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Our fragile Democracy has always relied too heavily on the assumption of scruples and integrity of elected and appointed patronage rather than tested, proven career professionals with impeccable qualifications and credentials. https://twitter.com/meenaharris/status/1281790674560593925
This assumption, combined with a dearth of guardrails, made it possible for trump, his crime syndicate, GOP crooks, cronies, Mafiosos, and other criminals to easily topple or corrupt our government, justice system, and military.
According to Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, ”The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
The man in the WH may be a dolt, psychopath, and devoid of any moral values or integrity but that's immaterial, because as Maria Popova brilliantly states in her article https://bit.ly/3eiNuFZ ”Con artists are supreme masterminds of malevolent reality-manipulation...”
”Con artists prey on our propensity for believing what we wish were true and how this illuminates the inner workings of trust and deception.”
Too late, Americans, Congress, government, the courts, etc. have realized that our oversight, checks and balances, and common sense protections against corruption are weak and ephemeral.
We assumed people would do the right thing and would never succumb to the temptations of greed, money, power, and unchallenged corruption. We left protecting our precious Democracy to chance and fate created the perfect circumstances for a perversion of our Founders experiment.
And without codified clearly defined enforceable anti-corruption laws, our government and legal system were vulnerable to influence and overthrow by enemy states, traitors, and criminals, and yes, even incompetent buffoons and con artists.
Con artists rely on their marks’ trust to pull off scams and trump, and his co-conspirators masterfully weaponized our complacency and narcissistic distractions and created an Orwellian alternate reality. Now, lies are truth, wrong is right, greed is good, and facts don't matter.
We know trump wasn't smart enough or trusted enough to do this alone. He had help from equally unscrupulous, ratings-driven MSM. Despite his considerable cognitive limitations, he easily manipulated MSM into amplifying his dystopian narrative and made them accessory to his lies.
In the era of trump, there are no press conferences, all contact with the media is managed, and factual content is replaced by propaganda.
The trump administration's obsession with controlling the message coupled and his attacks on the media are textbook tactics used by dictators and authoritarian regimes around the globe.
In America, MSM’s complacent acceptance of the president's lies, use of inaccurate information, and disregard for facts have made truth meaningless. As a result, the swift demise of journalistic integrity and The Fourth Estate has occurred with barely a whimper of protest.
The new tragedy of the pandemic, it's criminally negligent mismanagement, and the resulting destruction of our economy has made we the people dispensible subjects of the very sort of despotic regime our Democracy was intended to abolish.
