I want you to imagine you have just landed in a gleaming majestic Air Force One, to the largest radio rally in history. Instead of thousands cheering as you walk up to the stage, there are millions and millions of patriots out there right now anxiously awaiting to hear from you. No doubt, they’re waving Trump flags, wearing their bright red MAGA hats proudly…
— Media host Rush Limbaugh speaking to President Trump at the start of an October 9, 2020 “radio rally” interview
In Part One, we looked at a quote, shared in the Washington Post, taken from an interview with President Trump on the Rush Limbaugh show:
“And maybe I’ll lose because they’ll say I’m not a nice person. I think I am a nice person. I help people. I like to help people…”
This quote is, of course, taken out of context. The full statement looks more like this:
Joe [Biden] cannot answer a question. Joe, they ask him a question, a very simple question, and he’s reading it off a computer. He’s saying, “Move the computer. Move it, bring it closer, bring it…” He couldn’t see it. “Bring it closer.” On a question that that anybody could answer. I mean, it’s a very simple question. We can’t have this. We could be nice, and maybe I’ll lose because they’ll say I’m not a nice person. I think I am a nice person. I help people. I like to help people, but we can’t have this as our president. We really can’t, Rush.
Mr. Limbaugh’s “radio rally” with the President hit on many other topics, such as, for example, the President’s insistence that he will win the election when the ballots are counted tomorrow.
And we just got great polls out of, you probably heard, out of Arizona, we’re getting them out of Nevada. The real polls, not the fake polls. We’re getting them out of North Carolina, looking really good. I think Pennsylvania is looking good. Florida is looking great. It’s all a big phony deal they have going, Rush, and we’re going to win this. I think it’s going to be a bigger win than we had four years ago.
The full 2-hour interview, on October 9, amounted to about 22,000 words — 22 times longer than this editorial will be. You can download the full 43-page transcript here.
You can find plenty of photos, on the internet, showing President Trump expressing anger, rage, indignation, acrimony, hostility and various other forms of displeasure. I found the photo above, for example, on the right-leaning “My Right American” website.
To judge by the real polls, or the fake polls (take your pick) it appears that about half the voters in certain states are supportive of a President who yells, shakes his fists, and gets people fired up to make America great again. These voters want a President who’s not “nice.” How do you make a country great again, if you go around acting “nice” all day? Sometimes, you’ve got to be willing to punch someone in the face.
So we have to wonder. Was President Trump joking when he said, “I think I am a nice person”? Or does he not know who he really is?
Does he not know why half the nation admires him, and the other half despises him?
I spent some time in counseling, back in the late 1990s. Clarissa and I were not getting along — in fact, we were on teh verge of a divorce — and Clarissa believed counseling would help. I wasn’t so sure. But I agreed that our (at that point, 20-year-partnership) was worth at least an attempt at repairing. Our counselor of choice was a gentleman named John Walden, who had spent much of his adult life in jails and prisons, and who knew a bit about fighting and anger. He had punched many faces in his past life, and had his face punched in return.
But he left that phase of his life behind. He said good-bye to the “blame game.”
John’s counseling techniques were definitely eye-opening, based as they were on several concepts with which I was unfamiliar. For example:
That my emotional pain and suffering resulted largely from a lack of self-knowledge. That, as a young child, I had formed mistaken ideas about who I was, and how the world operated, and I had carried those mistaken ideas, unexamined, into adulthood.
That I lived in denial of my own shortcomings, and as a result, I blamed my partner, my children, my parents — instead of looking in the mirror. That, by fixing blame on the other people in my life, I relieved myself of ‘responsibility’ — the obligation to respond creatively — and thus made real, positive change unlikely.
I credit John Walden with providing Clarissa and I with enough psychological tools to allow our marriage to last an additional 10 years before it fell apart.
Reading through the 43-page interview between radio personality Rush Limbaugh and President Donald Trump, we get a sense of two men who want to make big changes in the world, but who are also more than willing to cast blame and aspersions when things don’t turn out the way they’d hoped. Two men, unwilling to accept personal responsibility when things go to hell.
If you read the interview, neither of these men appear to be “nice”. We easily conclude that they’re both more than willing to engage in the “blame game” and point accusing fingers at everyone except themselves. Democrats, immigrants, China, the media, Black Lives Matter, liberal court justices, public health officials, Muslims, North Korea, environmentalists, the career bureaucrats.
COVID.
Let’s blame the virus. You can’t go wrong when you blame the virus.