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Timothy Snyder on why authoritarians like Trump can’t handle leaving office.

[T]yrants always die. The empty heterosexual posturing, the shirtless photo ops, the misogyny and indifference to the female experience, the anti-gay campaigns, are designed to hide one basic fact: A cult of personality is sterile. It cannot reproduce itself. The cult of personality is the worship of something temporary. It is thus confusion and, at bottom, cowardice: The leader cannot contemplate the fact that he will die and be replaced…

This is how UD accounts for Trump’s otherwise unaccountable ignoring/indifference/magical thinking in regard to the most appalling pandemic of our time. The phenomenon involves death. Soldiers who die in battle, Trump says, are “suckers.” You get the drift.

“A cult of personality says that one person is always right; so after his death comes chaos.” Ah, but Trump believes himself to be deathless. Death is for suckers. He operates on an unimaginably higher plane.

Which is why it’s so easy for Bill Maher to make us laugh right now. All he has to do – as Aristotle counseled – is bring the Immortal down fast, and with a big bump.


If this presidency is a bar, it is way past closing time. We need that guy who goes “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Margaret Soltan, November 14, 2020 9:17AM
Posted in: Genius of the Carpathians

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