Mr. Donald Trump Is Being Compared To ALL The Villains

By
Liberal America
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Backlash from Mr. Donald Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from coming into the U.S. have had an incredible backlash world-wide, with Adolf Hitler being only the most-obvious and most-often-made analogy for behavior of The Trump. But the list of villains Trump is being compared to is long…and it’s easy to see why.

  • Gameskinny.com laid out an entire slideshow describing Trump’s likeness to a wide array of classic video-game villains, from Dr. Robotnik to Bowser.
  • Attn.com’s Thor Benson put together a stunning piece comparing and contrasting The Trump with Emperor Palpatine — noting “only one of them has any experience in government.”

https://vine.co/v/i7OIQrTK1ev

  • The writer of the script for Back to the Future II admitted that the movie’s villain, Biff Tanner, was directly based on Donald Trump.
  • The New York Daily News featured a full-front-page political cartoon that did the Hitler thing in a particularly spectacular way.

  • And in perhaps the most certain display of The Donald’s uber-villainy, America’s white-supremacist corps came out in strong support of the candidate after he laid out his immigration plan.

So what’s the deal? How is it that we’ve come to the point where two-thirds of the conservative base of the United States is polling in full support of a plan that is evoking such intense contempt from the rest of the world?

More importantly, how is it that those two-thirds are so blind to the understanding that, as Tom Brokaw put it in a segment that absolutely everyone reading this right now should click through and watch, “defeating ISIS will be long, hard, and expensive…even more so now because ISIS is likely to use Donald Trump’s statements as a recruiting tool”?

A Long-Standing Hate
What a lot of liberals don’t really realize is just how deeply ingrained in the conservative media the anti-Muslim mythos actually is. The Atlantic points out that the role of ‘semi-entertainment/semi-serious, deeply anti-Muslim public figure’ has been around since 9/11, moving from Ann Coulter to Mike Huckabee to Mr. Donald Trump. “He’s exploiting a market for anti-Muslim bigotry that conservatives have nurtured for more than a decade,” author Peter Beinart writes, “…[H]he’s just the latest, and most successful, in a string of GOP contenders—from Herman Cain in 2012 to Ben Carson this year—who have proposed denying American Muslims basic rights.”

But is there hope for America in the face of such a deeply lame success story? Sure there is.

The Extinction Burst of an Honor Culture
An ‘extinction burst’ is a known phenomenon in which a behavior that has worked in the past but suddenly stopped working is repeated frequently and violently. According to a beautiful essay on Acculturated.com, our best hope is that Donald Trump represents the extinction burst of the honor culture that America held until the turn of the 20th century. The theory, says author Charlotte Hays, is that we have transitioned over the last 100 years from a culture where you had to earn honor by being a tough sonofabitch and not letting anyone get the better of you, to one where you are granted dignity and expected deal with minor annoyances by walking away and major ones via the legal system.

If Mr. Donald Trump’s villainy gets him elected, the dignity culture is in for a long, hard struggle to survive. If he’s beaten, we can all cross our collective fingers and pray that Hays is right and the right-wing need to “win” everything can soon and finally be laid to rest.

 

(Featured image courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)

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