10 Commandments of Trumpism
Pro-Trump street art in Los Angeles
The inauguration of President Donald Trump, a man whose previous claim to fame was making a small fortune by inheriting a large one, reveals a lot of truths that are shocking to the world at large, and embarrassing, diminishing, and direful to the American nation.
Forget for a moment whether Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice than Trump, or how Barack Obama rates in retrospect as a President. And let’s not try to locate Trump on any map of political ideologies, because he’s too scatterbrained for ideology. What follows is an attempt to organize his excrescences into something like a definition of Trumpism, since he’s incapable and unwilling of doing that for himself – and we need a better grip on what we’re up against.
Here follow 10 key commandments of Trumpism, inferred from deeds and words of the man himself, and of the people he’s selected to run the country under his brand:
1. Men shall, at their own discretion, hold and exert power over women, including but not limited to assaulting wives or partners, dates, employees, and other uppity broads as necessary -- and deciding the fate of fetuses in women’s wombs.
2. People who appear to have European ancestry, primarily with pinkish pale skin color, shall, wherever possible, assert power over people who appear to have other ancestries. This will apply particularly to immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans making trouble in ghettos, but also to foreign leaders from anywhere other than Britain, Russia, and a few others who look like them and talk our talk.
3. Men’s accomplishments and merits are measured by how much money they can plausibly claim to have, it being unnecessary for those numbers to be publicly verified or taxed if the claimant has sufficient cajones or weapons.
4. No public good, be it a thing such as a park, a service such as education, or an amenity such as clean air, should be mandated, regulated, or financed by government, if there’s a profit-driven business willing to do the job.
5. War and other transnational interactions such as access to land, sea, air and space, and trade, plus all consequences of such interactions, intended or not, will be managed on behalf of the USA by men whose businesses top-prioritize short-term profitability. In this spirit, we will encourage broadening the global market for nuclear weapons.
6. Activities that are not self-evidently beneficial to practitioners or the public at large, such as all forms of art, or whose benefits are attested to by experts but don’t make sense to me, such as controlling greenhouse gases, workplace conditions (including wages), or vaccinations, will henceforth be left to the invisible hand of the marketplace.
7. The United States shall not promulgate notions of inherent rights, or moral or ethical priorities, in either the global sphere (see 5th Commandment above), or -- the US Constitution as amended notwithstanding – domestically, except by Presidential tweet.
8. America belongs in the Material Men’s Sect of Christianity in which Jesus is not Semitic and his teachings are irrelevant but OK except those concerning rich men and needles, and loving the dispossessed, both of which were fake news written by Marxist priests. Other core beliefs, such as requiring that fetal remnants from abortions be buried at funeral homes, as Vice President Pence proposed for Indiana, will be made the law of the land if Christian voters in strategic electorates say so.
9. Given that certain core beliefs of Judaism overlap with our Christian values, eg that Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem and was given gifts by Gulf Kings, the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu will be more than ever defended by US military as if it were American soil. The fact that my fellow casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is a fundamentalist Zionist who contributed $35 million to my election campaign is also irrelevant. And -- the US will finally take back our oil from under the sands of Iran, Iraq and the other ones.
10. Acts designed to shame or criticize the POTUS, such as suing Him for rape or writing detailed and irrefutable exposes of His corrupt business practices, or suggesting that his election by one in four voting-age Americans does not constitute a mandate, or that hundreds of thousands of voters were systematically prevented or dissuaded from voting, will not go unpunished.
Throughout these Commandments it is assumed that “men” might occasionally include women, at the discretion of the man or men in charge.
Challenges to any or all of these Commandments on Constitutional grounds will be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, now divided equally between “liberals” and “conservatives” but, given that three of eight justices are either over-80 or dead, will soon be the Trump-Supreme Court.
And if you or anyone you know (and might even love) is still saying “give the man a chance” or “anything’s better than the status quo”, show them the bios of the hundreds of people he’s choosing to populate the pyramid of powerful people immediately below him in Washington and around the world. Pretty much to a man, they are proven purveyors of the inhumane agenda embodied in the above Commandments. They are the real deplorables.