Street sign illustrating the concept of Democracy versus Dictatorship.
As the Trump administration enters its death throes, look for supporters on social media to shift their attention to Hunter Biden or any other story that distracts from the retelling of Trump’s horrifically negligent handling of the pandemic, and his criminal activity (both as a candidate and as president).
I’ve gone back and forth on how I think the state should move forward on citizen Trump. Part of me wants the government to cut a deal with Trump — Forgo prosecution if Trump agrees to retire quietly to the dustbin of American history. America turns the page, and Trump slinks away. “It’s time to put this shameful chapter behind us and move on”.
A continued focus on Trump through criminal and civil prosecutions just fans the flames of political tribalism and deepens the divide in our country. But a deal works only if Trump is capable of quietly walking away – is Trump capable of doing anything quietly? I don’t think so.
The other part of me wants to crush the orange menace unmercifully in the juicer of the American Justice System. Squeeze that motherfucker until there’s nothing left in that sorry orange hide of his. Prosecute him aggressively and relentlessly on all fronts criminal and civil. Make an example of him, because the next fraudulent criminal thug with autocratic tendencies might not be as inept and incompetent as Trump.
Regardless how the justice system proceeds against Trump personally, America must go full medieval on any organized effort to promote Trumpism in the future. Trumpism is the enemy of Democracy. It’s a poisonous and divisive political philosophy that ferments mistrust, fragments the population, and promotes a cult of personality (dipped in nationalism, sprinkled with religion) as a solution.
Trumpism is the blueprint for democracy’s demise – regardless of who sits at its head. When Trump leaves, another ambitious thug is sure to pick up the banner. Waging war against Trumpism is the only way forward.
I remember my kids watching a Trump speech early on in his run-up to the presidency and the expression on their faces as they listened to him.
They saw in Trump the behaviors and attributes they were taught to fight against. He was awash in them—the epitome of what they were taught not to be—the embodiment of the worst human attributes and characteristics (mean, petty, vindictive, and intellectually lazy). Surprisingly, Trump did not attempt to obscure any of this, no subterfuge—he reveled in these negative attributes like a hog in the slop.
I remember my kids watching Trump on television, then looking over their shoulders at me with a confused expression bracketed by nervous laughter. An expression that occurs when realizing something is not quite right at an elemental level — an expression that bubbles up from your core when what you’re seeing doesn’t jibe with what you were taught. It was an expression that said, “Is this guy for real? This can’t be real, right, Dad?”
“Right, Dad?”
And I think that’s why I detest Trump so much. His ascension to the highest office in the land refuted the values that I so strongly believed in and that I so vigorously instilled in my kids: values like kindness, empathy, understanding, hard work, and strength of character.
After the 2016 presidential election, I had to come to terms with the fact that the person elected to the highest office in the land — the person representing America to the rest of the world, was unkind, apathetic, and totally dishonest.
For nearly four years, I dealt with a buzzing dissonance deep inside my brain’s frontal and limbic lobes. Not only could I not make sense of a Trump presidency, but its very existence agitated me (as evidenced by my social media posts over the last four years).
If I take a step back, my anger at Trump is misdirected. Sure, Trump is an intellectually lazy and vindictive narcissist. But he’s never tried to hide that from anyone; he’s totally transparent and never tries to be something he’s not, which usually is an admirable trait if you’re not a raging asshole.
If I were on a psychiatrist’s couch, it would be a relatively short session to get to the actual source of my anger.
“Mr. Reilly, you’re not angry at Trump at all; you’re angry that so many of your fellow citizens voted for him – TWICE!”
And that would be an accurate diagnosis.
Which brings me to some questions:
Doesn’t every good parent teach their kids the fundamental values that I taught mine (work hard — be respectful — be honest — be a good sport – admit your mistakes — don’t bully — don’t brag)? And if they do, how do they square that with voting for someone who exemplifies the opposite of those values?
I have a theory.
My theory doesn’t take into account the people who support Trump because they’re drawn to the President’s bigoted views and white supremacist tendencies (fuck all of those people); in my view, these are not the majority of Trump supporters.
I’m pretty sure that the Trump supporters who I’m friends with know the President is a deeply flawed and selfish man.
If they were to walk into a bar and see some schmuck spouting disparaging remarks about women or a disabled person – or, if they saw an individual bragging about his intelligence and then, in the very next minute, demonstrating his ignorance, they’d think that person was a moron.
And yet, they turn a blind eye to the same behavior when it’s the President.
Why?
Because for some Americans, Trump’s flaws are insignificant and easily dismissed when balanced against the views they hold on abortion and religion.
For other Americans (though I suspect there’s a lot of cross-over with the first group) they believe in a wildly-weird conspiracy theory that pits President Trump against a cabal of global elites who are trafficking in human flesh. Like the first group, these folks are willing to dismiss the President’s intellectual ineptitude and moral decrepitude, because the alternative is a country being run by cannibalistic vampire sex traffickers.
These two groups (the religiously fueled and the conspiracy-driven) are bedfellows when it comes to their support for the President. For both groups, the President’s casual relationship with truth and facts matters less than what they see as the alternative.
The battle against COVID-19 required competent and steady leadership. To stop the spread of the disease, we needed our President to be honest, intelligent, and humble.
Honest, because we needed to trust him. We needed to know that what he told us about the disease was factual so that we could make well-informed decisions to keep ourselves and our families safe.
Intelligent because infectious disease epidemiology is complicated and heady stuff. We needed a president who could read briefings, synthesize and extrapolate the relevant data, sit down with scientists, listen to what they were telling him, and effectively make sense of it so that he could communicate what he learned to the public clearly and concisely. Being able to do this would result in public confidence.
Humble because COVID-19 was an unknown and ruthless disease. What we learned early on was subject to change as new data became available. We needed a president who was humble enough to admit the challenge would be tough and require Americans to work together in a coordinated and unified manner.
We needed our President’s honesty, intelligence, and humility, and he was glaringly 0 for 3.
COVID-19 has killed more than a quarter million Americans. Tens of thousands of those deaths can be blamed on the incompetency of our President. It has wrecked our economy, devastated small businesses, and decimated families. It also shined a light on an immoral and criminally incompetent leader and, in all likelihood, ended the Trump presidency. In a weird twist of fate, if not for the virus and incompetent leadership that ensued, we might have lost our democracy.
What a devastating price to pay for electing a con artist and reality TV celebrity to the Presidency. I hope we learned a lesson as a nation – that cheap populism makes for a dangerously shaky and ineffectual national platform and that honesty, intelligence, and humility matter in a President.
Republicans gerrymandered districts, closed polling places, and appointed a crooked pro-Trump Postmaster General, who, in the middle of a pandemic, ripped sorting machines out of postal facilities and removed drop-boxes to hinder the ability to handle an increase in mail-in ballots. And after all of that politically-motivated and strategic malevolence, Trump still got his ass handed to him in a big blue box, beautifully adorned with 306 electoral bows, in what the Department of Homeland Security called the most secure Presidential election in history.
And ever since that stinging rebuke of America’s one-term orange menace, we’ve had to listen to republicans’ bitch and moan (without evidence) about voter fraud — 0 for 13 in lawsuits at the time of this writing – laughed out of courtrooms across battleground states.
We watched in bemusement at the more than eleven thousand pathetically lost souls at the “Million MAGA March” with their “Stop the Steal” signs, and thought to ourselves how easy it is in America to sway the masses. All you need is a website, a lie, and a human desire to be part of something “big and just” and its down the wallpapered-with-Q-conspiracy-theory-rabbit-hole they go, screaming and yelling like snowflakes on steroids, like zombies on crack, like lemmings on Led Zeppelin.
Shut the fuck up already. You lost. Despite all the slimy underhanded efforts to suppress the vote and misinform citizens, YOU STILL FUCKING LOST.
Instead of bitching and moaning without merit, start thinking about putting up a better candidate in 2024, and while your at it, you might want to consider the fact that America is changing. We’re becoming more diverse, less religious, and more concerned about our planet – deal with that by backing candidates who will hustle for new voters, who will reach out to the people who live and work in their state and look to genuinely understand their needs and concerns.
And for the love of Mike, don’t blindly back a shallow and vacuous megalomaniac like Trump, who for 4 years padded the wallets of rich people, lowered the tax burden for multi-billion dollar corporations, ratcheted up fear, racism, and xenophobia, tried really really hard to limit access to healthcare, rolled back environmental regulations, diminished the integrity of the Presidency by lying at an astronomical rate, withheld lifesaving information about the dangers of COVID-19, tongue-kissed authoritarians across the globe, and wrecked America’s reputation around the world.
If you can’t elect a candidate better than Trump next time around, you deserve to lose again. Biggly.
And quit being that single-issue-ban-the-fetal-tissue-voter, because all that does is make you a target for manipulative vote-grubbing slugs like Trump, who, let’s be honest, would mandate abortion if it meant overturning the 2020 election results. If you want to reduce the number of abortions in America, let’s start with improved health education, reinforced by frank and honest discussions with children about sex, sexuality, and the importance of acting responsibly, and combine that with easy access to birth control. Then, implement these measures nationally, so everyone gets the same message at the same age, regardless of their background or where they live – that would do more to reduce abortions than 9 Amy Coney Barrets.
And finally, can we please get back to the core human values that actually have made America great – kindness, empathy, honesty, and integrity and get off the dangerous, religiously-fueled-patriarchal-cult-of-personality path we’ve been on for the last 4 years, because that shit is rotting this country from the inside out.
There’s something poetic about how the last few days of the 2020 presidential election played out.
As batches of counted ballots were released, I envisioned the President, alone in the White House, at the mercy of math. This muttering mad king, a slave to his television, forced to listen to the American press he so fervently hates, report on the facts, which he refuses to accept.
The harsh and austere undeniability of math.
The steadfast and steady march of the count.
To a person whose been married to the denial of facts for his entire life, it must have felt like death by a thousand cuts.
Hopefully, the people of this country can put down their blue and red tribal flags and start the hard work of talking with one another, instead of at one another.
bendingtheneedle 