Dolchstoß-Legende and Trump's Lost Cause

 

So, about 156 years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the statue of the general came down in Richmond because sometimes, you just have to take the "L". Even if over 150 years later. It's not that the statue didn't still have some current support, like the folks who supported Confederate monuments back in 2017. It's that the support they have doesn't recognize the reality that treason in support of chattel slavery is actually very bad. Dress it up however they want to--the Civil War was fought and the union won. We acknowledge the citizenship of those born here of whatever their origin. Our Constitution guarantees to all citizens their equal protection under the law. 

(With varying degrees of enforcement, but I am not addressing that today. Although I want the Supreme Court to consider this clause with all their attention regardless of their partisan affiliations and realize the trouble that this country went to to finally find the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence--to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a matter for government not to fail to interfere with, but to positively protect.)

This blog has been keeping track of The Former Guy's habit of myth-making, and his attention to the Civil War. He has shamelessly compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, never understanding just quite why The Railsplitter dwarfs him. 

But his recent missive into the world from his Mar-a-Lago exile (where he still declares he never lost the 2020 election--a lost cause if I ever heard one) is uniquely absurd:

The radical left is very responsible for ending the racism of the Confederacy--okay, I guess we can take the credit for trying although I don't think we're fully there, yet. And maybe Lee was great (or at least, competent) for all his wins if you don't count his losses. But saying Lee would've been great if we had him in Afghanistan seems like a bit much. 

We were in Afghanistan 20 years. Lee was done and dusted in like 5. I don't even know how these thoughts came together in his head except for trying to create a Dolchstoß-Legende for Afghanistan where we forget that Trump negotiated with the Taliban and released 5000 Taliban fighters and drew down the US presence to where we had few to no good options. He set Biden up because he knew he lost. Trump read the polls and knew he had lost. That's why he was crying about fraud well before the election. To save face like a little weak loser, so he never had to admit he was one who pissed his future legacy away.

He did it. The stab in the back was him. He fucked it up. He also fucked up his own 2020 campaign by choking like a dog over Covid-19 and failing to get Covid-19 under  control, failing to protect the economy in any way, needlessly beefing with blue state governors, and being a sad impeached bitch who incited an insurrection and got himself impeached again. He's still instigating and dividing, when Lincoln, the guy he recklessly compared himself to, reminded us that "A house divided against itself could not stand".  

If the media could do one thing right: report this shit correctly today, not before you all get excited and let this racist, America-hating egomaniac run again in 2024. He wants to run on being robbed and on the Confederacy being robbed.

The Confederacy. He's proposing that if America was more white supremacist, we would have won the War on Terror. Because Whiteness. Because the willingness to be more horrific could have existed. Because we weren't on Trump's side enough. We could have clicked our heels and let Trump win all the things. Him and the spirit of Robert E. Lee, and Eddie Gallagher, and god only knows. Because white supremacists and people who really love war crimes are his really big fans right now. 

And as I live and breathe, we, I mean, America, the Beautiful, deserves so much better than his moral decay and mental delusions. 

But we are living in a dumbass time, and somehow he still has supporters.  And I have to, by now, think the worst of them, because whatever could be good in them is obscured by such a terrible fault.