Trump’s moral tapeworm: Far beyond “deplorable”

September 21, 2016 Originally published on SFGate

Hillary has mild pneumonia. Maybe a classic case of walking pneumonia, and of course it’s all very easily treated by rest, and antibiotics, and skimming through the countless laughable tweets of a thousands of scabrous, Trump-fellating supporters deeply wishing for her death so they can reclaim the country for an increasingly irrelevant army of furious white males who can’t spell and detest women and think Obama is a secret Muslim – which the majority of Republicans, quite truly, still do.

Trump, by the way, is quite sick, too – though his ailments are, shall we say, of a slightly different variety.

Trump, of course, suffers from a bizarre combination of ethical derangement, reverse priapism, moral tapeworm and malignant spiritual melanoma, all shot through by an incurable deterioration of everything it means to be human.

It’s impossible not to notice. So dire is his condition, so bizarre and inscrutable, the media has struggled mightily to report it with any accuracy. They are flailing everywhere.

It’s no wonder. Problem is, Trump’s derangement is so compete, so astonishing, so head-scratchingly WTF-you-can’t-be-serious, from claiming he helped clear rubble on 9/11 (he didn’t) to swiping 20 grand from his own bogus “charitable” foundation to buy a six-foot painting of himself (he did), to claiming he never supported the Iraq war (he did) to, oh dear God, roughly 10,000 other shameless and instantly discredited lies, it’s no wonder the media is taking heat for not sufficiently holding his inane statements to the fire.

Like a flatulent 5-year-old trying to scowl as hard as he can.

Like a flatulent 5-year-old trying to scowl as hard as he can.

How can they? How do you possibly find a foothold? When everything you say is hateful, bombastic nonsense, there’s nothing particularly exceptional to report on. It’s all sludge. It’s all garbage. What Paul Krugman called his “big liar” technique – it’s just what’s expected now. And Trump knows it.

It is sad to note that, in elections past, one candidate suffering a mild health issue on the pitiless campaign trail might elicit a genuinely kind, tactful word from his or her opponent.

Trump, of course, laced his “get well soon” with the gross chyme of sneering innuendo, adding his typical “something’s going on” to bait his easily manipulated base to wail about conspiracy and cover-up, as he happily moves on to lie about 9/11 and corrode everything humanity stands for.

Which is another way of saying: This right here? This spasm in history we’re suffering through? This is about as ugly as America gets.

There has never been a modern, major-party candidate so nasty, so poorly educated, so poisonous to the American experiment, one who openly offers not a single iota of joy, hope, intellectual curiosity, genuine concern for the well-being of anyone but himself. Trump operates on the lowest, least humane strata of human dignity and moral disdain. Bush was dumb as a post, but he had a moral center and basic human decency. Trump’s most devout wish? To pass on his personal moral tapeworm to you, to me, to the world.

Some say that the effects of Trump will be felt long after he loses the election. I disagree. I think Trump will be quickly identified as the horrific parasite he very much is, something you pick up in the waters of Borneo or the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, like E.Coli mixed with flesh-eating bacteria with a ringworm chaser. And, like a strange virus, we are shuddering and sweating, screaming and vomiting our way through.

But then, come November, the fever will finally break. Hillary will win in a landslide and we will all breathe a sigh of relief, coupled to a sort of unprecedented declaration of ethical intent: “Let us never get that vile illness again. Let us change our diet, our posture, our rule of electoral success.” I mean, we can hope.

“Deplorables,” by the way, is a marvelous word. “Basket of deplorables” is even better, a rich and memorable image – though of course when speaking of Trump’s most vicious core supporters, a huge number of which support white nationalist hate groups, or Putin, or anti-Muslim rhetoric and fully 65% of which think Obama is a Muslim and huge percentages of whom think blacks, Muslims and Mexicans are more violent, more criminal and lazier than whites, perhaps “cesspool” is more apt.

Which is to say, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment, despite the media’s idiotic over-reaction and misunderstanding of the entire comment she actually made, was almost exactly correct.

Yes, Trump and the majority of his supporters really are, by way of actual, expressed viewpoints and attitudes, deplorable. The good news is, that basket isn’t as large or durable as some seem to think. And, like Hillary’s pneumonia, the vicious poisons it contains cannot survive long in the open light. They will have their antidote soon enough.

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Mark Morford

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