Trumpism Is A Cult, Not A Political Movement

There's far too many lies spewing out of the Trump administration for a single part-time blogger to keep up with them all, but one particularly facepalm-worthy event from yesterday is when Sean Spicer made repeated references to non-existent “Islamic terrorism” here in my new hometown of Atlanta. (Fact check: Atlanta did suffer from terrorist attacks in the 1990s, most infamously the 1996 Olympic bombing – but the terrorist in question was no Islamic import but Eric Rudolph, a home-grown right-wing American Christian white guy.)

How many Trump fans called Spicer out on this? Not a single damned one that I saw. Of course, they were eager to commend Spicer for his honesty the next day, when he stated that he merely “misspoke” (he'd meant to say “Orlando,” not “Atlanta”),  yet they even managed to give that a dishonestly partisan spin – the people who readily forgave Spicer's multiple Atlanta-related slips of the tongue and Kellyanne Conway's “accidental” repeated mentions of the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre were the same ones who, back in the day, insisted that Barack Obama was a clueless stupidhead who genuinely believed there are 57 states in the U.S. Thus, Obama's one-time slip of the tongue becomes a deliberate lie (or admission of ignorance), whereas the oft-repeated lies of the Trumpsters were all mere slips of the tongue.

Trump supporters act more like a cult than members of a political party. Of course American politics has always had its share of unprincipled hyper-partisan hacks – we've all known our share of Democrats who outright refused to see or admit to any flaws in Obama or Clinton, and Republicans who took the same view toward Romney or Bush (I remember one man back in the day, swear to Zod, who insisted that only a hardcore Democratic shill could possibly doubt the intelligence and qualifications of then-vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin) – but the majority of people on both sides of the political aisle took a more moderate approach: “I voted for [Obama or Bush] because I thought he was better than his opponent, but I still don't like the time he said this, his policy in support of that, or his appointment of what's-his-face to whatever cabinet position.”

But I have yet to meet a single Trumpster who has admitted to any flaws in the man or his mouthpieces. At this point, you'd have better luck trying to find a Sea Org Scientologist who's willing to admit that L. Ron Hubbard had some kooky ideas about human psychology.