Trump, Trumpism & Transactionalism - And How We Traded Short-Term Lies for Long-Term Loss

ow long is 4.543 billion years compared to 3,500 years? The 3,500 years our species has existed as humans might seem minuscule compared to our 4.543-billion-year-old planet Earth. But what about 8 years compared to 249? Only 8 years, compared to the 249-year scale of American democracy. To some, both comparisons might seem like an insignificant percentage, not worth accounting for—a mere statistical blip in the grand narrative of a nation. And yet, within those 8 years, things built almost over the course of two and a half centuries could be destroyed. Not by a meteorite strike, or nuclear disaster, but by a pure and unforgiving spectacle and apparent denial of reality by a mass of over at least 170 million people.

An old saying goes that a lie repeated 100 times eventually becomes truth. But a lie repeated at least 170 million times—what are we to make of that? Yet the very lie was repeated not 170 million times but twice that amount, as Trump was voted for president twice. Can we still really talk about a lie that becomes truth—that Trump is suitable and adept for the presidency of the richest and mightiest country history has ever seen?

The lies don't just evolve into truth by being repeated almost half a billion times. This inadvertently alters the very fabric of what we perceived as truth itself. We have witnessed not merely the corruption of information, but the fundamental restructuring of reality through mass delusion. When 170 million people choose to believe the same falsehood twice, we are no longer dealing with propaganda—we are confronting the collective suicide of human's reason & rationality.

Thus:

In America, they have twice elected a president who has said and done things that violate universal moral values we all share—hoping he would fulfill short-term political promises. They were rewarded with lies, falsehoods, and duplicity in every conceivable claim he had made. Trump is not just someone who should never have been elected to a position of power—yet he was, and he surrounded himself with vultures and idiots feeding upon America's heartland while he himself remained merely a puppet.

But Trump is only the symptom, not the disease. He is the perfect expression of a society that has learned to trade dignity for supposed security, truth for convenient lies, principles for populism. His election reveals something more terrifying than his own moral corruption: it shows that a majority of voters were willing to sacrifice the foundations of democracy for the promise of simple answers to complex questions.

The vultures who flocked around him recognized the opportunity: a people afraid of the future will buy anyone who promises them certainty—no matter how deceptive. They transformed America's noblest tradition, democratic discourse, into a show where the loudest screamer emerges victorious. The idiots he surrounded himself with weren't there by accident—they were the logical consequence of a system that considers competence elitist and ignorance authentic.

And while Trump played his antics, while his supporters chanted "America First," the country became a living example of how quickly a democracy can crumble from within. Not through tanks or bombs, but through citizens' willingness to despise their own democratic institutions as long as the right demagogue tells them what they want to hear.

This is the bitterest irony of our time: while we fear external enemies, we have elected democracy's internal enemies to power. We have learned to place authority over truth, strength over justice, power over morality. Trump was not the corruptor of American democracy—he was its faithful mirror.

The mathematics are staggering in their implications. In 1776, a handful of revolutionary thinkers conceived a radical experiment in self-governance. For 249 years, that experiment survived civil war, economic collapse, both world wars, and the constant tension between idealism and human frailty. It took nearly two and a half centuries to build the institutions, norms, and shared understanding of democratic governance.

And it may took only 8 years to dismantle them.

This is not hyperbole—it is arithmetic. The rate of democratic decay we have witnessed represents an acceleration of destruction that defies historical precedent. Typically, democracies die slowly, eroded by decades of institutional capture, economic inequality, and social fragmentation. America chose the express route: mass delusion delivered at the speed of social media.

When 170 million people voluntarily abandon their capacity for critical thinking—not once, but twice—we witness something unprecedented in human history. This is not the gradual corruption of a political system; it is the voluntary lobotomy of a civilization. Each vote for Trump was not merely a political choice but an act of epistemological surrender—a conscious decision to reject the very concept of verifiable truth.

Dignity has not merely become violable. It has been degraded to a commodity that can be bought and sold at will. And what's terrifying is this: we were all willing to pay the price. We all watched as the foundations of our civilization became bargaining chips in the great game of political power.

The old adage about lies repeated 100 times becoming truth was coined in a different era, when information moved slowly and verification was still possible. But we live in an age where lies can be repeated 170 million times in an instant, where falsehood can achieve critical mass faster than truth can respond. We have created a democracy that operates at the speed of light but thinks at the speed of medieval superstition.

It was not Terrorism, not Russian Aggression nor Economic Collapse of Capitalism, that defeated us. We did it ourselves—at the ballot box, through our silence, through our willingness to excuse the inexcusable as long as it served our own short-term fulfillment of illusion about the world.

The question is no longer whether our democracy will survive. The question is whether what survives will still deserve the name. And perhaps more chilling still: if 249 years of democratic progress can be undone in 8 years of willful ignorance, what does that say about the fundamental nature of human civilization itself?

We may have discovered that democracy is not, as we believed, the natural state toward which humanity evolves, but rather a brief and fragile exception to our species' default setting: the worship of deillusional certainty over uncomfortable truth.

‍

Download PDF (121 pages)

‍