When the madness breaks, watch out

Donald Trump rode to political prominence by claiming that Barack Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen, dismissing documentation of Obama’s Hawaii birth as some international conspiracy hatched way back in 1961 to prepare for Obama’s illegitimate election as president some 47 years later.

Seriously. That was the claim. Trump took that bizarre theory and sold it to millions of voters who swallowed it as haplessly as those dunces who had enrolled in “Trump University,” thinking it would turn them into millionaires. In a poll taken as recently as December, 57 percent of Trump voters still were saying that Obama had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii.

And that’s just the beginning of the list, which includes Trump claims that Rafael Cruz, father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, conspired to assassinate John F. Kennedy, and that 3 million people voted illegally against him. In a rational era, with a somewhat rational American electorate, any candidate who had even hinted at such lunacy would be laughed out of political life and reduced to selling supplements and prepper kits on some late-night talk-radio show, in between segments denying the Apollo moon landing, claiming the pyramids were built by aliens and warning that Hillary Clinton was running a child-pornography ring from the basement of a Washington pizza parlor.

Instead, we live in the Age of Idiocracy, and in the Age of Idiocracy we have a president of the United States who tells the world that the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies — “the Criminal Deep State” — have carried out a coup attempt against him, and that even now, those agencies continue to cover up that conspiracy despite the fact that they are all led by people whom Trump himself appointed.

It’s nonsensical, but I fear Trump has come to actually believe it. Go to a Trump rally and try to find the most gullible person in the room, the person most likely to believe and internalize every crazy thing that Trump says. It’s the man standing at the microphone. We’ve all known BS artists, but in my experience Trump is unique in how quickly he accepts the words tumbling out of his mouth as absolute fact and truth.

Of course, others believe it too. They believe him now for the same reason that they believed the birther story: Because they WANT to believe it, and that desire to believe is so great that it overwhelms all facts and logic.

It was reassuring for them to believe that Barack Obama’s presidency was the product of a 50-year international conspiracy against America, because the alternative was believing that a black man named Barack Obama had been legitimately elected by America, their America. Given a choice, it was that second thought that was too painful to bear, that second thought that violated too much of what they thought they knew, so it was the first thought they embraced.

The same is true now. They can believe that Trump is an incompetent, corrupt, amoral con man who was elected with Russian help and has no idea of how to run the country, or they can take Trump’s offer and explain all his troubles away as a criminal deep state conspiracy. The second choice causes them less pain and embarrassment, so that is the choice they make.

I don’t know how or when this madness breaks; I know only that it must and that it won’t be pretty. As Ray Bradbury warned us in “Fahrenheit 451,” “you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”