If anyone had any doubt, lingering or otherwise, as to the suitability of Donald Trump to again become president of the United States, then they should have been well settled by his performance at a recent CNN town hall.

There the former president doubled down on the lie that the election was stolen from him, even though this was disproved repeatedly in the courts. He was at his irascible best, proving that little had changed with regard to those who disagree with him and the disdain he has for women. Even on the set, he called the host Kaitlan Collins a nasty person.

For CNN not to have discontinued the charade after Collins was so degraded was pathetic. As a leading news outfit, one would have thought that CNN would have understood that there is a reciprocal responsibility for a host to treat his or her guests with dignity and for the guest to behave with the appropriate decorum. It was clear that this guest was not going to abide by any protocols, save those of which he is in control. I believe Collins was stunned at Trump’s comment but nonetheless carried on the interview. I believe, in another life, CNN would have pulled the plug on the programme. Its present iteration is perhaps an indication of what CNN is becoming by picking up the detritus from the Fox News Channel fallout with the “MAGA” crowd.

Inadvertently or unwittingly, CNN might have done the country and the world a favour. By bringing Trump on and showing him being his true self, the country would have got a clearer view of the kind of personality he continues to be and that he has only changed for the worse.

In an earlier piece, before he was elected president, I averred that Trump is like an old oak tree that is incapable of bending. At 76 years of age, anyone who thinks he is going to or is willing to change what he has become is living in a fool’s paradise. I for one was not surprised at his behaviour, though I must admit that I was a bit taken aback when he blurted out the nasty reference to Collins. He had just gone through an indictment in which a porn star figured prominently and he had lost a lawsuit in which he was fingered for raping a woman and defaming her. His misogyny got the better of him and his utter disregard for women was on display. This will not augur well for him in any future elections.

But does he care? The CNN town hall event showed that he does not. If anything, it demonstrated unerringly why he should not be trusted with presidential power in the future. As I said in my last piece, if he should ever be given such power, America and the world will have hell to pay. The CNN event has cemented this thought even more firmly in my mind.

I continue to be appalled by the many people who continue to support Trump for the presidency and often wonder what really drives them. Yes, I know that he is the mouthpiece for many white Americans in the lower classes who have felt left behind by a society in which they failed to make a successful life for themselves. Yes, I can understand the grievance of the white extremists who believe they must preserve every vestige of whiteness in a society that is browning by the day. Yes, I can even understand the evangelical vote in support of a person who will do their bidding in the pet causes, especially abortion and putting conservative members on the courts, that they care about.

But do all these things and others explain the full picture of the man Trump in office? What is frightening is the inability of people who defend these causes to look beyond their narrow concerns to larger and weightier issues, such as Trump’s avowed anti-democratic behaviour and what that could do to the country if he should be given a second term. What is galling is their lack of appreciation for how he behaved in his first term — the name callings, the chaotic policies he pursued, the tearing of the social fabric, which he gleefully pursued. Is this the kind of society in which they want their kids to grow up? For, make no mistake about it, if his first term was chaotic and lacking in sober governance, you will not want to see him in full flight in the second. It will be chaos on steroids.

What I have concluded from the calcified support of Trump by those who follow him like a cultic leader is that they have tethered themselves to the tyranny of an idea from which they cannot detach themselves. As the ultimate cult leader, they need Trump as much as he needs them. That is why it is not surprising that they ignore his most detestable behaviour and do not see the danger he poses to their futures.

Even in the worst days of Adolf Hitler’s decimation of the Jews in Europe, there were those in civil society, including the hierarchy of the German Church, who were willing to turn a blind to the atrocities. It was only elements of the Confessing Church who showed any resistance and they were duly repressed. Anyone who spoke out against the regime was either arrested or killed. The same is happening now in Vladimir Putin’s Russia with his war against Ukraine. It is not Jews who are now being slaughtered but women, children, and the elderly in the indiscriminate and diabolical bombing of schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings in city after city.

When one is captured by an ideology or subject to the tyranny of an idea, one loses all sense of rationality. This is where I believe many who support Trump now find themselves. They are willing to forget the dignity of human life and suspend all moral judgements in service to what they consider to be a greater good. But they do not know that the path to that greater good is one of destruction. Again, ask the German people whose experience under Hitler is one of the closest parallels to what I see emerging in America. Many believed the propaganda that was spewed daily by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. Even when the country was falling into ruins, there were those who believed that the situation was salvageable.

I am sure that those who are rooting for Trump, those you could consider the true believers, believe that their cause is righteous and Trump is the person who can achieve that greater good for which they hope; thus, they are willing to ignore his worst excesses with a shrug of the shoulders that Trump is just being Trump. But those of a more sober mind must see beyond the facade to the danger that he truly represents and the chaos and carnage of which he is capable if he is given a second stand at the wicket.

Through my prophetic lens I can see as clear as day the kind of hellscape that America will become if this should ever happen. The least perceptive among us will say that I hate Trump for saying these things, but you can always trust the most perceptive to see the dangers that lie ahead. The CNN broadcast was a warning. Will America heed it.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest, social commentator, and author of the books Finding Peace in the Midst of Life’s Storms; The Self-esteem Guide to a Better Life; and Beyond Petulance: Republican Politics and the Future of America. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or stead6655@aol.com.