Saved by the Devil
Trump takes office. Surely he will destroy the world. But what if, God forbid, he saves it?
What would you do if you were saved by the person you despise most in the world?
Would you rather be left to suffer—to die—than to accept salvation at the hands of a monster? Or would your desperation to escape suffering—to survive—overpower your revulsion and rage, compelling you to accept aid no matter the source?
If you chose salvation, how would you then integrate into your worldview the previously inconceivable reality that someone you detested with every fiber of your being, someone who you knew with metaphysical certainty to be evil incarnate, was in fact not only capable of competence, but capable of good, and worst of all... good on your behalf?
I find this to be a fascinating conundrum. I suppose I should; I’m writing about it. We often wish to place people in neatly organized, distinct categories of friend or foe, good or evil. But life does not always (if ever) acquiesce to our desire for such Manichean conveniences.1
This dilemma is presented with powerful poignancy in the 2004, Academy Award-winning film Crash. While not my favorite film (or even my favorite film named Crash), the film did have some great moments and excellent performances. Chief among them, a later sequence where a young woman, Christine Thayer (Thandiwe Newton), gets into a car crash that leaves her trapped, upside-down, in her mangled SUV as gasoline drips down around her, pooling dangerously close to another vehicle burning nearby. Police sergeant John Ryan (Matt Dillon) responds to the accident, heroically dashing to the vehicle in an attempt to drag the injured Christine to safety before she is killed in the imminent explosion.
While a compelling setup in its own right, the preceding paragraph would be at home in any number of Hollywood action flicks or TV melodramas. What makes this scene so compelling is that all-important element: context.
You see, though Christine does not realize it immediately, this is not the first time she and John Ryan have met. Earlier in the film, Sergeant Ryan pulled over her and her husband, Cameron (Terrence Howard), in a traffic stop. Over the course of the stop, John proceeds to humiliate them, groping Christine, and coercing Cameron into apologizing in order to avoid trumped up charges. Afterward, the victimized couple is “allowed” to go on their way, shattered by the trauma, haunted by the spectre of John’s vile abuse. John is never held accountable.
Then, fate intervenes, Christine crashes her car, and her life and John’s collide once more, with results that neither could have expected…
The scene marks the intersection of brilliant (if a bit heavy-handed) writing, directing, acting, scoring, and (along with the always wonderful Michael Peña’s “magic cape” sequence) likely won the film its Oscars (much to the chagrin of gay cowboy enthusiasts across the world). It also has always stuck with me for how viscerally it presents the unique and multifaceted question with which I began this article:
What would you do if you were saved by the person you despise most in the world?
As I type this, today is January 20th, 2025, the day of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States of America. The nation is suffering. It is in dire peril. Runaway inflation, gas prices, economic turmoil, drug addiction, and homelessness, declining physical and mental health, declining IQs and test scores, Big Pharma run amok, vaccine injuries, rampant crime, the border crisis, the disastrous Afghanistan withdraw, the Gaza bombardment, endless war in the Ukraine, censorship, neo-racist DIE policies, transanity, dystopian surveillance, weaponized and compromised bureaucracy, corporate collusion… the list of calamities itself is endless, to say nothing of more whimsical tales of late, like Chinese spy balloons and swarms of mysterious drones wafting through our airspace.2
The Biden administration, and the Uniparty it fronts, has overseen one of the most disastrous periods in American history. It has crashed the SUV of the USA. Its supporters are trapped upside-down, battered and bruised, in the mangled wreck as gasoline drips down around them. Actually, that might even be an improvement because at least that would mean they could afford gas.
Regardless, they have flipped the car of the nation, and they need help. Fast.
As they peer blurry-eyed and bloodied through the cracked windshield, a patrol car pulls up next to them, and who is that they see rushing to their rescue?
For the past decade, the mainstream media has been running a ceaseless loop of Two Minutes Hate about Donnie. It was the subject of one of the first articles I published here. It has come up in several articles since. (Case in point.) The media has convinced a sizable portion of the proles that Donald Trump is—with no sliver of irony or hyperbole—Adolf Hitler, the Devil, and, of course, an existential threat to Our Sacred Secular Democracy©. This has severely impaired some people’s cognitive ability and emotional stability. It even seems to have driven people to violence, including suicide, murder, and multiple asssassination attempts.
As I explained in an earlier article:
The bedrock of the Dem Faithful’s belief system—more fundamental and unshakable than protecting their children; than their own senses, sanity and ego; than their very own existence—is that TRUMP IS UNIQUELY EVIL AND MUST BE STOPPED.
[…]
You may not be able to fully understand this thought process, to put yourself in that mindset, but the sooner you accept it exists, the sooner Dem Faithful behavior makes sense. The Party need offer them nothing. The Party can abuse or deceive them at will. Nothing will unmoor their metaphysical certitude that Trump is uniquely evil and must be stopped.3
I only risk belaboring this point because at first glance my comparison to the scene in Crash, with the deeply personal trauma that Christine has to confront in that car, surely feels grotesquely exaggerated compared to how a random Democrat voter might feel about some fat, orange, floppy-haired, carnival-barker-turned-politico whom they’ve never even met.
However, it is no exaggeration in the minds of the many people who loathe The Don. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is very real. They regard Trump—like the character of John Ryan—as a repugnant, racist rapist drunk on power and privelege4, and they feel intimately violated and menaced by him. I personally know people who have told me they hate Trump more than relatives who actually abused them. The innumerable “meltdown” montages that exist, compiling videos people willingly recorded and uploaded themselves, further substantiates this phenomenon. It just happens to serendipitously align with my leitmotif here that these videos also tend to be filmed in cars.
Speaking of thematic, comedian and late-night talk show host Bill Maher provided an extraordinary example of this mentality that was near word-perfect for my purposes. On the June 8th, 2018 episode of his show, Maher literally wished for an economic “crash”—replete with all of its concomitant suffering and death—in order to rid himself of the execrable Trump. He would rather watch the world burn than to see Trump help it, opining:
I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point, and by the way, I'm hoping for it because I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy. So please, bring on the recession. Sorry if that hurts people but it's either root for a recession, or you lose your democracy.
What would you do if you were saved by the person you despise most in the world?
What if Trump not only does not destroy the world, as the mainstream media has reliably informed us he will, what if he saves it? That may also sound horribly hyperbolic, but we’ve already seen some apparently positive developments over in Israel. Will we see similar amelioration of the conflict in Ukraine? Would it be hyperbole to say that both of those situations, if they worsened, could lead to a global conflagration? If so, then simply by presiding over a de-escalation on those fronts, the Trump administration could save the world. And that is on a macro level. If his policies rescue people from abject poverty, or prevent someone from losing their life to addiction or crime, then for those people and their families there is no greater salvation to be found.
I suspect there are several possible paths such a person’s mind might pursue. If they hate Trump, but find their lives improving under his presidency, the media will certainly offer any number of coping mechanisms—possibly even orchestrating a large-scale synchronization ritual—to assuage the cognitive dissonance.
“Things were great all along, and you just didn’t notice over all those hunger pangs, citizen!”
“Trump just happens to be in office now and is trying to steal credit, but the truth is it was the hard work of the
Biden andHarris administration that got us back on track!”“Don’t believe your lying eyes, citizen! Things are actually way worse now under Trump, with your apartment and your food and your self respect… Think about how much better things were when you couldn’t afford anything and were getting dive-bombed by spy drones while hoofing it to the homeless shelter!”
So, I am certain that even if their lives improve under Trump’s reign, many of his more zealous detractors will find ways to avoid acknowledging that.5
However, some people may allow for nuance in their evaluation of Trump over time. “He is still a degenerate, but his policies and cabinet picks have been good overall.”6
Still others may change their minds completely. “I tell ya, that ol’ Donnie ain’t so bad after all.”
Perhaps the more intriguing development would be how such a shift might impact someone’s worldview, not merely their view of a particular politician. What does it mean if something you knew to be true proves to be false? What does it mean if your heuristics for assessing and categorizing people prove insufficient or outright inaccurate? Can our devils be redeemed?
Longtime readers will need no reminder, but for the neophytes among you, let me note that I mainly peddle in thought experiments here. I am more interested in exploring the dark, byzantine catacombs weaving their way beneath a story, down in the primal, archetypal soil, than I am in just arguing the usual Red Team/Blue Team talking points.7
I say that because it is possible that Trump will be a terrible president and people’s fears about him will be validated. It is possible that he will be just a particularly flamboyant clown in a long line of dancing marionettes paraded out to preside over our perpetual panem et circenses.
It is possible to flip this question and ask the particularly ardent Trump devotees (those suffering from the other extreme of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”) how they would react to Trump betraying their faith and leaving them to “burn” (to continue to torture my extended Crash analogy). Leaving them to rot in solitary confinement for years after being ensnared in a false flag at the Capitol while trying to peacefully support him at his behest. Leaving them to suffer in shamed silence after his beloved, ballyhooed “vaccine” took their health or the lives of their loved ones. There is no shortage of potential coping mechanisms and media manipulation on this end of the spectrum either.
It is possible to ask raving Biden detractors how they would’ve reacted if he had actually done a good job and impro—OK, I can’t even type that one with a straight face, but you get the idea. There are myriad permutations.8
One of those permutations is that Donald J. Trump, “demon to some, angel to others,” ends up being a great president who works to meaningfully improve the lives of many Americans, even those who despise him. After the last four years, “improvement” isn’t a high bar to clear. When you’re bleeding out upside-down in a burning wreck, bleeding out on a stretcher instead starts to seem pretty appealing. Perhaps that was the plan all along.
In either case, it strikes me that all Americans are trapped in this crashed-car country together. Here’s hoping we can work together to get ourselves out of this mess. And here’s hoping we can avoid such calamities down the road so that we won’t need saving. From anyone.
I used “Manichean.” For those of you playing the official drinking game: take a shot! [Note: I am kidding! Don’t drink or do drugs, kids!]
Government: “We have absolutely no idea what the drones are, what they are doing, where they are from, where they are going, who is piloting them, or anything else whatsoever… but fear not, citizen! We can assure you—with 100% confidence—that they definitely are absolutely nothing for you to be concerned about. Back to sleep now. Pleasant dreams.”
Also, I should note, I am not saying that the outgoing regime is solely responsible for this whole Pandora’s Box of politics, nor am I saying that the incoming regime is going to magically solve all of these things.
It is somewhat outside the focus of this particular post (hence getting footnoted), but nonetheless—if only to shoo away some Newmanoids—I feel obligated to share the subsequent paragraph from that past article to make clear that I am by no means asserting that people have to be Republicans or Conservatives (I am neither.), nor that they must like, respect, or vote for Trump. (I have done some of those things.) Heck, I know very smart and caring people who voted for Harris. What can I say? “The net is vast and infinite.”
Of course, this diagnosis need not apply to someone just because they happen to be on “the Left,” or an old-school Liberal, or a progressive, or dislike Trump, or oppose his policies, or was aligned with Democrat platforms in the past, et cetera, et cetera… I have no issue agreeing to disagree with people who choose to vote for a third-party candidate—or not to vote at all—for such reasons. I am not talking about those people. No, this is the exclusive domain of the true Dem Faithful, the face-shield and triple-maskers who still think Trump praised Nazis and led an insurrection, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinfo, people who uncritically imbibe Joy Reid-Behar and think listening to NPR on the way to grab a Mocha Fapalottacino at Starbucks and a fourteenth booster at the Walgreens makes them a member of the Global Brain Trust.
Basically, Sam Harris.
And to be sure, stealing credit for positive changes and avoiding blame for bad ones is a timeless tradition among all politicians and parties.
For my part, I tend to look at things this way. Politics is a brutal world, and it requires a very special set of skills to survive there, let alone thrive. It’s like the gladiatorial games. If I had to choose an actual gladiator and my life depended on him (Sorry, ladies.) winning in the ancient Coliseum, I would not choose the nicest, most well-spoken, most handsome fellow whom I’d like to have over for tea and invite to date my sister. I would choose the meanest, ugliest, most bloodthirsty deplorable possible and pray to God Almighty I never meet him in a back alley. I vote similarly.
Conversely, I think many Dems, largely now the party of the Archetypal Feminine, the party of charismatic, glib, grinning glad-handers like Clinton and Obama, tend to vote for someone who “looks the part,” someone who makes them “feel” good about their choice. They can always rationalize away the failures later. Crass, Archetypal Masculine Reps seem more amenable to “vulgar displays of power.” This, however, is a much larger and more complex topic than can be properly investigated in a footnote. Stay tuned, true believers!
Well, except for my polemics about abortion baby murder. And A.I. And the fake moon landing. And transanity. And censorship. And “gun control.” And Covid. And the fake vaccine… OK, you know what, never mind; disregard that all that pretentious, hypocritical “thought experiment” nonsense. What do you expect from a lyre, anyway? Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
“Myriad.” Drink! [Note: Kidding!]
I love that you quoted one of my all-time favorite passages of yours. You know, the one re: Sam Harris. Your footnotes are always a delight.
If Trump farts in the forest, and I don't hear, does Trump actually exist?