The Sad Truth About Trump’s Fourth Indictment

Yep, I'm being that downer guy who is honest with you.

I asked Substack’s AI image generator to create an image with the prompt “4 Donald Trump faces” and it actually nailed it!

As happy as I am about Trump’s FOURTH INDICTMENT, the sad truth is that it still won’t be enough for many Trump supporters. They’ll continue to imagine Trump as a literal gift from God and a force for good. I know, crazy, right? But these are the same people who believe that they are the superior race—that People of Color should not vote and that People of Color and the LGBTQ community don’t deserve the same rights and treatment as white folks get under the law. These are the folks that believe women shouldn’t have control over their own bodies. And it all stems from the most dangerous belief they have—a belief in God. When you believe something with zero physical proof and point to two thousand years of other folks believing as proof enough for you, you’re failing to notice that you and others like you have been gaslighted for a couple thousand years. This means you’re susceptible to the kind of gaslighting that Trump has done over and over throughout his life.

Combine that character flaw with the Dunning-Kruger Effect (see last week’s thepete’s POV for more on the DKE) and you have a recipe for absolute disaster. Then pile all of that onto how we, as a society, think about failure and being wrong and making mistakes, and how we are all taught to feel shame for any of those things, and it’s even worse.

To put it simply, Americans are programmed (almost like a computer) to believe that they should never be wrong and that if they are, they should be ashamed. This basically means that, as Trump once said, he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and some of his supporters would not care.

It’s because that programming is really effective on some people’s minds.

We’ll have a better sense of how many people’s minds we’re talking about when the Republican primaries happen. Or maybe sooner when Trump shows up at the Fulton County Jail or when he doesn’t.

And the question then will become, will we see another January 6, 2021 event?

Ultimately, the sad truth about Trump’s fourth indictment is that, because of these people have essentially been trained by American society to believe they are right all the time (and to be incapable of admitting it when they are wrong), they may do something extreme because they can’t just recognize reality and say “Oh, this guy is not a good person at all.” and “I was wrong.” They’ll likely cling to their beliefs so hard and justify any act to protect those beliefs.

While I am saying that it’s essentially society’s fault for creating these people, I am clarifying by also saying that these people are capable of learning, capable of self-examining and self-reflection if they just decided to do those things. In the meantime, society needs to stop gaslighting itself. The lies we willingly accept every day need to stop.

I will definitely be writing more about topics that fall under DKE, fear of admitting failure and wrongness, and more.

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Also check out my Ballpoint Adventures Substack! It features a stick figure comic strip that deals with a lot of similar topics as Pete’s POV but are short, thought provoking, and like my writing, always challenging!