As Trump wows the public at rallies, Biden seethes behind the castle walls, demanding that his nemesis be convicted and jailed.
The next big news day for the regime will be Verdict Day! Oh, how they will celebrate.
And lest you get carried away with the fantasy that maybe they’ll acquit Trump in the city that made him, think again. There is little chance that the jury will go home to their friends and family and confess they passed on the chance to save Democracy because they had a sudden case of reasonable doubt.
Corrupt president, corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judge, corrupt jury. And Rachel Maddow will declare justice was served and Joe Biden will pretend that a bookeeping error was a big enough crime to warrant indicting a former president.
Reasonable Doubt? It’s been eliminated, along with due process and the presumption of innocence. The only thing that matters is whether or not Bette Midler and Stephen King can sleep at night and that Joe Biden gets to sit in the Big Boy chair at the White House and stare back at us with his tiny, angry, squinty eyes and bark about bloodbaths, dictators and “good people on both sides.”
But nothing Biden has done to Trump has helped move the needle in the polls.
The Democrats and Never Trumpers probably wonder how it is that Donald Trump can still be this popular after everything they’ve thrown at him. They keep doubling down on the hyperbole and overblown attacks against him, resorting to lying outright to win over a handful of low-information voters.
They probably haven’t figured out yet that what they’ve put in motion is a tale as old as time, one that resonates in each of us down to our bones, passed on through the generations, told by campfire light in the worst of times. It’s a story we need to hear again and again because it helps us keep hope alive.
The Hero’s Journey is a trope, to be sure, but it’s also the basis for some of the best movies ever made. We respond to characters put through their paces who come out the other side transformed. We need these stories because without them, what else is there but hopelessness.
The Democrats and Never Trumpers might have been able to convince the American people that Trump is the greatest threat they face. But after four years of Joe Biden, who has used most of his time in office demonizing Trump and his supporters, more Americans are waking up to the real threat to Democracy.
Only one side has jailed political protesters and treated them like terrorists, enlisted the help of the FBI to meddle in our elections to remove an unwanted president from power and install an establishment stooge. Only one side has weaponized the Justice System and the criminal courts to persecute and prosecute their political rivals. Only one side has attempted to take control of social media and police it for “disinformation.”
Without even realizing it, the Democrats have cast Trump as the hero in the Hero’s Journey and themselves as the villains. They’re Voldemort in Harry Potter, Darth Vader, and Governor Tarkin in Star Wars. It won’t matter what else they do to Trump; this story will end the same way.
The only reason Democrats have gotten away with their sudden lurch to authoritarian madness is because of the fast-changing media narrative that turns the page almost daily.
None of this should be even remotely acceptable to any American, and yet, since so many go along with it, including the legacy press, there are no checks on their power. How our information is meted out is whatever it takes to get what they want.
As Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi discuss on America this Week:
What will really condemn them when students of history look back is the unanswerable question of what Trump did to deserve upending the entire country to stop him from winning an election.
They can’t point to mass graves, or lynchings, or genocide. There are no crimes big enough to justify raiding a former president’s home, with authorization to use lethal force, then turning around and gaslighting us with “official protocol” as if any of this is standard procedure.
The truth is that half of what they do is based on their ongoing hysteria and paranoia of who Trump is. They probably imagined he would be like Al Pacino in Scarface when the FBI showed up, say hello to my little friend.
Half of it, though, is knowing who Trump really is but also believing they have to keep putting on a good show to scare voters into keeping them in power.
A Crumbling Empire
When Donald Trump won in 2016, much of American society took a side against him, forming the #resistance. Somehow, they all thought alienating half the country would be good for business. After destroying almost every major industry and institution, from Hollywood to book publishing to science to journalism, they fooled themselves into thinking everything would go back to normal once Trump was out of office.
But it hasn’t gone back to normal. Audiences aren’t showing up for a Hollywood that went woke.
Cable news, despite their nonstop Trump obsession, is also taking a hit. They’re lucky at MSNBC if they can crack one million views. Your average Youtuber gets more than that.
May 15:
And this was from Friday, the 17th:
The last remaining viewers loyal to them are being lied to every second of every day and no one seems to care. They believe what they believed in 2016 and in 2020: whaever it takes to destroy and vanquish Trump and MAGA is justified. But look at what it does to their crediblity to anyone out there who knows the truth.
I went along with it too, for a long time. I thought guys like Rick Wilson, George Conway and Steve Schmidt were the good guys. I thought people like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski would never lie. I even thought Joe Biden was a decent man.
All it took to wake me up to reality, away from delusion, was to watch Trump’s rallies for myself. Once I saw who he really was and who his supporters were, I could see that I’d been lied to, not once or twice, but nonstop everyday since 2016.
The empire is crumbling because they’ve relied on a mass delusion for so long they’ve lost touch with the reality of everyday life in America. How can they possibly know what is true when they all look so petrified, so strung out, so out of their minds with fear of comic book supervillains they invented.
Imagine being Dan Goldman and carrying this around - the fear that Trump is the next Hitler.
Does he really believe it? Or is he just a well-practiced liar?
Trump might not always tell the truth. He might boast and fib and exaggerate, but he’s come to represent the truth for many Americans, which is why they trust him to represent them. It will take decades after their empire collapses to regain the trust of the American voter, the American consumer, and the ordinary American citizen whose eyes have now been opened and do not like what they see.
Says this TikTok user:
The Hero’s Journey
Trump’s rise fits the Hero’s Journey almost too perfectly. He came from the ordinary world of Reality TV and entered the special world of politics, knowing almost nothing. Trump’s power was always concentrated on his willingness to say what couldn’t be said. It made him a well-known contrarian back in the 1980s, and no doubt had much to do with high ratings for Celebrity Apprentice.
In a different time or place, no one would think twice about Trump dabbling in politics. But at a time of extreme thought and language policing, and at a time when the Democrats had more power than they’d had since before the Civil War, with Silicon Valley handing them the keys to the New “special” World online, they became intoxicated by the idea that this was their country now.
Whatever Trump’s reasons for getting into politics, it can best be described as a “call to adventure” that would set him on the hero’s path.
Trump’s mentor might have been Steve Bannon, among others, who helped guide him from the world of television into the shark-infested waters of winning elections, and also helped orchestrate his shocking win in 2016, otherwise known as crossing the threshold.
After that, Trump realized that becoming president meant being attacked by his own government the minute he was sworn in. Almost immediatlely, he was thrust into Tests, Allies and Enemies, which would eventually grow into MAGA.
Who knows what Trump’s fate might have been had he decided not to run again in 2024. But with Biden’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan which trashed his approval ratings, Trump once again decides to run, and here we have The Approach, and eventually, as Joe Biden and maybe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton help coordinate a multi-pronged attack on a former president, Trump is now headlong into the Ordeal.
But Trump, like every hero tested this way, rises to the challenge and somehow deflects their attacks against him. Every minute he has he holds rallies to greet his supporters. He understand inately as he fights this battle that he’s fighting for something bigger and more important than even himself.
Despite what the media says, despite what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris say, Trump has changed. He is more grateful, less arrogant. He is more humble, less hostile. He has learned how to be a real leader and is better at the game now than he was in 2020. And this is what we call the Rebirth.
We don’t yet know the outcome or what the rebirth will be. The story could play out in one of two ways. Trump could win in a landslide in November, Ronald Reagan-style. Or, the system could win the election for Joe Biden as it did in 2020.
But whether Trump wins or not, he still walks away the hero transformed, leaving a country that will never be the same —the reality TV star who fought for reality and truth in a country that had forsaken it.
Trump’s rally in the Bronx shows that his reach is expanding. There is only so much hiding the media can do as the people wake up to this Hero’s Journey that resonates with so many of them:
The Way Back
If Trump somehow survives all of this and wins a second term and maybe finds a formidable Vice President, like JD Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy, then we really are talking about a transformed country by the end of this.
It might end up costing Trump everything, but the one thing he gives the people that they really need, that Joe Biden can’t give them, is hope. Hope for a better America. Hope for the land of opportunity. Hope for girls and women in sports. Hope for a better economy. Hope for a united country.
Hope.
The full video of the Hero’s Journey:
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Trump and The Hero's Journey