Do see Paul Krugman, The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities. He addresses the phenomenon of Trump worship; the hard core base who even now can’t see what a loser Trump is.

Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremistsRepublicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

The comment was followed by a photo of Bush looking studly in a flight suit. I’ll spare you. Krugman continues, “And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.”

During the Watergate scandal there was a lot of wagon-circling around Richard Nixon, as I recall, but nothing like the adoration offered to Reagan or the deification of Trump. So I’m going to postulate that this need to find a heroic figure who will save us from [fill in the blank — scary minorities? libtards? vegetarians who do yoga?] is something coming from the U.S. Right that I don’t think was around so intensely in earlier times. McCarthyism came pretty close, though.

The social psychologists tell us that conservatives value party loyalty more than liberals do, and that’s a factor, but what’s going on with Trump is not just loyalty. It really is a cult of personality with no basis in objective reality.

And then beyond the base we have the elected officials and Supreme Court judges who bend the Constitution and sometimes their own prior opinions to give Trump more power and more protection from the consequences of his incompetence. Whether they do this because they are in the cult, or because they are afraid of the cult, or because John Roberts’ head lives in an alternative universe, I do not know.

The recent pushback from some Republicans against the slush fund and tax money for the ballroom gives me hope that a few are beginning to break away. And today the South Carolina Senate killed the redistricting attempt that would have eliminated Rep. James Clyburn’s seat. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

Krugman concludes,

The point is that the dire state we’re in — the leader of the free world has turned against freedom, the greatest power the world has ever known is self-immolating before our eyes — isn’t just a matter of Donald Trump’s personal failings. It’s the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made American great.

That much is certainly true, and IMO this has roots in the “pseudo conservatives” Richard Hofstadter used to write about. I’m not sure what to do about it, though.

Other good stuff to read – see Tax Me If You Can by Jeffrey Winters at Mother Jones, about the growing oligarchy in the U.S. and Paul Waldman at The Cross Section, Trump is Haunted by Barack Obama. I especially recommend The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face by Sen. Chris Van Hollen at the New York Times. the Hard Truth is that “The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” And this has to stop.

I’m not seeing anything new about Iran since this morning’s performative strikes by Trump. The word for the day, boys and girls, is quagmire.