In nine years of bring a politician, Trump, by his own words and deeds, has proven he is a congenital liar, a criminal, and a rapist. He stole classified files in the biggest breach of our national security in our country's history. He incited an insurrection. He wants to tear up the Constitution. He is a classic narcissist, loyal to no one but himself, and totally lacking a moral conscience or empathy. He has repudiated the rule of law by calling those who participated in the Jan 6, 2021 insurrection “patriots,” and stating his intention to pardon any of them found guilty in a court of law. He spews character assassination and insults with reckless abandonment. He has wrecked the lives of ordinary Americans and destroyed the careers of some for simply telling the truth about him.

Simple Google searches will provide the evidence backing up every word in that paragraph above. But there is an even simpler, quicker way to get a comprehensive summary of Trump’s own words that reveal him to be an immoral cretin.  Read my report: “The Republican Screed: What It Takes to be a Republican, According to Donald Trump.” Trump actually escalated his malicious diatribes in the closing days of his campaign.

You would have thought Trump’s reputation as an immoral cretin had been signed, sealed, and delivered. But not surprisingly, an apologia for Trump is already underway. Some of its propagators have given it an additional twist by claiming that Democrats treated Trump with false charges and extremist rhetoric.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media—the same instruments that back in 2015-16 fueled the political career of the novice Trump with tons of free publicity—are in the forefront of the apologia crowd.  Their poster boy has to be Shadi Hamid, author of a Washington Post column on November 25, “Why the Resistance Went Quiet After Trump’s Victory: The fight against supposed fascism is not much of a fight, and that’s a good thing.” Hamid tells us that the criticism of Trump’s malicious lies, insults, and personal attacks—much less calling him a fascist—was wildly exaggerated, alarmist language. Some excerpts:

• The language of autocratic doom has dissipated…Biden welcomed the would-be dictator to the White House and seemed in good spirits, pledging to do everything he could to make sure the president-elect was accommodated.
• In Harris’s concession speech, she did not seem overly troubled by the prospect…of a fascist in the (White House).
• This sudden softening, however, raises questions about whether Democrats ever truly believed their own words.
• Perhaps, too, there is a bit of shame (among Democrats)
• There is also a sense that protests might not exactly work, that people power isn’t particularly powerful.
• Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to (take more extreme measures).
• Despite how it might feel in this moment…there should be no embarrassment in pulling back, even if temporarily.

In my opinion, this is one of the worst commentaries  the Post has ever published. The headline prepares the reader to for comments centered on Trump’s explicitly pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, violence-inciting statements. But any reference to Trump’s drumbeat of extremist diatribes quickly disappears, and Hamid launches attacks on virtually the whole of the Democratic agenda.

The first four paragraphs of the article—summarized in my first three bullet points—are an insult to honest journalism. They reach new heights of obfuscation. Hamid actually mocks the proudest legacy the Democrats led by Biden and Harris bequeathed America: the peaceful transfer of power. His depiction of their adherence to the law and tradition as “a dishonorable surrender” and a “sudden softening” of their position on Trump’s extremism is a disgrace.

Hamid seems to admire the opposite approach taken by Trump and the Republicans in 2020-2021, when they showed their contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law, & democracy, by falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen, and unleashed an attack on the Capitol and used other criminal acts to try to overturn the lawful results.

In the Post’s comment section on Hamid’s article, LJWALKER offered this eloquent statement:

• Shadi Hamad is essentially giving the finger to those who do and will stand up against Trump. He mocks the idea of resistance as if it's something funny and unserious.
• I hope Hamad doesn't have to worry about his friends, family members and colleagues losing jobs, being deported, and marginalized (though with a name like his, I wouldn't bet on it). When they are, however, he can thank himself for this pathetic appeasement piece to a low life piece of scum who is also a fascist and will take this country back generations while he's also working to tear it apart.
• Hamad's words will come back to bite hard.
• So yeah, he should go ahead and make fun. Laugh it up! If he thinks the resistance is a joke, he couldn't be more wrong. And mealy-mouthed, spineless pieces like this show just exactly how much he DOES know about it: ZERO.
• A lot of us still care about this country and the U.S. Constitution, freedom of speech, the 14th and 15th Amendments, law and order—as screwed up and racist and sexist as it sometimes is. And that number is only going to grow from Trump's Day One

A Prominent Conservative Speaks

New York Times columnist David Brooks, one of the last real American conservatives with a prominent platform, has also taken a stand on the apologia cabal arguing for dropping the denunciation of Trump’s lying racist, xenophobic, misogynistic diatribes and treating him as a normal person. Excerpts from Brook’s article “The Moral Challenge of Trumpism:”

• …Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.
• The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.
• MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate.
• (By Trump’s standards) The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions.
• In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life.
• The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump.

Brooks quotes another prominent observer of American morals, David Linker, from his recent Substack essay:

“Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”