Hook, line and sinker — and how MAGA took the bait

Shortly after the Trump regime’s illegal military occupation of Los Angeles, Governor Gavin Newsom began relentlessly trolling the 47th President, mocking his serially absurd social media posts.

The MAGA community came predictably unhinged.

Fox News personality Dana Perino said Newsom “has to stop it with the Twitter thing. I don’t know where his wife is. If I were his wife, I would say you are making a fool of yourself, stop it.”

Perino continued.

“He’s got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.”

Psssttt … Dana … many of us have said the same thing about Trump, his tweeting, and his spouse for practically a decade. But as I often say, MAGA is a “Do as I say, not as I do” movement that repeatedly fails its own litmus test.

In my column last week, I deliberately used grandiloquent words to prove a point. MAGA readers took the bait -- hook, line, and sinker.

As a matter of personal policy, I don’t respond to reader messages -- positive or negative. Likewise, I refrain from reading comment threads. For my experiment, I asked my publicist to keep an eye on the feedback and pass along some of the more hilarious responses.

MAGA didn’t disappoint.

“I can’t even read this. I may know what these words mean, but the message loses meaning when one has to think so hard to understand it,” wrote a woman who lists her occupation as an English instructor at a community college in the middle-of-nowhere.

Though I will take her advice into consideration, I have an average weekly audience of 374,000 readers. Dumbing down my commentaries would be an insult to my target demographic.

“This person, can’t force myself to call him a man, is so clueless about so much when it comes to to [sic] conservatives! Or people with Christian morals or morals period,” exclaimed another reader.

Really? I pointed out a lack of altruism among some members of the MAGA community and THAT was her rebuttal? How about addressing the points I made about how conservatives delight in accepting social handouts but decry socialism?

“Good Lord!!! I cannot believe you published this,” lamented a reader in a comment evidently directed at the newspaper’s publisher.

I applaud the publisher for including a diverse assortment of viewpoints in their newspaper. They're evidently a proponent of the First Amendment. Rather than calling on the publisher to restrict the free press, you would think a person who belongs to the so-called "party of limited government” would celebrate it.

Not so with MAGA.

Free speech isn’t embraced; it’s punished. Even Republicans who disagree are labeled as “RINOS.” As I mentioned in a column earlier this summer, MAGA employs a Stepford approach. Like most cults, whether out of fear or ignorance, Trump loyalists will rarely drift from parroting the assigned talking points.

One of my favorite responses came from a reader who wrote, “LMAO! Thats funny! Now wright [sic] about the democrats! SMH.”

It’s probably best that the individual stick with acronyms considering spelling is not his strong suit. He’s obviously not a regular reader of my work, either. Were he acquainted with my writing, he would know that I have been a registered independent for a decade and that my columns, which are all archived at www.dannebohm.com, call out both the left and right when the situation warrants.

Though I’m glad my website’s submission form served as a release for a clearly triggered reader, I’m not caught up in the cult of personality. Therefore, insults against Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris don’t bother me. In fact, there have been occasions when I’ve criticized each of them in previous columns.

Nice try, though.

While they love to label voices of opposition as “snowflakes,” MAGA is a fragile, delicate movement that is especially sensitive to intellectualism, tough arguments, mocking, irrefutable facts, and criticism.

If you see a blindly obedient Trump loyalist on the street, be sure to give them a consoling hug. Though history will brand them as hoodwinked buffoons, they no less deserve our compassion. In the words of Voltaire, “It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.”

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J. Basil Dannebohm is a writer, speaker, consultant, former Kansas legislator and intelligencer. His website is www.dannebohm.com. Mr. Dannebohm is a member of the Virginia Press Association and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He writes from the Washington DC metro in the Commonwealth of Virginia.