Mocking everyone around

““We’re talking about your beloved Trump,” a familiar TV makeup artist said one day when I came to film. I don’t remember what I replied, because I’m used to many people considering me an admirer, lover, and almost religious supporter of Donald Trump and his policies.

I can’t blame those people: they speak according to their own understanding, because they want rescue and care, and love (and money, too, but that’s a separate story) from the government. A few decades ago, there were such venerable aunties who cherished almost romantic feelings for Algirdas Brazauskas or Vytautas Landsbergis (supporters of the latter were called knitted berets – and one British journalist translated it into English: “Knitted Beret Brigade”).

Ordinary people are very ordinary: they personalize politics and see fairy-tale characters, not trends - just as many stupid people have been writing in comments since 2022 about why someone couldn't just deal with Vladimir Putin as if he were a fairy-tale dragon. Many voters have the right to vote, but they only think in terms of children's books. Some are childish, others have never matured.

Even very talented politicians - both US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and German Chancellors Helmut Kohl, Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt - were only midwives, witnesses and standard-bearers of change.

Such is Donald Trump, whom the whole world is rightly talking about, because he is today the greatest of actors and the brightest of showmen.

The era of Western degradation and theatrical farce, marked by the slogans of the alleged wronged – ozone holes, “man-made climate change”, #metoo, Black Lives Matter (when people were fired from their jobs just for writing “all lives matter” on the Internet), DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion – which is the new name for “reversed discrimination”), identity politics (when gender is no longer about biology and chromosomes, but about emotions) had to collapse and did.

It wasn't so much that Donald Trump won, but rather that a tragically shaky project collapsed with a bang, where for four years a disabled, very poorly functioning person (Joe Biden) was presented to the public as a full-fledged leader of the country, and when he was no longer able to run in the elections due to old age and serious health conditions, the Democratic Party Politburo nominated Kamala Harris, who was terribly laughing, unable to understand anything and who had not even won her party's nomination, and sent her to political death in a hopeless struggle. Donald Trump himself, who is now dealing with unresolved issues with illegal migration, drug imports from Mexico and Canada, the growing influence of China, and the Middle East (in which region he was very successful in regulating things during his first term), as English speakers say, "threw out the textbook" and is not acting in the way that is accepted, expected, or reasonable. Intimidation at huge rates has worked 100% wherever it has been applied: as I have said before, Donald Trump is not unpredictable - on the contrary, he is very predictable, he does everything he promises or threatens, he does it quickly and does not care at all who will like it or not. He reacts to criticism with mockery or does not react at all and acts like in a television studio.

“The state and its institutions are being destroyed,” lament the left-wing structures of the Democratic Party and the Washington bureaucrats, but they are wrong. Democratic and free America is rotten in many places and we should not blame doctors and hearses for the fact that the former declare death, and the latter remove bodies in black bags.

It is not the eccentric businessman and billionaire Elon Musk who is to blame for the abolition of structures such as the international aid agency USAID, which has existed since the time of President John F. Kennedy. Absurd and politicized support programs for projects ranging from publishing transgender comics (literally) in Peru to sending condoms to the Gaza Strip, theater performances on the theme of gender politics (here as dramaturgy about factories and predatory agriculture projects in the Soviet Union), and propaganda for diversity and inclusion policies in Serbia would have surfaced sooner or later with or without Elon Musk. The so-called “Russian democratic opposition,” which has taken millions of American money, today lives lavishly in Europe and replicates poorly viewed YouTube channels and rents expensive offices, explodes with rage and calls Donald Trump a madman, a fanatic, a lunatic, a fascist, a narcissist, a mental patient – ​​but would suddenly change its tune if it received new grants, benefits, allowances, and project money. It just won’t.

Next in line is the Department of Education. The bulldozers have already left: the sanatorium of education bureaucrats, which has long since become a party committee for militant teachers' unions and a politicized agenda, will probably be completely swept away, because schools, like universities, in America are completely self-sufficient. I look at it with envy and would like to see the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, Science and Sports abolished, which everyone remembers only during the next crisis that it could not cope with. It would be followed by the Ministry of Culture, which Lithuania needs as much as Mongolia needs the Navy Department.

 

One feature that unites the brightest and most defiant members of Donald Trump's team is not (as the outraged opponents of the new administration say) that they are loyal - because any politician gathers a loyal team of political trust around him.

 

They are all afraid of nothing, and when a person is not afraid of anything, he can achieve a lot.

 

For example, the representative of the Kennedy family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was distinguished by his “vaccine skepticism” during the pandemic, as it is politely said today, is determined to “Make America Healthy Again” and, perhaps, he is the one who can succeed in this at least to some extent, because he is not (at least apparently) connected with the lobbyists of food and pharmaceutical companies and their money and is not afraid to make new enemies, because he has already won over them.

 

Showman Peter Hegseth, with extensive experience in television and the military, but without a significant managerial job, has now become Secretary of Defense and heads the department responsible for the defense budget, which amounts to almost a trillion dollars a year. Having had a drinking problem (he’s from Minnesota, and believe me, it’s as widespread in that harsh state as colored shirts are in Florida), he’s a “disruptor,” as Donald Trump put it—and a natural choice in an administration that’s coming to leave no stone unturned.

 

That means the people who come won’t be very attractive, and few people will want to invite them over, but their goal isn’t popularity: their way of life and work is to keep moving forward. Will they cause problems? Sure. The hope is that the positive changes will outweigh the pain.

 

This is very unusual for many in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. Ninety percent of the world’s people are conservatives, supporters of the old ways, the old order, and the usual order, and ten percent are disruptors, innovators, and experimenters. Not all changes and new ideas are successful, but long-term marinating in the usual order means guaranteed degradation.

 

And from these days in America, as well as many times before, we will learn a lot about courage and ignoring criticism. Just as we once learned to play basketball from the Americans and we do not regret it to this day.”

 

American universities are still keeping some wits only thanks to huge amount federal grant money for science. Otherwise American universities would be as useless as Lithuanian universities.