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.
America succeeds and prospers when its citizens get along with one another. And in a country where politics often ignites passion, getting along means not digging too deeply into each other’s political views.
So, Americans consciously work at not letting how we vote affect our relationships. It’s not always easy, but one thing that helps us keep the peace (and the republic) is a shared set of values that transcend politics.
We might have divergent views on taxation, education, healthcare, and foreign policy. Still, we unite around core values rooted in our humanity – honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy. It’s these shared values that allow you to tolerate my politics and me to tolerate yours.
So, what’s changed in America? Why are we so quick to disregard the unspoken rule that separates the personal and political?
I suspect Trump supporters are saying, “I’m not acting any different than I’ve acted in the past; I’m simply voting for the Republican candidate – why all this outrage?” And I agree with them; they’re not acting any differently than they have in the past.
What’s changed this time is not you or me – it’s the leader of the Republican party.
Donald Trump is demonstrably mean, dishonest, and apathetic. He is the antithesis of the values we assumed transcended politics and united us as Americans.
So, when I hear a colleague, a neighbor, or a friend vociferously support the former President, I process that support as an indifference to the personal (not political) values that I hold firmly — honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy.
America has never had to deal collectively with a leader like Trump.
The personalization of politics we see in our country today comes from the jarring realization that honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy do not transcend politics for Trump supporters.
Here is an actual response to a statement about the morality of Trump supporters versus those who oppose him:
“I’m not sure how if one thinks the president is doing a good job, it automatically means our morals are opposing?
I think you may be over simplifying what is a fairly involved subject. For example, while I often cringe while listening to him conduct briefs, and there are other facets of his personality that turn me off, I agree with the majority of the things he is doing (his policies).”
When someone makes “personality” and a poor use of language the main shortfalls of the President, then of course they’re going to overlook them in favor what the president is “doing (his policies).”
Trump supporters use this logic all the time, and I suppose it helps them sleep at night. And actually, in the past, such logic made sense, because the person occupying the oval office usually possessed a base-line of morality, empathy, and decency.
But that’s not the case today.
What Trump supporters refuse to do is delve deeper than “personality”. They refuse to look at the role a person’s character plays in decision making.
Statements about not liking Trump’s personality, but liking his policies, is akin to saying:
“Sure, Hitler’s spastic speeches make me cringe, but at least he’s putting Germany first.”
Relying on the “policy vs personality” argument, while ignoring an egregious lack of normative behavior, combined with the demonstrable fact that the president has no moral compass, is a faulty and dangerous thinking.
When a selfish and immoral man gains access to political power, he’ll use that power for selfish and immoral purpose. He’ll always put his own well-being and thirst for power above the needs of people he pledged to serve. Expecting righteousness and sound governance from a man who’s lived a shallow and self-serving life, and who labels those who serve the greater good as “suckers and losers,” is absurd.
Those who refused to look at the Trump’s character in 2016 (because of a blind hatred of Hillary Clinton), have had have 4 years’ worth of examples that show President Trump puts himself above the country — and a blind hatred of Hillary Clinton is not on that ballot this time around.
bendingtheneedle 