Sometimes, when you grow older, you lose respect for people that you liked when you were younger. This happened to me with some fairly well-known people. The most glaring example right now would be Donald Trump. Don’t get me wrong: I was never a fan. But not knowing much about him, I just assumed that he was a successful businessman who was the picture of the shameless exploitation that had become the flavor of the moment in the “Me Decade” of the 1980’s. In fact, he seemed to me to be the very symbol of that decade of excess greed, like no one else. I had been under the apparently mistaken assumption that the fictional Gordon Gekko, who famously summed up the excesses of the age with the declaration, “Greed is good. Greed works.”
If anybody embodied that belief, it was Trump.
That has not changed. But what has changed is my perception of Trump himself. Whereas I had assumed that all that was wrong with Trump back then was excess greed and a narcissism not easily overlooked or dismissed, I now view him in an even more negative light. That likely would have seemed unlikely when I was younger, but it is true. Now, I view him as narcissistic on a level quite possibly and literally never matched before in human history. Where I had assumed that he was morally bankrupt, but competent, now I view him as morally bankrupt on a level that somehow dwarfed what I believed of him then, but also astonishingly incompetent and, frankly proudly ignorant. The narcissism which was quite obvious even back then has now appears to be on a historical level rarely, if ever, matched before. If he seemed obsessed with getting his name on the tops of skyscrapers dominating our cities back then, in the eighties, he now seems intent on making sure his name is repeated and praised not just across the land, but all around the world, and that he be effectively appointed “President for life.” Ah, I know that he claims that he is joking, but my own belief is that he is in fact deadly serious. He throws these ideas out there to test them out, to see how they are received, and then backs down if he gets too much negative press from it. In typical fashion, he laughs it off, as if he is laughing at the media or any others who claim that he is serious when he claims to be clearly joking. This is all that we can expect of a megalomaniac on a level that I suspect none of us have ever seen before.
Now, on the flip side, my impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger was mostly negative back in the eighties, as well. Even while I enjoyed some of his movies, particularly the Terminator movies, he seemed to exude my impressions of a mindless musclehead. All bulk in his arms and legs and torso, but not much going on upstairs.
How wrong I was!
This is not to say that I agree with everything that Schwarzenegger says. He is a Republican, after all. I do not really identify with Democrats anymore, but never in my life have I identified with Republicans. A lot of the idiocy that has become accepted and championed under Trump actually took root on a national level in the eighties, particularly during the political wave of what came to b known as the “Reagan Revolution.” It seems that ever since then, Republicans and Democrats alike have come to embrace this ideology and economic approach more fully, even while tinkering with it. It seemed that both political parties were irrevocably altered from that point onward. When Clinton came in, he effectively embraced the economic elitism championed by Reagan, and made it a little more easy for those who identify with the left, with Democrats, to swallow. Since then, the Democrats have effectively come closer and closer to what Republicans in the eighties were. Meanwhile, the Republicans were forced to go farther to the right, to the point that it began resembling lunacy. Yet, since they are one of two major parties, this extremism was nevertheless accepted into what has become mainstream political thinking in the United States. That was what made a President Trump possible. Frankly, he might not be the worst that we end up seeing. I still am a bit nervous that we may have someone even worse somewhere down the line.
So Schwarzenegger, as a Republican, seemed to embrace an ideology that, quite frankly, remained very foreign and seemingly unfriendly to me. When he became Governor of California in the 2000’s after a recall of the previous governor, it felt like just yet another sign of how the country had taken a very wrong turn. I still remember reading about how Orin Hatch of Utah was trying to change the laws to allow a foreign-born citizen to become the president, with Schwarzenegger obviously being the one he had in mind.
Yet, as California Governor, and a Republican one at that, he wound up not seeming too bad, truth be told. As governor, Schwarzenegger never tried to undermine the science behind climate change, which made him a relatively rare breed among nationally famous Republicans. In fact, he was a leader in the field of combating climate change, better frankly than most Democrats, which made him stand out. And he seemed more reasonable and, yes, intelligent, than I had wrongly supposed.
Schwarzenegger also blasted Trump quite regularly throughout his presidency, which is another way that he stood out from most of his fellow Republicans, and which gave me great respect for him. Indeed, Schwarzenegger was very critical of Trump consistently from the very beginning of his presidency. Yet, he never cut quite so deeply and mercilessly on Trump as he did in a nearly eight-minute video released just a couple of days ago. Obviously, he spoke about what is on everyone’s mind, which is the insurrection at the Capitol building last week, which Trump played an obvious role in launching, and has received very justified and nearly universal condemnation for.
The former Californian governor lambasted Trump. Like Joe Biden did in one of the debates, Schwarzenegger suggested that Trump was the “worst president in history,” which is one thing that I can definitely agree with.
But Schwarzenegger did not merely blast Trump, and his band of cultish supporters. He also compared what is happening in the United States right now to what happened in the lead-up to Hitler and the Nazis taking over in Germany. In fact, he warned that Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol building was the equivalent of a very dark day in German history, one that still lives on as an early warning sign of the horrors to come in Nazi Germany.
Colin Campbell, Managing Editor of Yahoo! News, succinctly summed up Schwarzenegger's sentiments:
President Trump “sought a coup by misleading people with lies. My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies,” the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger said, adding that Kristallnacht was conducted “by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys,” one of the right-wing groups that assembled in support of Trump's false claims about the election. Egged on by Trump, the rioters stormed the Capitol Building and temporarily halted Congress’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Congress reconvened and certified Biden’s win later that night.
Here, a bit more directly, is what the former California governor said of Trump, and the situation that the United States as a nation finds itself in:
"Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States," Schwarzenegger says in the video, which by Sunday afternoon had been viewed nearly 12 million times. "The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. They shattered the ideals we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded."
"Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men drinking away their guilt with their participation in the most evil regime in history," he says. "Not all of them were rabid anti-Semites or Nazis. Many just went along step by step down the road. They were the people next door."
"My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies. And I know where such lies lead," he recalls in the video. "President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever."
However, Schwarzenegger was not all doom and gloom. He suggested that he has strong faith in the United States, and felt certain that it would not deteriorate to the point where such a horrific chapter in history would effectively be repeated here in the United States, even while his prognostications served as warnings that such disasters could befall us if we, as a nation, allow them to.
As I mentioned earlier, I have only grown more impressed with Schwarzenegger as I grew older. I was wrong to assume that he was just some mindless musclehead. In fact, he is one of the most impressive voices out there among prominent politicians, or former politicians. And despite having been born in a foreign nation (or perhaps, in part, because he was born in a foreign nation), he seems to me to embody the best that this country has to offer far, far more than our current sitting president (at least for a few more days) or any of his cultish followers, who like sheep do whatever their "fearless leader" demands of them, without thinking on their own. In this era of Trump, when we have seen countless Republicans who proved to be spineless when they should have spoken loudly and clearly against things that Trump has done which were clearly and absolutely wrong, we should all be thankful for this example of a brave American - and a Republican, no less! - speaking out eloquently and without margin for misunderstanding against the biggest threat to our democracy, and indeed, to what remains of our morals and good standing in the world. That is what we are going to need, even if Trump himself will soon be history. Because whether or not Trump runs again, or however much he controls the Republican party behind the scenes, it is clear that Trumpism is not simply going to go away anytime soon. It will remain a threat for the foreseeable future, and it urgently needs to be defeated.
Below are the links to the two news articles that I used in writing this particular blog entry, and from which I obtained the quotes used above. There are video clips where you can watch the entire nearly eight-minute video, as well, so please take a look:
Recalling Nazis From His Childhood, Arnold Schwarzenegger Decries The Capitol Assault by Kat Lonsdorf, January 10, 2021:
Schwarzenegger invokes Nazi Germany in powerful video denouncing Capitol Hill riot by Colin Campbell·Managing Editor, Sun, January 10, 2021:
https://news.yahoo.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-capitol-hill-riot-kristallnacht-155259895.html
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