A thought crossed my mind that has me diverging from the usual topic that I keep hounding you with, because having lived through being a teacher, I know for absolutely, positively sure, we’re dealing with Trump because of our corrupt education system. (Nothing will change my mind about the fact that fascists hijacking our education system and silencing teachers around four decades ago was a diabolical first path to take our democracy from us.)
Because it’s close to impossible to get our leaders or reporters to listen to our whistleblowing teachers and investigate our schools, we’re an undereducated nation. Our revered forefathers preached that education is the essential foundation of democracy—look it up—yet teacher whistleblowers like me are exponentially more powerless than the Epstein victims when our victimization, the muzzling or disappearing of the called-to-teach teachers, is every citizen’s victimization!
The Epstein victims got somewhere. We haven’t yet. Every leader and every institution has let teachers down, from our unions, our courts, the media, and even the ACLU.
However, what I’m sharing today started out having nothing to do with education. I wrote this to share some innovative thoughts about Trump’s behavior. I began thinking he’s like that guy Dustin Hoffman played in that award-winning movie, Rain Man, which was about an odd kind of genius.
They keep changing the diagnosis for a person like him, but I’m thinking an idiot savant with a sprinkling of autism describes Rain Man.
Rain Man was definitely smart—a genius about some things. But he was a handful for his brother, Tom Cruise.
I think about Trump’s genius marketing ability every time a reporter or a show host known to love democracy talks about the bill whose name I won’t say (“big, beautiful”) because a genius set us up to promote a horrible bill.
If I had to refer to it, I’d say the Big Beautiful for the Rich and Powerful Bill, or the Epstein Class Bill. But I’ve never worked for television. I bet they think they have to use the name he gave it, which was Trump’s brilliant move. He brilliantly has his enemies propagandizing for him!
I do hear some call it the Big Ugly Bill. That’s a slight improvement. Yet it sounds like sour grapes, while reminding us of its real name as we hear it.
And then there’s Truth Social, his way of disseminating lies in addition to his mastery of lying, equal only to Rain Man’s mastery of numbers. It’s truly stellar!
My point is that Trump is as brilliant at using words to capture minds as Rain Man was at nailing numbers. They’re both winners if you ignore ethics, the Golden Rule, and civilized living.
Our problem is that too many people decided to let that brilliance lead us, whereas in the movie, Rain Man went back to a facility because he couldn’t function in the world.
In other words, we’re now living in a world that doesn’t get the insanity of letting a person like Rain Man lead them.
I didn’t remember enough about the movie Rain Man. So recently, I rewatched it to see if I was on to something.
When Tom Cruise solved all his money problems by using Rain Man’s brilliant number mind to win more than $80,000 in Las Vegas, the movie felt prophetic. It’s as if Trump followers were watching Rain Man as they watched The Celebrity Apprentice, and ignored the part that the extraordinary being was clueless about just about everything else, and put him in a leadership role.
The fact that he didn’t know better than to sit on his brother’s bed while his brother was having sex, showing no ability to relate to another human’s needs, wouldn’t matter to MAGA minds. They’d be scouting out others with similar peculiarities to put in the cabinet, such as a propensity to lick toilets, to play war, to shoot teenage puppies, or to bring their children and nannies to dine at an admitted grotesque person’s home.
One of the lessons of that movie was that Tom Cruise learned that he had to return his brother to the mental institution. Insane things kept happening because Rain Man couldn’t cope with the world.
I might be giving Trump a kinder label. Although Trump is replicating Hitler’s SS with ICE and a passion for concentration camps, and Hitler was definitely an evil man, Trump might only be an idiot savant.
However, whatever the condition Rain Man had, it is clear to any critical-thinking mind that you don’t put an imbalanced person in charge of anything, much less the once-greatest nation on earth!
And so what if Trump is not intentionally evil? Terrible ideas that manifest as evil make sense to a person who cannot think about other people. It’s not much different.
The movie Rain Man was about one man trying to keep his idiot savant brother in the outside world.
Our nation is now a real-life story about a large group of people thinking an idiot savant can run our country.
Watch Rain Man. See what you think. Did Tom Cruise put his brother in the mental institution because he had Rain Man Derangement Syndrome?
If there’s any advantage to seeing Trump in this generous light, it might be that we can see his voters differently. Tom Cruise took a while to figure out he had to return his brother to a mental institution. The whole movie was about that. They also need time.
And perhaps, by agreeing with me that many of our fellow citizens elected a strange word genius who could talk so many to submit to his power, seeking the way Rain Man used numbers to wow everyone with the promise of desirable change, it might help my mission to investigate and fix our schools. Yes, both parties let us down. They were and are a problem. But only a total failure of critical thinking could have produced our current story of electing a Rain Man. It had to be our schools.
I keep reminding people that fascists took over our schools about four decades ago. That began only a few years before that movie came out. We hadn’t become that ignorant yet. We knew better.
We wouldn’t produce a movie about figuring out what to do with such an unbalanced man today. Instead, it would be Tom Cruise traveling to Washington, D.C., to use politics to get rich, using his Rain Man-like brother, as if that were normal.
Unless you read my book about what’s actually going on in our schools, it will be hard for you to understand how we've lost our values and thinking to the point that we don’t know where a person like Trump belongs.
What schools were supposed to be or what they’ve become is not on most people’s radar. Once known, trust me, solving our democracy problem will be closer to a computer reset than to the horror story we awaken to each day lately.
We have a version of Rain Man running our country, with a mastery of public relations devoid of human context. Read my book, A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime,™ The Stunning First-Ever Explanation for School Shootings & How We End Them, and you’ll understand how we got to the modern dark ages and learn a solution to fix our schools that will work—and also end school shootings!
You will also understand that we’re not the same people after so many years of corrupt schools. If you knew our schools, you’d know that would be impossible.
Time to listen to the teacher whistleblowers below, who have been appearing online in disguise and ignored since 2008. (Other teacher whistleblowers have told their stories at Teachers’ Horror Stories since 2002.)
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