One of the things Daily Kos provides its members is a clearinghouse and a practice forum for conversations with friends and relatives afflicted with the MAGA virus.
Personally — I don’t meet a lot of “infected” Americans. When I do, it’s usually someone I’ve known for years and who surprises me by suddenly blurting out something like “Canadians don’t really have universal medicare — that’s just fake news created by American liberal newsrooms.”
I never really try to convince these old friends that they are entirely wrong — that their model of how the world works is built on a vast tangle of false premise. If I push too hard, they’re likely to say “well — your branch of the family left the United States long ago — you don’t even understand what it’s like any more.”
(As an aside — their version of “what it’s like” is MS-13 gangs in virtually every small town in America; American health care system is the “envy of the world;” millions of “illegals” vote D in every American election and Hillary Clinton has been responsible for several murder contracts.)
I generally bite my tongue and limit myself to saying “Here’s what makes me uncomfortable with Trump.” One of my favourites is his double standards — where he pretends to take a moral stand but ends up over time contradicting his moral stance. The more indignant his original complaint, the better the contrast and the stronger my point.
So this morning Trump totally dumps on Michael Cohen for “taping” phone conversations with candidate Trump. Basically, he is saying “anyone who would do that is a total scumbag — and cannot be trusted on anything else.“
Except…. Except… what if the person secretly recording a conversation with Donald Trump is the President of Russia? Then, of course, there is no criticism.
The point I make to my Trump-loving friends is this:
“When you hear Trump totally dump on someone else, and you start to share the President’s indignation… and you start to get pissed off at the ‘transgresser’ and Mother Nature starts pumping stress hormones into your increasingly angry body… just remember that Trump is playing you. He doesnt REALLY think secret recordings are disgusting, — he only thinks it disgusting because the target of his rant has stopped being helpful to Trump — THAT is why I don’t trust him… because he’s constantly trying to play the people who believe in him.“
So there we go — one tiny, granular narrative for one tiny, granular installment of the ongoing effort to break the fever created by the MAGA virus.