Crawling Out Of The Trump Cesspool*

Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash

Given Trump’s success in finding people who subordinated every virtue to him, people who pledged personal loyalty to him above all else, and culling out those who refused, what character of persons remained within the lame duck administration at its end?

Did those loyalists who resigned in disgust in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6 just miss the signs?

As Chris Hayes reiterated during his July 22, 2022 show, we’ve known who and what Trump was since before he announced his candidacy in 2015. The campaign spotlight and that on his presidency simply confirmed the depth of his evil and revealed new details, many occurring in real time. The Jan. 6 hearings have also exposed details, but no one should be surprised at the depth of Trump’s depravity and lawlessness or his inciting a violent insurrection as a final attempt to stay in power after his Big Lie campaign that began well before the election and all else failed.

Watercolor, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Van Wagoner Family Trust

With Trump the focus of applied power turned away from serving its constituents to amassing, consolidating, protecting and preserving itself. Trump attracted and recruited people who willingly subordinated every virtue to him, many of whom were…