Trump and the cult of positive thinking (generation, polls, racism)

[Clarallel]

It's interesting that Trump's only meager connection to "God," since he's clearly not religious (any true Christian would shudder at his cruelty and avarice), is a situation where the "religion" functions rather like a self-help set-up, perfect for a money-grubbing publicity hound like Trump.



The Cult in the White House
Donald Trump, Norman Vincent Peale, and the perils of positive thinking
By Chris Lehmann

The little-noted corollary proposition of the Pealeist creed is that the forces of negativity can never be permitted to gain serious purchase in the believer’s mind; at that moment, all the hard work of retraining your brain to achieve in the face of all seeming adversity simply unravels, as weakness and defeat swamp the poor beleaguered soul of little faith. This is why the dogged media reports on Trump aren’t simply repudiated, per the standard conservative critique, as the bad-faith distortions of a biased, elite-ridden journalistic establishment. No, in the Trump gospel, such reports are always and forever “fake”—that is, a metaphysical affront to the way that reality can and should be ordered. Opponents can’t be interlocutors who honorably dissent—they have to be warped “bad actors.”

https://inthesetimes.com/article/207...ent-Peale-MAGA

[DRob4JC]

Didn't we have a whole generation grow up with the necessity that one must have a positive self-esteem, and we couldn't tell them they were wrong, and parents couldn't discipline them because it might damage their psyche - and now because it's Trump, positivity sucks now.

We made 2+2=5 to protect the kids' esteem... we stopped keeping score of ball games to not hurt the losing teams feelings... we created this alternate universe of everything positive, and now...

This same process of magical thinking drives the Trump presidency. In the president’s alternate-universe Twitter feed, the polls continue to ratify his amazing and historic legislative successes, and it’s Hillary Clinton, not the scores of shady Trump campaign cronies, who has been colluding with the Russians.

...
All of this magical thinking works to systematically blind Trump and his followers to the raging hubris, racism, xenophobia and dishonesty that Trumpism breeds daily. But as the stout Cold War reactionary Norman Vincent Peale himself would likely preach if he were with us today, that blindness is a feature, not a defect, in the wonder-working hydraulics of the positive-thinking creed.

...now they want to complain about others creating an alternate universe.

The truth is... ONCE AGAIN... that those who make these accusations are the ones perpetrating the crime. They are the ones who create an alternate universe. They create the false universe of a Clinton victory instead of looking at where the country truly is. They create the alternate universe of Trump colluding with Russia and broadcast it everyday.