Dance of the Duped

Donald Trump and America’s Great Parade of Delusion

?? Listen

Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025

The human propensity for absurdity is perhaps our most enduring quality.

This was on full display today in the nation’s capital, as the frothing masses gathered to anoint Donald J. Trump for his second term as president. It was less a ceremony than a séance, a convocation of the spiritually dispossessed who believe they have seen salvation in the form of a spray-tanned real estate magnate. The man who once declared he would be remembered as a healer has returned, not as the doctor of the nation’s ills but as its undertaker, garbed in the trappings of false glory and surrounded by a congregation of the duped, the desperate, and the deluded.

The weather was suitably bleak—a steady sleet that plastered red hats to thinning hairlines and turned poster board slogans into damp, illegible smears. Yet the faithful came, their spirits unbowed, for this was no ordinary political rally. It was a pageant of grievance, a festival of victimhood dressed in the gaudy colors of patriotism. Here they were, the forgotten men and women, standing in line for hours to be metaphorically spat upon by their savior, who would not endure five minutes of their company without recoiling in visible disgust. But such is the nature of devotion: it demands humiliation as proof of sincerity.

Inside, the true show unfolded. The Capitol Rotunda was transformed into a gaudy ballroom, where the nation’s richest and most influential gathered to congratulate themselves on their cleverness. Elon Musk, fresh from his latest scheme to fleece so-called followers in some crypto-scam, grinned like a Cheshire cat, while Jeff Bezos lounged nearby, his fiancée’s attire more suited to a burlesque revue than an inauguration. Bezos seemed unconcerned, or maybe secretly flattered that Mark Zuckerberg, that sallow-faced mechanist of human interactions, ogled her openly, perhaps thinking himself above the norms of common decency—or perhaps simply unaware of them.

And then there was Trump. The man himself waddled onto the stage with the bearing of a circus bear who has just been handed a new tricycle. Behind him stood the parents of Israeli hostages—actual human beings whose suffering was so profound it might have reduced another man to silence. But Trump is not another man. He took their grief, their unimaginable loss, and yoked it to his grotesque narrative, equating their suffering with that of the January 6th rioters. Yes, those fine patriots who smeared feces on the floors of Congress and battered policemen with flagpoles—they too, Trump intoned, had endured “unspeakable injustice.” The audience roared. The parents stood there, their faces masks of polite bewilderment, trapped in a moment that must have felt like a waking nightmare.

Trump’s genius—if one can call it that—is his ability to take the particular and make it petty. He has taken the profound tragedy of hostage families and reduced it to a talking point, a rhetorical cudgel to bludgeon his enemies and galvanize his supporters. And his supporters, for their part, have willingly surrendered themselves to the ecstasy of outrage. They cheer not because they believe what he says, but because what he says makes them feel. In Trump’s America, the truth is irrelevant; only the feeling matters.

And what a feeling it is—a toxic brew of anger, fear, and self-pity. These are not simpletons or fools, though they are often dismissed as such. No, they are ordinary people, burdened by the weight of their own unimportance, desperate for someone to make them feel that their lives matter, that their struggles are noble, that their enemies are evil. Trump gives them this in spades. He wraps their grievances in the language of heroism, transforming their petty frustrations into cosmic battles between good and evil. It is, of course, nonsense, but it is nonsense that works.

What makes Trump unique is not his cynicism—it is his banality. He is a man utterly devoid of imagination, incapable of seeing beyond the narrow confines of his own ego. He dreams of being remembered as a great man, a peacemaker, a unifier, but his every action betrays him. He squanders his power on petty feuds and performative gestures, all in service of a legacy he will never live to see. Trump is like a man who, given the gift of a Stradivarius, uses it to hammer nails.

And yet, his followers adore him. They cheer as he promises them the world, even as they ignore the wreckage he leaves behind. They do not care that he has squandered his opportunities to address climate change, to foster international cooperation, to invest in technologies that could save millions of lives. They do not care that death is what some of them actually got last time Trump was president; when they chose the feelingTrump stoked in them—a feeling no drug or religion could ever deliver—instead of choosing the COVID vaccine, and life. They care only that he makes them feel powerful, that he validates their anger, that he tells them they are right. And the feeling they get from all of that is more important to them than anything else.

The billionaires, of course, are laughing. For them, Trump is a godsend, a lightning rod that absorbs the anger of the masses while they continue to hoard their wealth and power. They toast their fortunes in the gilded halls of Washington, secure in the knowledge that the outrage Trump stokes will never be directed at them. They are the true winners of this charade, and they know it.

As the day wore on and the crowd began to disperse, their cheers still echoing in the frigid air, one could not help but feel a profound sadness. Not for them, but for us all. For this spectacle, this grotesque carnival, is not merely a reflection of Trump’s failings but of our own. We have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the easy answers and comforting lies of a man who offers us nothing but ourselves, distorted and magnified until we no longer recognize the truth.

Trump is not the disease; he is the symptom. He is what happens when a nation loses faith in itself, when it trades substance for style, principle for spectacle. He is a warning, a reminder that now lands on numb ears, that democracy is fragile, that it requires vigilance and courage and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. And yet, as the lights dim on this tawdry pageant, one cannot escape the feeling that we have also learned—nothing.

The joke, as always, is on us. And it is a cruel one indeed.

Copyright ? 2025 by Paul Henry Smith ? Originally on Substack