been most consistently amazed by with regard to Trump is how often he suggests America is a shithole country. In fact. His whole premise for being a president is grounded on convincing everyone the country is in a shithole and he is the only one able to ‘un-shithole’ the country. The deeper the shithole you are convinced we are in, the deeper you will go on your solution. As someone brilliant once said, “extreme conditions demand extreme responses.” A shithole is an extreme condition. Trump is an extreme response. If you live in the fantasyland universe of America is in a shithole,” you will be a Trump supporter. But his whole schtick is to suck everyone into the shithole belief system, using a stream of lies and half-truths. Trump’s message, dumbed down for America, is simple: Make America great again and, uhm, this only works if enough people believe America is in enough of a shithole that it isn’t great now. I shared his image in 2015 to show he is a master at creating shithole perceptions:
These perceptions have some psychological roots. You look around at the relative carnage of the day seeing your plans in disarray and hopes & dreams nowhere in close proximity to your current reality and you think to yourself “how the hell did we get into this shithole.” That is where conviction comes into play. You, or we, are not really in a shithole, you just have had what you thought would happen or should be happening, well, not happen. And you have some threads of belief that exactly the same thing will happen again tomorrow AND is happening to everyone. Your conviction of ‘something better beyond the horizon’ is a little blurrier than it was the day before. Now. To be clear. Decades ago globalization, tied to multinational companies and institutions seeking to make larger profits through lowering costs, hollowed out a shitload of manufacturing jobs and businesses. That is a reality which has certainly created a halo of attitudes, perceptions, and some individual realities. Let me add small groups of people are desperately in worse shape, some people are in good shape, but have not improved, most people are doing fine, but hearing all the talk about the top 1% and feel entitled to some of what they got. That is reality. We have a higher standard of living than any country of any size in world. Our inflation is lower and our economy better, low unemployment, low overall violence <with isolated pockets which people distort to a larger view>. We have an incredible history of assimilating immigrants and, uhm, if immigration was truly an existential threat to “a great America” one would think that we would have done something about it sometimes in the past 20-ish years that the Right has been highlighting ‘invasions’ (usually every 2 years during an election cycle). To be clear. The US immigration system needs both structural and policy improvements, but immigration is not an existential issue.
Regardless. America is not a shithole country, and generally speaking we are in an economic boom (of which a significant swath of people are benefiting from) and we are actually investing in a better economic infrastructure now (which ensures not actually becoming a shithole country).
This may be the greatest example of the gap between perception and reality I have seen in my lifetime.
We ‘see’ something and then extrapolate it out in our minds to being a larger systemic issue. And maybe that is Trump’s most egregious asshole superpower. He distorts “the one” into “the many.” He implies an isolated situation is indicative of the greater whole. And he does it with such hyperbole <and lies> even if most people do not believe it, it elevates whatever perception you may already have a little higher <therefore, he drags more people closer to believing we are in a shithole, i.e., not great>. I imagine the fear Trump should have is that if he drives his dystopian view of who and what America is so far down into some wretched dark hole that people will only see darkness and enough people will sit up, look around or out the window and say “shit, it isn’t that bad or dark.” Oops. Not a shithole.
- ** “The America I live in is imperfect, but compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.” Colin Cowherd
Which leads me to how Trump, and inevitably MAGA, perverts the idea of progress.
Trump looks at progress in terms of individuals seeking individual satisfaction in combination with an encouraging an attitude of individual escape from individually suffered discomfort. That thought is a derivative of something that Zygmunt Bauman suggested “progress no longer refers to forward drive and that society, rather than chase after a target spinning along ahead of us, instead seeks to make progress under the guise of ‘a lucky escape imperative’.” In other words it inspires the urge to run away from something, a crisis or a shithole disaster, that someone is suggesting is breathing down our necks. Let me be clear. Progress is not running away from something, but rather it is running towards something. That toward something should be a desired dream of a distant goal – one which progress should, could, and would eventually bring those of us seeking it, a better world not only for us, but one that serves all human needs. It should be the pursuit of shared improvement rather than just individual survival. And maybe that is where I will end because that is where the Trump vision begins. It doesn’t begin with any shared improvement, but rather individual fears. The Trump vision is grounded on the thought nations have lost influence on the course of not only its own affairs, but the affairs of all people which means that it has lost influence on guiding the world toward a ‘better destination’ and has lost the ability to mount a defense 
against all varieties of fear. The Trump vision encourages us all to believe this, therefore, it encourages us to dwell on your individual fear that you live in a shithole. It suggests your worry is not only an immediate worry, but a long-term worry, i.e., even if in your own life it doesn’t feel like a shithole, the shithole seems imminent. From there they offer no real solutions for progress and prosperity, just dubious tactics to salve your individual worry. Trump a black hole of no solutions. Shit. Trump IS a shithole asking people to live in his shithole view. But those who do see themselves in the shithole worldview, well, they are camels. And even a camel will drink poisoned water if it thinks it is dying of thirst. Ponder.
The truth is in today’s world we seem to get caught up in the everyday grind of the story of the day. And, yes, most stories don’t reflect the best version of people or the positive side of emergent issues. What this means is that it can get fairly easy to step on to the slippery slope leading down to a belief we are in some shithole with no leader or steps to get out of it. And what THAT means <at least to me> is that far too many people are abandoning hope and we desperately need some people to offer us some good ole pragmatic hope.