I’ve come to realize that the Obama Cult and the Trump Cult are two sides of the same personality-cult coin. The cognitive dissonance between what the Trump faction hated about Obama and what they love about Donald is so far beyond ironic it would take a team of trained linguists and semioticians decades to decode. But I’ll try.
You hated Barack Obama’s cult-like followers, with their mindless stares of adoration, their impervious barrier between emotion and reason, and their instant fury when confronted with the facts about his record, his history, or his philosophy.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated Obama’s shallow, facile rhetoric, with its hollow promises and loose, lowest-common-denominator word-vomit disconnected from any real policy.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated how Obama was gleefully lying to credulous low information voters, filling them with empty promises of economic prosperity that would never come, based on plans that could never be achieved.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated how Obama lied about his positions on single-payer healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, and abortion to get elected, knowing that if he ever revealed the truth about what he believed that he’d be unelectable.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated how Obama rode the wave of constant attention from the mainstream media into office, and how they played along with his game, draining the life out of every other candidate by describing him as an inevitable juggernaut, an unstoppable political force, and a game-changer who was tapping into something deep and powerful in American political life.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated how Obama’s naive ignorance of the real and brutal world of international affairs was papered over by his hollow promises to make the world respect the United States again.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated Obama’s casual disdain for people who weren’t from a major city where, you know, all the rich, smart, educated, liberal people like him live.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated Obama’s elite credentialism, and how he yielded his Harvard and Columbia degrees to browbeat his aspiring-class opponents from outside the meritocracy, and how he used them to cow an already docile press.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated that smug, arrogant, sneering affect that took hold the moment he thought the cameras weren’t looking.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated Obama’s cadre of sleazy, weird, creepy advisers, with their combination of over-the-edge ideological fervor and their stench of petty corruption.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated Obama’s support for bail-outs, too-big-to-fail, and big, taxpayer-funded government intervention in dying industries.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated his comfy alliance with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the odious Clinton crime family.
But you love it from Trump.
You hated his cavalier disdain for private property rights.
But you love it from Trump.
Everything that set your teeth on edge, and raised your hackles and made you loathe Barack Obama is there in Donald Trump. Every aspect of the con game Obama played on America in 2008 – the obsessive focus on one base issue (for Obama the war in Iraq, for Trump, Mexicans), the cult-like obsession, the instant attacks on apostates, the willful ignorance of his history and his beliefs – is present in Trump.
Everything you despised in Obama is there.
But you love it from Trump.
Rick Wilson is a national Republican media consultant and campaign adviser.
