Life in the Trumpocracy

Life in the Trumpocracy
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Here is this guy who berates people like Megyn Kelly (although there have been rumors of a rapprochement, "Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly met at Trump Tower to 'clear the air,'" CNN, 4/13/16)) and says all this shit, but how does he behave when when he comes home from work? Last Tuesday night CNN's Anderson Cooper attempted to find out what Trump was like at home and the picture painted by his two sons Donald Jr., Eric, his daughters Tiffany and Ivanka and his five language speaking wife Melania was that of a teddy bear ("Donald Trump: 'rules stacked against me,'" CNNPolitics.com, 4/13/16). If nothing else Trump's children take the award for self-possession and articulateness outpointing Chelsea Clinton, any of the Kennedys, Eisenhower, Nixon or Reagan offspring. And even as they talked and Trump looked on beatifically, apparently tamed by this new trump card, you couldn't help eating it up. Here is what DT wrought...this is the real Trump...he will make America great like his family...everyone will be good-looking educated and well-spoken. If you are "good," he will even adopt you and take you under his big wing. One blot on the seemingly idyllic portrait of the Trump family (Trump's sister Maryanne Trump Barry is Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) was the death from alcoholism of his older brother Freddy ("Donald Trump Opens Up About His Brother's Death From Alcoholism: It had a 'Profound Impact on My Life,'" People 10/8/15) Freddy was 42 when he died in l981 and Trump said he never took a drink ("I've never had a glass of alcohol and yet I own the largest winery in the East Coast, it's a crazy thing, but that's okay," Trump said during the CNN get together with his family) and apparently impressed the dangers of drinking and drugs on his children as they grew up. It's hard to figure out what to say. Not only is the family totally delightful, charming and candid, but they listen to dad when it comes to alcohol and drugs. How is one to process the picture painted on CNN? Will we all have inadvertently landed in Utopia, bypassing Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state, if and when The Donald becomes president? Will there be places for everyone in all of his families and companies and happy solutions to all our problems as long as we work hard, don't take "no" for an answer and say "no" to alcohol and drugs? "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," Dr. Pangloss says in Candide. Voltaire was parodying Leibniz, but the satire could easily be applied to the all encompassing vision of a Trumpocracy

{This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture}

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