Is Trump Doug or Dinsdale?
Back when I observed the New Age “manifest” in the early 1990s, I created a series of mock flyers for New Age services and workshops and posted them on bulletin boards beside the genuine articles. My difficulty was that as fake-crazy as I made them, I found that I couldn’t keep up with the real crazy. Recently, an interviewer asked a filmmaker how they could invent a credible dystopian world while living in one.
Some people of the people I met around town and at New Age expos, for example, were committed to natural healing to the detriment of their own well-being:
I knew a young woman with porcelain skin who contracted some common skin infection back in the 1990s. It was the sort of thing a physician might knock out with a prescription. But she didn’t trust western medicine. She went for months using “natural” remedies to heal herself as her face grew more mottled, swollen and pockmarked. It was a painful thing to watch and surely worse for her. When finally she became desperate enough to seek licensed medical help, the damage was done. The infection cleared up, but her face would never be the same. I don’t know if she chalked that up to the failure of western medicine or not.
Watching Trump 2.0 manifest carries echoes of that period 30 years ago. Today it’s vaccines:
The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense in a video released Monday that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.
“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”
Their 6-year-old is dead of a dis-ease we’d essentially eradicated with vaccines.
A Donald Trump voter from Wisconsin similarly stuck to his irrational faith in the face of family adversity and lived experience of his Peruvian wife:
A Wisconsin voter who backed President Trump in November is still sticking by the Republican — even after his Peruvian wife was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a federal crackdown on illegal immigration last month.
Bradley Bartell is worried about the well-being of his wife, Sylvia Camilla Muñoz-Lira, locked inside a detention center — and is seeking donations — after she was nabbed by ICE agents Feb. 15 at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan. The pair were traveling home to Wisconsin Dells from their belated honeymoon in Puerto Rico when she was taken into custody.
[…]
Muñoz-Lira, 26, secured her temporary visa in 2019 after she was accepted to a work-study program in Wisconsin but was then unable to return to Peru a year later when the pandemic limited her ability to travel. She instead chose to continue working in the States and eventually met and married her husband in May 2024.
She’d overstayed her visa but thought it safe to travel within the U.S. while her citizenship case was under review. No, not under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
“It was kind of like a slap in the face,” Bartell, 40, told The New York Post. But Bartell doesn’t regret his vote for Trump. “I still support our president.” And he wouldn’t say otherwise in a media story.
The denialism at work here in both families, especially where it’s in submission to an authoritarian bully, is not funny. It’s disturbing. And disturbingly reminiscent of a Monty Python bit about a pair of English gangsters, the notorious Piranha brothers, Doug and Dinsdale. Look how submissive Stig is:
| Presenter | Another man who had his head nailed to the floor was Stig O’ Tracey. |
| Cut to another younger more cheerful man on sofa. | |
| Interviewer | Stig, I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor. |
| Stig | No, no. Never, never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to give his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me. |
| Interviewer | But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor. |
| Stig | Oh yeah, well – he did that, yeah. |
| Interviewer | Why? |
| Stig | Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean, be fair, there was nothing else he could do. I mean, I had transgressed the unwritten law. |
| Interviewer | What had you done? |
| Stig | Er… Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn’t want to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. There’s nothing Dinsdale wouldn’t do for you. |
| Interviewer | And you don’t bear him any grudge? |
| Stig | A grudge! Old Dinsy? He was a real darling. |
| Interviewer | I understand he also nailed your wife’s head to a coffee table. Isn’t that right Mrs O’ Tracey? |
| Camera pans to show woman with coffee table nailed to head. | |
| Mrs O’ Tracey | Oh, no. No. No. |
| Stig | Yeah, well, he did do that. Yeah, yeah. He was a cruel man, but fair |
How many like Bartell are taking Donald Trump’s word for it that every one of those Venezuelans sent to a notorious Slavadoran prison were violent gang members merely based on deliberately misinterpreting their tattoos? Because they must have transgressed the unwritten law. A cruel man, Donald, but fair.
(h/t Jonathan Last at The Bulwark)
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