CSotD: Clean-up time
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Tom Toles leads off today with the central issue our country is facing: Donald Trump and his minions are promoting a cult of personality.
For those who only know the term through rock music, “Cult of Personality” emerged as a political term in 1956, when Nikita Khruschev took power in the USSR and began attempting to diminish the personal imagery of Joseph Stalin that had built up around the place.
His secret speech to a Communist Party Congress was leaked and caused widespread consternation, including this, from Wikipedia:
The speech was a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split in which China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) and Albania (under First Secretary Enver Hoxha) condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin.
I quote that because Mao and Hoxha also ruled under a cult of personality, so it’s not surprising they’d object to Khrushchev trying to move away from that sort of individual dictatorship.
Khrushchev was a tough guy, no doubt, but he was proud of his peasant background and, while he endlessly promoted the Soviet Union, he didn’t puff himself up a whole lot.
But here’s the other thing to bear in mind: For all the millions murdered and/or permitted to die, by Stalin, there were many million more who looked up to him not simply as head-of-party but, as Khrushchev charged, a larger than life character and a sort of father-figure.
A czar who didn’t wear an actual crown, but a czar nonetheless.
And the further into his administration Trump gets, the more he acts like the dictators he admires: Xi and Kim and Duterte, and it’s not that his opponents mock him as “Dear Leader” but that he invites the comparison himself, giving his children cushy jobs, enriching himself with golfing vacations for which his entourage and security detail pay tourist rates with taxpayer dollars, and even issuing statements about reopening the country that are advertisements for his own private businesses.
And, Toles further notes, nothing is ever Dear Leader’s fault. Just as Stalin’s Five Year Plans often failed but were never his fault, Trump has compiled a long list of other people’s screwups.
The biggest of which is blaming Dear Leader.
As Steve Brodner points out, woe betide any whistleblower or even finder-of-fact who dares to note problem areas in Dear Leader’s world:
And, yes, “tonight” is accurate on that last one: Perhaps Dear Leader thought he could sneak one through on Friday’s traditional slow-news-day wrap.
Well, he didn’t sneak it past Brodner, and now he hasn’t snuck it past you, either.
Unlike Stalin, the people Trump purges don’t end up dead or in gulags, but the fact remains that bad news ends careers and the people around him are the ones who have mastered Happy Talk, a hallmark of the cult of personality approach to governance.
And it helps, as Ruben Bolling points out, to have a Ministry of Justice dedicated to protecting Dear Leader.
Nixon made the mistake of appointing good, qualified people with a love of country, perhaps a hangover from the Kennedy/Johnson practice of surrounding the President with “the best and the brightest.”
In the end — and it was the end because it was so shocking — he ended up having to fire attorneys general one after another because they wouldn’t bend to his will and abandon their ethics.
There will be no “Saturday Night Massacre” in this White House because the best and the brightest either failed to sign up in the first place or left as soon as they saw which way the wind was blowing.
And those who thought they could stay and make a difference are being picked off, one by one, much more below the radar.
Meanwhile, Fox News has proven more loyal to the GOP than to the President, which is often a distinction without a difference but has led Dear Leader to twitter-trash the network on occasion and to prefer OAN, which makes Pravda and Der Sturmer look like paragons of neutral reporting.
His latest sally is “Obamagate,” and Rick McKee isn’t buying it.
So far, Obama’s terrible crime for which he should be locked up is that, when there were reports of Russian interference in the election, he had someone look into it.
In fact — brace yourself — his administration even shared the name of the person who was apparently coordinating with the Russians, a horrendous act that, though legal, only happens nine or ten thousand times a year, and now more often than under Obama.
Though, as Mike Lester points out, if you get bogged down in the minutiae of what “Obamagate” actually consists of, you miss the important part.
Meanwhile …
There are still cartoons pointing out the Joe Biden isn’t Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and that Tara Reade, a woman of uncompromised integrity, has accused him of things nobody knew were happening.
Matt Wuerker simply notes that it appears he can do pretty well simply by avoiding getting down in the mud and wrestling with the Personality.
Which brings us to Jen Sorensen’s analysis of the USPS kerfuffle, in which Dear Leader wants to shut the place down because his cronies could make money doing that and, besides, Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post makes money shipping things to people through the USPS.
I got this letter from one of my senators the other day, which reminds me that, whoever ends up in the White House next year, the laws will be made by whoever ends up in Congress.
Such that you might want to focus some of your energy on those races, which you have a better chance of influencing.
Think of it as betting the field: Your presidential choice might come in second, but if you’ve put down money on a half dozen legislators, you’re likely to walk away a winner.
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