Corrupts absolutely.

All the head scratching over why Republicans are blindly in lock step with Trump seems easily identifiable. They are drunk with power and blindly devoted to the dear leader because he promises the other side of the mountain.

Trump is a master manipulator. As loathe as it is to give him any credit for cognitive forethought, he is hard wired to recognize and then exploit those inferior humans in his orbit vulnerable to his form of fawning.

Think of him as a pimp. This is a stretch only because most of us have no experience with the “second oldest profession,”but Trump does fit the profile. As it turns out, trolling for vulnerability is not requiring of high intellect, but instead boils down to basic instinct. And once bitten, the intended targets surrender themselves completely. The relationship works until the hapless victim realizes the error and attempts extrication. Like the trophies of serial killers, he keeps them all close and full of never ending grooming, lovingly nurturing the shell that remains. He never willingly lets go but once he feels betrayed there is no depth to the depravity of his rage.

That is the cultivation of the base.

There are those around him who think they are in on the joke, who acquiesce to his cruelty thinking there is a pay off at the end of the rainbow. That’s the problem with being a sycophant…so busy sucking you can’t hear the voice in your head saying “Run!” Michael Cohen, famously known for being consigliere to the Trump “family”, learned, albeit a bit late, how incredibly incapable of human connection Trump is. And when Cohen made the split, the public retaliation was relentless. It’s tough to admit, both to yourself and publicly, that you’ve been had. Absolute power.

Denial is not a river in Egypt. To anyone who has ever been in a 12 step drug/alcohol rehab program, that sounds familiar. The first step on a road to recovery is admitting to having a problem and accepting help. The minions cannot admit to a problem because the problem will not stop grooming them. Opioid addicts get vindication and absolution because they receive the drugs legally from their physicians. What could be wrong with that. And Trump like the consummate drug dealer feeds into the addiction by constantly offering product. He will never stop feeding the frenzy because not only does he enjoy it but it also makes money.

These are desperate times. So much hate, anger and self righteous indignation that drives us further apart. Something that brings us together? A Vegas vacation.

Ponder for a moment Trump’s proclivity for saying the bad parts out loud. ‘ There’s no way we don’t win unless the election is rigged”. This set in motion legal avenues which found unequivocally that the election was not fraudulent, not rigged, and not stolen. If we can get past his obvious self contempt and inability to accept being a loser and look at it in a different way, we may gain some insight. When he defeated Hillary Clinton he had made the same accusation of voter fraud and voter machine tampering all of which disappeared after he was declared the winner. Perhaps there was some tampering with the voting machines. We can see how this group of grifters have learned many lessons from the Nixon presidency and have in some ways perfected the art of undermining democracy.

We can even make the case that Trump lost to Biden, not because Biden won the popular vote, but because the art of tampering with the machines was thwarted by an unexpected disaster…COVID. Many voters, perhaps many Democrat voters , were dissuaded from going to polling places and instead mailed in their ballots. Recall if you will how Trump railed against these ballots and tried many tricks to try and have them thrown out. I suggest that the steal via voting machines was in place and that he would have won except for the hefty mail in vote. I don’t know it for a fact, I just think it’s true. The louder the squeal, the bigger the steal.

The Oath Keepers, regardless of their delusions of insurgent righteousness, have put themselves in a very precarious position. They cannot be legitimately declared a legal militia unless Trump is placed back in power. And since we know Trump has no loyalty except to his own personal gain, he could easily determine that these “patriots” are just a bit too unpredictable and out of control. You know, like him. And he will not abide that uncertainty.

Finally, we had feared that Trump would gin up a military conflict as another means of remaining in power. He didn’t, possibly because he is a coward and probably because he thought all the bases were covered. When he didn’t win, he started his new campaign. While a civil war may be attractive to him in a purely selfish way, a world war gets him where he wants to be especially if he can convince the populace that only he can deal with Putin and end the war in Ukraine and further reign in Putin’s desire for unlimited power. We do not know if Trump is in communication with Putin, but it seems plausible especially since Trump has remained eerily silent regarding Putin’s actions.

So many unholy alliances have been put in place, that even without Trump, the GOP could conceivably maintain their grip on power for a very long time. And ladies, the trampling of our abortion rights will become the very least of our problems.