General Discussion

a John Gotti type without the bodies in car trunks; or a cult leader, Jim Jones without the Kool-Aid, if by some bizarre twist of fate he hadn't become president. His sort is a dime a dozen; there's no shortage of conscience-free narcissists in this world. But those guys always manage to find certain people, the so-called authoritarian followers, who want to be part of their operation and will obey them blindly. We look at the Mafia and the People's Temple and we wonder how anybody could get mixed up with such groups and their leaders, but Trump is exactly that, writ large. We've been smacked upside the head with the reality that a whole lot of people would be happy to belong to criminal mobs or cults as long as they had a leader who would promise them something they wanted - money, power, a group to belong to - no matter how dangerous, debased, immoral or downright evil they had to be in order to belong. Trump is the bastard child of John Gotti and Jim Jones; he gave the millions of authoritarian followers we didn't know walked among us a cult or a mob they could belong to. You didn't have to whack somebody or move to a jungle commune to belong. Just buy a red cap, watch Fox, join your friends at the new Nuremberg rallies and presto, you're a made man.