Subject: Re: Is This Fascism or Tyranny?
I don't think they're portraying him as "hypercompetent".

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Correct. Competency is associated with getting complex, difficult, VALUABLE things accomplished amid dozens of constraints, not the least of which are legality and morality.

No one would ever equate competency with any act performed by Trump.

Trump is effective at making events happen, but that is only because

a) he is incapable of considering negative consequences for anyone on the planet except himself

b) his warped childhood and corrupted adulthood have convinced him he can escape legal consequences for his actions

c) via his warped childhood, he has been instinctually trained to exploit those with a combination of ignorance, jealousy and fear into doing his bidding (***) and keeping him away from "the wet work"

d) we have educated at least two generations of citizens who are completely ignorant of the concept of the separation of powers between the branches of government and the checks and balances between those branches defined in our Constitution

Let's look at what Trump was "effective" at in Term #1:

* building a wall - yea, but only about 10 miles of it and in a way that was easily scaled or toppled
* illegally separating undocumented children from parents to "send a message" to potential migrants
* extorting an ally by witholding military aid approved by Congress in an attempt to get dirt on Biden
* telegraphing to Putin that US support for Ukraine might be iffy
* by getting impeached a second time, convincing Putin he could swallow up Ukraine while the US was distracted with a second impeachment trial
* he seeded enough cash to pharma firms to convice them to ramp up production of COVID vaccines -- admittedly, a great outcome but how was that threading a poliical or economic needle? It was the smartest approach for accelerating delivery and wasn't controversial in ANY quarter... Until Trump subsequently fed fears of vaccine objectors.

As has been discussed in prior threads, item (d) above is perhaps THE force that makes a danger like Trump real. When people don't understand the balance of powers built into the Constitution and do not understand how those levers interact over time, voters ignorant of those balancing forces who give up on the process in frustration because the system is not presenting them a direct choice for GreatThingX that is PRECISELY what they want or it's presented but loses are surrendering their future to those willing to deceive in the short term and play a long-term game over multiple election cycles -- even decades.


WTH


*** Way back in the 1960s, there was a famous book in the realm of pop psychology called Games People Play that catalogued a huge variety of psychological games people play on others and themselves. One of the chapters in the book was called "Let's You and Him Fight" that originally described a romantic triangle where (stereotypically) a woman tricks two men into fighting each other with her as the prize while in fact she's already wanting to move on to someone else.
More generally, it seems to describe a dynamic psychopaths use to distract others from what the psychopath is doing while at the same time, by being around actual physical violence, appearing to be the tough guy when they do no fighting at all.
In many cases, even the morons goaded into doing the fighting fail to realize they've been manipulated.