We all know that Grand Nagus Drumpf didn’t hold his knowledge of how contagious and deadly the COVID-19 virus is close to his ill-fitting vest because he didn’t want to create “a panic” among the general population. Maybe he didn’t want to create “a panic” on Wall Street, but anyone who has heard the Nagus speak for more than a minute or watched any part of the Republican National Convention knows that Republican politics is — and has, for a very long time, been — all about creating panic.
Indeed, as I wrote two years ago, eight years of relentless, non-stop fostering and encouragement of abject, blinding, unwarranted panic among Republican voters and fans anesthetized them — and thus, the country — to the genuine outrage and truly panic-worthy events that have followed:
[Republican politicians, conservative pundits, opinion-makers and opinion-havers] spent eight years characterizing absolutely everything the President did, said, or had going on around him, no matter how benign or routine, from policy “czars” to executive orders to coffee salutes to tan suits, as an outrageous, unprecedented, profoundly threatening, panic-inducing crisis. Eight years creating controversy over things they knew were not controversial; eight years feigning outrage over things they knew were not outrageous; eight years putting their audience in a constant, unrelenting state of panic.
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I could go on and on about all the fake “controversies” and “scandals” — facts minus context plus wishful thinking — that had the GOP’s fan base in a perpetual and relentless state of panic — and I use that word quite deliberately — from January 20, 2009 through November 8, 2016. I can’t count the number of times I pointed out many times in various places how utterly and epically irresponsible it was of those politicians and pundits to tell their fans not only that there was a reason to panic but that they actually should panic; not merely be concerned or upset or outraged or even afraid but full-blown, abject, inconsolable panic; the feeling that they and everything they knew, loved and cared about was under constant, mortal, imminent threat.
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When Obama became President, the Republican Party and its media enablers decided to … create controversy and feign outrage over absolutely everything, even the most benign and routine matters, and behavior that was entirely congruent and consistent with their own. The end result was a population of tens of millions going about every day in a constant state of panic, angered and outraged and threatened by everything they saw and heard and, ultimately, unable to distinguish genuine controversy, real threats, or the truly outrageous, from things that only occurred in Republican fan fiction.
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Trump, then, is a result of the Republican base having lost their ability to distinguish the benign and routine from the controversial and outrageous; to distinguish a genuine villain from an imaginary one. They were in a state of panic for 8 years and yet their fears never came to fruition; things Republicans always say will certainly happen if we elect a Democrat have a way of never actually happening. If someone as depraved and wicked as Obama (again, the comic-book character, not the man) could get elected, be president, and not have the world come crashing down, why not a vulgar, ignorant, demented racist gangster with no governing, public-service, military, legal or diplomatic experience?
Apologies for the lengthy block-quote, but I think it bears repeating, especially since we’re going to be hearing a lot of this “didn’t want to create a panic” hogsnot from the Grand Nagus and his enablers in the coming days and weeks. Republicans and their enablers have always been about creating and fostering unwarranted panic, and using it not only as a weapon against their political opponents but to blind their own voters to what the Party itself is actually doing, proposing and attempting. If voters are panicked over immigrant caravans and antifa thugs and the gay mafia and being silenced by cancel culture, they’re not paying attention to the looting and corruption and the health and safety hazards brought about by deregulation. You can’t get people to vote for making the rich and powerful richer, more powerful, and unaccountable for the harm they cause, unless they’re in a panic over what will happen if they don’t vote for that.
Of course, no one who reads Daily Kos is in danger of taking the Grand Nagus at his word, and we all know that his entire re-election strategy is, has been, and will continue to be, a relentless effort to instill a sense of panic over what will happen if he loses. And, let’s face it, it’s not just the Deplorables who are in a panic over that prospect.