This is going to be a little bit of a different post, taking a look at something I have been thinking about for a while, and that’s Donald Trump’s effect on our society.

Donald Trump is a lying liar who lies and has a long history of lying, and his administration of course is full of liars. To me, lying is one of the many flavors of bullshit. Bullshit can be delusion like Roadkill Gourmond RFK Jr.’s recent ideas on what really causes measel outbreaks. It can be total stupidity like claiming that you saved over a third of the US population from being wiped out by fentanyl in a mere three months, and apparently the fentanyl would kill over five people per pill. This was made by the U.S. Attorney General. No, really. A screengrab from over at Elon’s Hellsite:

The response, of course, is quite a legitimate question.

The bullshit also includes outright elements of the style of cruelty that is uniquely awful in a most MAGA way, like claiming that there is enough evidence that a man is a gang member to allow him to be sent to a foreign prison, based on a photoshopped image of his hand. There has always been this element in the GOP, going back to Nixon and Reagan’s “welfare queens” driving new luxury cars and buying steak and lobster on the government dime. Trump has taken this side of the American right-of-center and force-fed it steroids like you force-feed a goose for foie gras.

Bullshit can also include delusions, like Trump’s tariff beliefs. Or more standard bullshit, such as flat out lies about Biden’s economy.

To be a Trumpster these days requires buying into increasingly crazy, stupid, delusional, and cruel. It’s hard for anyone to really say for sure how this affects his followers in their everyday lives.

“People on edge” has been a story in the media since around COVID, but before that, there were a lot of questions about whether the first Trump era saw the end of civility. These stories were always couched in a “both-sides” narrative, as if the people who objected to a president who is a racist admitted sexual assault enthusiast with zero need to be civil were somehow on the same level of morality as the people who were over the moon about that fact.

Perhaps some may find what I am writing here uncivil, as if to say that Trump’s most rabid supporters are lacking in morals, civility, and basic ethics like honesty is some sort of outrageous claim designed to demonize people. Except it’s very difficult to argue against that when his supporters cheer deporting four-year-old U.S. citizens with cancer and still think Trump’s mocking of a disabled person back in 2016 was HI-larious. The very same person who might call my post here uncivil also were the ones who saw the hundreds of thousands of deaths during COVID and instead of being horrified by the far-right’s delusional cures and deep rage over being told to wear a mask so their elders don’t catch the virus, they said “well actually they have a point you know.” So we gradually stopped caring about killing our elders and joined in the rage as a nation.

This leads me to a concern I have about the Trump 2.0 era, and that’s how contagious is Trumpism? Can it spread beyond its core cultists and affect “more moderate” people like it seemed to do during COVID? By this, I don’t mean politics. I mean general behavior.

Will we see more dishonesty in our public life, like an increase in lying at the workplace? Will people increasingly do things like ignore traffic laws because they feel they don’t apply to them? Will we see more people become actively anti-charity? Will the presence of the Internet and the increase in AI lead to an increasingly unstable society full of people who are stacked to the rim with delusions?

I honestly don’t know. I hope not, but the constant firehose of Trumpism aimed at us every day can’t be good for our brains.

The last word goes to Slade: