It’s been a while since I’ve heard the expression “50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” It’s a line from a song lyric, c. 1927. I’m not quoting it for its authenticity beyond the common sense notion that there is strength in numbers. Still, we cannot rely on junk beliefs no matter how many people hold them. In particular, it boggles my mind how 75 million Americans could possibly have voted for Donald Trump to be given another 4 years in the White House. It’s not very comforting knowing that 82 million voted for Joe Biden. Those 75 million brain-washed people can do a lot of damage. Here’s the lowdown.

According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump told more than 30,000 bald-faced lies during his White House years. That fact, alone, should have scared the daylights out of at least 50 million of his followers. It didn’t. Trump cozied up to Kim Jong Un and to Vladimir Putin in a set of mano a mano relationships. That scared me even if they kept their pants on. The anti-immigration Wall was a waste of everyone’s time and money. It made Donald’s day, perhaps his presidency. Packing the Supreme Court with “mighty righties” was straight from the playbook of totalitarian rulers. It made his ideologues happy as pigs in poop. His ability to identify the elephant from among four dissimilar animals in a picture made him believe he was a genius. He had no idea he was being tested for dementia. The list goes on. But his lack of contact with reality showed itself like a cheap amateur production with his insistence that he won the election, despite overwhelming evidence to contrary. The brazen insurrectionist attack by his followers on the halls of Congress validated how easily ideologues can be led to the cliff overlooking the Great Abyss...and told to jump. Meanwhile, the other 7.5 billion inhabitants of planet Earth are scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is wrong with the American people that we haven’t hog-tied this idiot, and put him in a padded room somewhere over the rainbow?

Well, what is wrong? Is it that herd mentality syndrome at work? Are his followers like the brain-dead followers of Adolf Hitler when he piled up 50 million bodies as proof that one demented mind can bring on death and destruction beyond the limits of normal human assimilations?

Don’t take my word for it. Read “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President - Updated and Expanded with New Essays.” In nice language these learned 37 head doctors concluded that Donald Trump is a verifiable nut case. Nevertheless, 100 percent of the Republicans in the United States Congress are still his loyal suck-ups—excepting only Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. Why? Have they all lost their marbles? And what about those on his Twitter follower list? Are they still believers in the make-believe world of a certifiable nut?

It was Trump aide Kellyanne Conway who gave us “alternate facts” whenever Trump uttered another of his lies. She was the lady who could connect 10 different subjects in a single breath in a stream of consciousness that could stop a hapless reporter cold in his tracks. She not only confused fact-checkers with her mumbo-jumbo, she cloaked Trump’s lies with the panache of pseudo-intellectualism and alternate universes. Clever lady. What happened to her? Did she get fed up with him before she jumped ship?

Hitler also kept a grandiose place inside his head that scholars of the demented labeled, Germania. Here is a citation from Wikipedia about his vision of his Third Reich and a post-war Germania:

Racism, Nazi eugenics, and especially antisemitism, were central ideological features of the regime. The Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and the persecution of Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power. The first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, and liberals, socialists, and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed and many leaders imprisoned. Education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organized via the Strength Through Joy program, and the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, and Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion. The government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others.

Trumpism, like Hitler’s Germania, is delusional, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, anti-women, anti-Muslim, anti-Christianity, and anti-everybody and everything that does not give its allegiance to a self-centered clown, with very limited mental abilities, and no respect for anyone other than himself. Buy into this fake reality if you must, but please do so on another planet far away in another universe.

My preceding comment is not for our astute AD readers. It’s for those brain-dead followers who believe that the assault on the Capitol was just a normal day there, that 60 lost legal appeals about a rigged election to 60 different judges make all those judges wrong, and that the best is yet to come...and the worst.

Dickens had it right.