Jealousy Is His Vehicle: It Gets Him Anywhere He Wants to Go

You have to admit that he isn't shy or indirect about it. 45 wants to be a despot.

He absolutely thirsts for it. Look at who he wants to hang around with. He's insanely jealous of them. They're his pals:

• Kim Jong Un: The one who has people shot when they bring him bad news. He risks starvation for his populace rather than back away from nuclearization. 45's now been allowed to take ten steps (Captain may I? Yes, you may) into North Korea, for the kind of photo op that's symbolic of sycophancy. "We fell in love," 45 says to his minions. Love is blind. Kim's been invited to the White House.

• Vladimir Putin: The one who supervises hacking our elections, in which the numbers just might have been changed (I insist they have. We will learn that someday.). He who has journalists executed if he doesn't like them, no matter where they are. "We have a fake news problem. You don't," 45 told him in the bright light of day. He's been invited to the White House, too.

• Mohammad bin Salmon: The one who oversaw the assassination of an Saudi ex-pat, American resident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in another embassy. He protects Israel not because he likes it, but because he gets our weapons to do it and might have to if Iran becomes the nuclear power 45 is now allowing them to be. Think about that. He's already been to the White House.

• Xi Jinping: The one who hacks our economy instead of our elections, for damage that may actually endure longer--manipulating currency, ripping off intellectual property. 45 doesn't like him but likes the way he can pull in the reins of his people when it suits him. (Actually, through the strangling tariff battle, he's doing exactly that to the farmers.) He can't do that here like Xi can in China. He hates that. When Xi muscled the Chinese legislature into allowing the end of his two-term limit as president, 45 said, "I think it's great," and made a crack about maybe being allowed to be president for 16 years. Just joking, though.

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Wants to take his country away from the secular state to which it has been more accustomed and more in line with Islamic law, the same way 45 doesn't at all mind the pseudo-Christians who bankroll and tacitly support everything he does and gradually dissolve the separation of church and state. Erdogan doesn't shoot people against him, he just holds another election when he doesn't get his way (but lost that one, too, so we'll see what he does next). He does jail journalists, though. I heard one a couple of months ago. Before he managed to get out, he and his friends were hunted like pheasant, not for trophy but for the suppression that political prisons bring. He calls it a democracy, but it's something quite different. "[It seems that 45] wants Erdogan to stay in power forever," said the editor of a Turkish news site. Count on that, sir. So does he. Has he been to the White House? Hell, yes. In May, 2017.

• Viktor Orban: With a chip on his populist shoulder against elites, he has gradually enveloped political discourse with a long-term strategy. The Hungarian legislature is well into the hands of his Fidesz Party due to gerrymandering. 90% of the media is owned or controlled by people with personal connections to him or Fidesz; 80% of the people only hear from them (think Fox News being the only major network here). His convenient enemy is liberal billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation is under endless attack, and whose Central European University, which hires its faculty independently, has had most of its operations moved next door from Budapest to Vienna. By law, no one can assist anyone applying for asylum in Hungary; less than 3% of those doing so were granted it last year. "We must show that the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite," he said recently, quoted by The New Yorker. "Christian democracy gives priority to Christian Culture...Christian culture is anti-immigration." He, too, calls it a democracy, but it's something quite different. Orban has been to the White House this spring.

Such is the pattern. Clearly, 45 is envious of these people and their stranglehold on power. He is looking for an opening, any opening, to claim more of it. The border atrocities--because that's what they are--are not so much policy but a display of what he'd like to do to others who cross him. 

If permitted by law or by fiat or by collective fatigue leading to apathy, he would do it. Believe this like you believe your own name.

Once again, it isn't just him. It's the pathetic tolerance of his party as well as the eagerness to duplicate who he is and how he seizes control. If and when he's gone, there will be more who will apply the same thinking, the same strategies, and the same attitudes. Let me give you a few names: Tom Cotton, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Dan Patrick. All are in significant government positions. All have displayed the same disdain for multiculturalism and for religious tolerance, play the victim card quite deftly, and can smear with the best of them. Go ahead and google them. There are more. That's just for starters.

And, oh yeah, Mr. F. Gow. Don't forget him, the destroyer of union worlds. He'll be back.

If we get too tired of this, we'll just get run over. Remember when this started: Jerry Falwell and the Christian Coalition back in 1978. Think they'll quit now, as close as they are to achieving the ultimate goal of consolidating their power in gerrymandering concrete and removing the right of women to control their bodies?

You know the answer. That's why every time we hold a federal election you'll hear some people say, "This is the most important election of our lives." And they are, of course, exactly correct.

Hold onto that if or when you get tired of the enormity of the politicking. You'll want to turn away. Please don't. 45 is jealous of the power you hold, too, but only if you continue to hold it. Awareness and activism tighten the grip, and not just on Election Day.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark