And burn it will

6 ½ years ago I wrote that "Trump's narcissistic hunger for adulation sucks goodness and light out of the environment and annihilates them. The president is a parasite who feeds off hatred and division."

My description has been validated innumerable times over the years.

In my piece I quoted George Will saying "Trump doesn’t just pollute the social environment with hate. He is the environment."

I quoted David French, writing in National Review, saying "Trump is fully employing malice as a political strategy. It’s not clever. It’s not shrewd. It’s destructive and wrong."

I quoted Rod Dreher saying "Where does he think this is all going to go? Where does this cycle stop? I don’t see how it fails to end in violence."

Dreher was right about the violence, but wrong about the ending. It hasn't ended.

I quoted Ross Douthat describing a "dark nihilism" that permeates Trumpism. Douthat said Trump and mass shooters (this was after the El Paso and other shootings) are "connected to the same dark psychic forces."

These are all conservative commentators.

I myself wrote that "a president's job is to tamp down such flare-ups, but Trump does the opposite, throwing gasoline on the fire and watching it burn. And burn it will." The title of the piece was "The Arsonist-in-Chief".

Trump's goon squads are presently rampaging through Minneapolis, and the city is metaphorically burning. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car, Trump surged an additional thousand federal agents into the city. Instead of calling for calm in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he lied that Good "violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer." She was neither violent nor vicious, and he was not run over. Trump lies continually.

My 2019 piece is as relevant today as it was back then.

 

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