Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
I would have to say that for pure malevolence sake that President Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he is undoubtedly a petulant child, and a narcissistic sociopath with delusions of Godhood who is incapable of empathy, that many of his followers are just as bad and quite possibly worse. However, none of them have an iota of the power that Trump wields as President. That is a good thing, but it is also quite troubling, because such people may be your neighbors, your coworkers, or God forbid, family members.
Gustave Gilbert, an American Army Psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials wrote:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949)
I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the
defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
An example of such a evil was displayed this week when a women in the Florida Panhandle, who while complaining about the effect that the Trump Shutdown is having on her family told a New York Times reporter “he isn’t hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting.”
Now let that sink in a moment. Think about it. Someone voted for and supported President Trump because he would hurt people. Now, when reality hits and the person is confronted with the fact that Trump doesn’t care if he is hurting his followers, she now complains that “he’s not hurting the right people.” In other words it’s okay for the leader you support to harm others so long as it doesn’t hurt you.
Trump, as horrible as he is, is not the cause of this. The preparation for him has been going on for decades, and people like the woman in Florida are prima facia evidence of a moral and ethical rot that has turned otherwise normal, decent people into fear driven narcissistic sociopaths incapable of having feelings for anyone but themselves. Trump is not the cause, he is the symptom of something far worse than he could ever be.
Unlike his most faithful followers, the people who he understood would follow him even if “shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” Trump never claimed to be a moral man, or for that matter someone who followed the teachings of Christ, but his most faithful followers do.
Now, those people are finding out that Trump for all of his bluster doesn’t really give a damn about them are lost. Like the woman in Florida, they are angry because they are suffering because of his policies, but unlike people who have not sold their souls, they cry out in disbelief, “he isn’t hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting.” They cannot believe that he lied to them, that he used them, and that his policies are harming them, but rather that he isn’t hurting the right people.
My friends, please tell me how such an attitude is anything less than evil. Please tell me how it is different from the men of the SS Totenkopfverbande who profited from the mass murder and genocide of others, but when called to account for their crimes, cried out that they were victims because they had believed Hitler? The difference is simply a matter of degree. These disappointed Trump followers would still follow him and do anything he says, but they are suffering and cannot believe that he is letting making them suffer, without comprehending that they mean nothing to him.
Deluded by decades of propaganda, such people are finding out that they don’t matter to Trump, or the GOP. Maybe someday they will realize that they have been complicit through their tacit support, agreement, and help in crimes against humanity, crimes against the Constitution of the United States, and attitudes that but I doubt it. They have no empathy for people,they despise, only self-pity when they find that the man that they sold their souls to support and defend despises them as much as the people they think they should be punished.
The irony is that they are not being punished by those that they despise, but by the man who they treat as a savior, a secular Messiah.
So, until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 