View from USA: American politics can only get crazier

Pic.: Spiked-onlin

“Famously, ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a Chinese curse. Americans have got to know this all too well as of late. What horrors and absurdities still await us in the 2024 election?” – writes American ‘Spiked-online’.

Within a month, we Yanks have seen a sitting president reveal his senility during a nationally televised CNN debate. Less than a fortnight later, we saw his opponent survive an assassination attempt. Then, a bandaged-up Donald Trump hosted the Republican National Convention (RNC), alongside rock star Kid Rock, UFC boss Dana White and SlutWalk founder Amber Rose. Now, Joe Biden has departed from the presidential race.

In many ways, this latest development is actually the craziest of them all. Especially considering that, for years now, America’s largest press outlets have been reassuring a nervous citizenry that our octogenarian president is alright, if not better.

This bovine pattern of herd behaviour took place despite the plain fact that Biden often seemed to barely be functional. There has been no end of widely circulated compilation videos of all the president’s ‘gaffes’ and ‘missteps’. These include Biden wandering off stage, falling up multiple flights of stairs, proudly declaring that he has cancer and claiming that a close relative of his was eaten by cannibals.

Biden’s handlers, such as press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, have attempted to downplay and dismiss these clips as ‘cheap-fakes’. But they were clearly not. The reality of Biden’s deterioration was revealed to all during his televised meltdown on the debate stage last month. It was a performance that even the left-leaning CNN summed up as ‘disastrous’.

When it comes to media coverage of former president Donald Trump, we see almost the exact reverse of the narrative surrounding Biden. Trump has spent almost a decade being accused of a range of things that are insane.

Remember the Russiagate conspiracy theory of the 2016 campaign? Large parts of the mainstream media really believed that he was a Russian agent or asset – and that he had hired Russian prostitutes to urinate all over ex-president Barack Obama’s hotel suite bed. Then there were the accusations that he had tried to take over the country by means of the largely unarmed ‘January 6’ riot in 2021. Most recently, his words were taken wildly out of context and misrepresented in the media as calling for a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the 2024 presidential race. Needless to say, all these claims are complete nonsense.

It is quite possible that loose talk of this kind played some role in inspiring would-be presidential assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, the deranged young man who tried to kill Big Orange earlier this month.

A trend that has been unavoidably obvious over the past few weeks is that huge chunks of the American population are beginning to react to this constant elite dishonesty with rage. It is unsurprising, then, that Trump is largely ahead in the polls.

The Trump train has certainly picked up a disparate cast of characters. While some of these people have long displayed conservative political leanings, most, unsurprisingly, have not. And there are a lot more dissatisfied and ‘politically homeless’ Americans where those came from.

It’s been a wild month in US politics. As Trump took the convention stage – ear freshly grazed by an assassin’s bullet, speaking after a pro-wrestler and a white rapper – you have to wonder if this is actually real life. Fortunately or unfortunately, the times we live in could still get even crazier…

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