Watching the 2024 US election campaign is like watching a celebrity roasting. Insults, not policy, flood the content of every election speech. Whilst I predicted a Harris presidential candidacy on 3 September 2016, the USA election stage has become a platform of dehumanising insults.

Of its 244 million eligible voters, about 160 million may pitch up to vote. Out of that group, about 70 million may vote for Donald Trump.

That that many people would vote for a man so deranged as the 45th president of the United States, says everything you need to know about the United States of America of 2024.

For a country that claims to be the leader of the free world, we are witnessing the cognitive decline of the collective USA live-streamed to the world. Despite Donald Trump losing all his cases of electoral fraud and being found guilty of 34 felony charges related to his business dealings, many Americans still think that he will make a great president. About 74 million voters cannot be persuaded that he is a fraud. If this were anywhere else in the world, the USA would be condemning that country on every platform. The USA of 2024 is like an old man suffering from dementia, still wearing military fatigues, believing the Vietnam War is still being fought.

While crime is down and the Biden administration is unable to do better at the Southern border due to the torpedoing of a bi-partisan deal by Trump’s congressional allies, Trump continues to portray the USA as a nation stuck in a massive crime wave and being swamped by illegal immigrants.

The US political psychology is tragically stuck on comic book superhero fantasies. Superman Donald Trump is all they want. They don’t want a government. Or an FBI. Or even a Department of Justice.

For Trump supporters, they have everything they need in Trump and the powers of the Oval Office. And they want Trump and his pen to use every superpower he has to ‘fix America.’

What is most dangerous, however, is that the world could be on the brink of witnessing the collapse of the USA constitutional structure. Trump has so hypnotised his followers that it is inconceivable for them even to think Trump might lose the 2024 election. According to them, should he lose it, it will all be due to voter fraud by the Democrats.

The US might face another January 6th all over again. Only this time, it will be a very serious civil war, because it will happen all across the electoral districts that Trump lost. Trump has not stopped campaigning since he won the presidency in 2016.

But his campaign strategy is poisonous: it’s a mass movement of hypnotic indoctrination. Trump weaves his messages of personal superiority with many twists of lies about his success whilst instilling toxic fears in ordinary Americans.

His speeches are the personification of the US quote “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Trump, born in 1946, grew up in a culture where stories of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Churchill as world leaders were told. It was also the period in which the American superhero comic book culture of Superman (1938) and Captain America (1940) were born.

Trump is a product of the American superhero culture of the post-war 1940s. He longs for the simplistic and uncomplicated white American narratives that dominated his life between the 1950s and 1980s.

He longs for the bubble America once lived in, where the rest of the world and its sufferings did not register on the radar of ordinary Americans.

Where all they shipped out to the rest of the world were ultra-right-wing CIA operatives parading as Christian missionaries and very bad fast foods.

Americans need to stop fantasising about their dominance, their superiority and their importance. It’s 2024, not 1954. From democratic elections in Botswana to economic gatherings like BRICS, the world is doing better at several things than the USA, and, without the USA.

Dear America, vote for your future, not your fears.

* Lorenzo is a leader and veteran in the social development space who has worked for decades to address SA’s stark inequities.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

Cape Argus

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