George W Bush, for all of his Republican flaws, was still one of them, he graduated from Yale, he never had a real job, he had grey hairs and was son of a President.

But not Trump.

Donald J. Trump, with his golden towers, his perennial tanned face and his 7th grade vocabulary, is the anti-hero of the elites. He’s the negation of countless hours spent on complicated books, of travelling around the world to attend sophistic conferences, of being proud of their PhDs, of writing hunger-solving children-savings essays. He is the negation of everything that they are.

And they knew it. Instinctively.

They knew it so well that they renounced their political identity in a heartbeat in order to defend their meta-identity: elitism. Republican and Democrats banded together to stop the unqualified buffoon. They stripped him away of his achievements, no longer was he the billionaire real estate tycoon from Manhattan, but just a bankruptee. No longer was he a champion of black people, he was now a racist white man from Queens.

They knew that if Trump won, their rent-free business models would come to an end. They were not concerned with the fate of the country, they were concerned with the fate of their careers. After all, how could they keep distributing their unbounded expertise to the masses when the guy who, according to them didn’t have any, was rewarded with the highest office in the land? How could they sell complicated books and charge high fees to go speak around the country when the guy who was proud of not reading books was made President?

Then the unthinkable happened: everything they thought was important didn’t really matter. November 8th came and what they considered indecency was elevated as a role model. Their worldview was shattered and so were their identities. The unqualified buffoon achieved the impossible and he was going to rule over them.

This catastrophe, of course, caused pain and disbelief in the heart of the experts. How could they be this wrong? They couldn’t, obviously. Something else must have happened. Something else that was outside of their control. Something nefarious which couldn’t possibly be foreseen nor accounted for in their torrential editorials plastered on the front pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Something, something. Something that could, somehow, incorporate President Trump in their “I’m a very educated and smart person” worldview.

What if Trump actually lost the election? What if there was a glitch in the system, an error, a mistake. That would explain everything.

And so it came. A few days after the election, the exit door from their nightmare materialized, like the sun after a tempest, under the form of an old enemy. An enemy that was operating below the surface, away from the impervious sight of the experts, an enemy sabotaging our democracy from the cold basements of a foreign land. And, just like that, Russia became the scapegoat for all of their shortcomings. As they furiously typed away their new editorials explaining in phantasmagorical details how Russia stole the election for Trump, they realized that hope was still there. Not everything was lost.

Trump, who they thought was just a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe incompetent man-child, was also a traitor to the country. A monster, a monster that, just like before the election, they now had to take it down at all costs. Their intuitions were correct, in fact, they underestimated how evil Trump truly was. Like hungry wolves spotting a prey from afar, they regrouped and began the new hunt.

This time, they confided with each other, they will not make mistakes, they will hunt the monster until he’s trapped and they will be victorious. A new purpose shined through their eyes.

….

A year after, Trump is still in power and the #TrumpRussia collusion looks more and more like a bad conspiracy theory yet their hallucination hasn’t faded away.

It can’t — Identity is their last strand.

Listen for yourself:

1:06.31 “I honestly will never believe he (Trump) is president of the United States”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Related articles from Ryan DeLongpre:

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you’ve enjoyed my writing and would like to support me you can do so by:

Earning interest on your Crypto on Celsius: