Gene Folkes had just been jettisoned as a contestant on “The Apprentice” and was commiserating with a crew member at a bar inside the lobby of Trump Tower. He was indignant — and not just at having been kicked off the reality show after its star, Donald Trump, had delivered his catchphrase: “You’re fired.”
One of two Black contestants chosen for that season in 2010, Folkes was insulted that Trump had called him inarticulate and accused him of illiteracy in a lengthy boardroom tirade minutes earlier.
As the crew member, a Black woman who worked as a contestant manager, consoled him, Trump suddenly appeared at the bar.
“He came up and he asked me: ‘Is this your woman? Because you two would make a really great couple, you both have the same background,’” Folkes told The Associated Press.
The contestant manager quietly reminded Trump that she worked for him. Then, Trump made a comment similar to something he uttered in the boardroom that never aired on TV, Folkes said.
“He said again, ‘It’s not like I used the N-word,’ and then he walked off, and that was that,” said Folkes, a New York-based consultant, podcast host and U.S. Air Force veteran.
Because conservativism is not a rational ideology, it is malignant misconception that narcissism is an ideology. All conservatives redefine their own values based on the small patch of territory where they currently stand.
Step 1: Identify the “self” and the “other.”
Step 2: Identify the positions that most benefit the self and do the most harm to the other. Those are your positions, and you don’t need to become attached to them.
To be a member of the self is to be protected financially, politically, spiritually, and in all other ways, as long as you remain loyal to the lie: You are good.
This is the most important lie. A conservative isn’t good because they say or do or believe good things. A conservative is good because they are a member of the self, and therefore anything they say or do or believe is good. Even when they knowingly do something objectively bad, it is rationalized as necessary for the good of the self.
It’s in that rationalizing that you are getting lost.
The modern Republican Party has identified Trump as their identity. You could argue that he took advantage of the flaw in their machinery to assume control, or you could argue that he is the inevitable pure-form product of the conservative machine.
Either way, he’s the current conservative avatar, the most perfect narcissist ever conceived, and his interests are the party’s interests. Anyone who challenges him or refuses him becomes a member of the other. Anything that could hurt him is evil, and anything that he says or does is good.
Each conservative finds different ways to rationalize this. Some claim that he is trolling, triggering and owning the other because it makes the other mad and sloppy. Like a jester distracting a dragon, they see Trump’s antics as frivilous taunts, intended to distract and confuse the other. He doesn’t mean it when he reveals his bigotry.
Other conservatives view him as a necessary evil, a compromise solution to a larger problem. He is their temporary ally while in office, and they are happy to watch him “hurt the right people” because they believe they will benefit on balance.
And of course there are plenty of conservatives who are just as bigoted and ignorant as he is, and they love seeing someone like them in power.
Regardless of their path to supporting Trump, they are all the same sort of sick. They all suffer from the delusion that they are good, and that because they are good, supporting Trump must be good because that’s what they want.
There are only two methods of breaking supporters away from Trump’s influence. They must either abandon conservativism and recognize that everything they ever believed was wrong, or they must believe that supporting Trump does more personal harm than good.
The former is very rare, and requires a massive amount of inteospection and personal growth.
The latter is far more common. Trump opponents like Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, these are not principled moderates with legitimate criticisms. They each saw either personal ruin or personal opportunity in attacking Trump, and the resulting retribution serves as a warning to other would-be challengers.
Unfortunately, these types of critics cannot be trusted as allies against Trump. They may hate the man, but they will fall in line at the ballot box, lamenting the sad reality that they aren’t as important as they had hoped.
But your question was, “How can Log Cabin Republicans, conservative minorities, Islamic republicans, conservative women, and other “pick me” conservative groups support a party that is built around a core of hatred and subjugation of their people?” And the answer is narcissism. They believe that they are the exception, the special self that will benefit from conservative power, despite all evidence to the contrary. They believe in themselves, that their ideas are important enough to make whatever deal with the devil required to win. They want to be on the winning team so that they can the spoils of victory. And if it means the leopards occasionally eat their faces, they may thrash about and complain, but ultimately they will accept this loss as necessary.
…holy shit.
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