John Feffer, Slouching Toward the Apocalypse

Tomgram: John Feffer, Slouching Toward the Apocalypse | TomDispatch

Recently, I posted a piece, “This Is Not About Donald Trump,” in which I explored some of the ways in which The Donald was, in American terms, anything but a freak of nature. As I suggested, the two roles he’s inhabited most fully in his life -- salesman and conman -- are so in the American grain that it’s been apple pie all the way to the Republican nomination for president. Think, then, of today’s post by TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the soon-to-be-published dystopian novel Splinterlands, as a kind of companion to that piece. It suggests far wilder ways in which Trump couldn’t be more in that same grain, if what you have in mind is the Dr. Strangelovian current that runs through American life, involving evangelicals, apocalyptics, survivalists, and white racists; even his extremity, that is, couldn’t be more us -- or, if you prefer, more U.S. Tom

Trump the Arsonist
Evangelicals, Survivalists, the Alt-Right, and Hurricane Donald
By John Feffer

The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the Republican primaries. It’s “like medieval times,” hesuggested during the second presidential debate. “We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”

For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock. Although his campaign doggedly continues to promise a new beginning for the country, the candidate and his advisers are sending out a very different message: the end is nigh. These Cassandras all agree that, although Obama’s two terms were no walk in the park, the stakes in 2016 are world-destroyingly higher. If Clinton is elected, the future could be, as conservative political operatives Dick Morris and Eileen McGann titled their recent book, Armageddon.

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