Ever since that fateful day, June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump—heretofore business mogul, beauty pageant owner, reality TV show star, NYC playboy—made his dramatic descent of the escalator in Trump Towers and announced to a surprised and amused world that he was ready to expand his resume by becoming President of the United States and leader of the free world, I—like everyone else paying attention—have been amused, appalled, bewildered, and infuriated. But after running that gamut, and still feeling all of those except the amused part (this is no longer funny!), I also feel deeply sad and disturbed because it’s become increasingly obvious Donald Trump is the effect, not the cause of our dire situation. Our country was ripe for a buffoon seeking the presidency to be taken seriously and voted for because of a half century of declining standards and failure to address systemic problems which are now rising to the surface in a way we haven’t seen in decades. And what the events of the last year have revealed to us about our standards and about the state of the Union is downright heartbreaking!
The person whom one of our two major parties is about to officially nominate as their candidate for the presidency of our country has regularly been labeled liar, racist, misogynist, xenophobe, birther, anti-Semite, hater of all Muslims, and inciter of violence. He has lawsuits pending against him for charges which include fraud, rape, and rape of a minor. He says he’ll bring jobs back to our country when it’s a well-documented fact that he himself has outsourced jobs in his various businesses. He says he’s for the working person but spent big bucks to prevent his housekeepers in Las Vegas from unionizing (he lost!). He boasts of his business success, but his corporations have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy four times. He wants to ban immigrants but has employed immigrants in his businesses (and married two of them). He claims to be worth ten billion dollars, but most economists believe his actual worth is far less; and he admitted his worth fluctuates by the day, dependent among other things on his mood (What the . . . ???). He refuses to release his recent tax returns even though doing so has been common practice among presidential candidates for decades. He proudly proclaims himself the King of Debt but boasts that he’d “do great” handling the national economy. He yammers on endlessly about his greatness, but everyone who knows the slightest smidgen about psychology immediately pegged him as the biggest narcissist ever to disgrace the national stage. He has repeatedly demonstrated his utter ignorance of history, politics, government, international relations, and everything else with which a president must be intimately familiar. Just this week, when someone asked him what he would do to protect the Article I powers of the Constitution, his answer could not have made it any more obvious that he’s never even studied the Constitution: “I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII.” Great, Donald! There’s just one problem with that: Article XII doesn’t exist. He also demonstrates with each passing day his complete lack of interest in or effort toward learning any of those things.
His rallies will be the subject of discussion for decades to come, giving historians plenty of material for analysis. Who remembers a previous presidential candidate giving childish names to each of his opponents? Who has heard a presidential candidate swatting away a mosquito make the statement “I don’t like mosquitoes! OK, speaking of mosquitoes, hello Hillary, how are you doing?” I recall saying things like that, circa third grade, maybe fifth. But this is someone who thinks he’s qualified to lead the free world, and this is a campaign “speech” for God’s sake! And let’s talk about his “speeches.” What he calls “speeches” are meandering, incoherent, streams of verbal vomit whose main focus is defending himself and his latest mind-boggling screw-up. He sprinkles in dashes and pinches of love for his audience and for his country and how he’s motivated by his love for us all to do great things, but then he goes right back to his narcissistic boasting and his thin-skinned, insecure self-defense; and he makes it abundantly obvious he has no statute of limitations on grudges as he even rehashes comments and incidents from the primary.
A couple of nights ago, I listened to a whole hour of his rambling, and it was the most mind-numbing hour of my life! This week, Wednesday evening, having just received the best gift a Republican candidate could possibly be handed—the FBI decision on Hillary Clinton’s emails—he was in the catbird seat! He could have spent his entire time behind the podium hammering his opponent, her party, her husband, the FBI, the Justice Department (not saying I agree with popular opinions on these subjects, but from a Republican candidate’s viewpoint he had a veritable arsenal of ammunition). Instead, he randomly sprinkled in lame comments on this new information, relying mostly on his worn-out accusation of “rigged system.” (Quick side note: According to the “speech” I listened to this week, he thinks he invented the word “rigged” and pretty much owns intellectual property rights to it. Really. No joke.) The body of the “speech,” however, twisted and turned from defending his Star of David tweet and wishing it hadn’t been taken down to his contempt for the media and their “racist tendencies” to praise for Newt Gingrich and Saddam Hussein to raking up grudges from the Republican primary to how great the upcoming convention will be to slamming the Never Trump movement as well as all the other Republicans who have refused or have hesitated to support him. And I’m sure I left out a few things I missed during the times my ears became numb.
Not much of a resume, I’d say, for someone who wants to be president. You wouldn’t go up in an airplane piloted by someone who’s never flown a plane before or even seen the inside of a cockpit, you wouldn’t sign a consent for surgery by someone who never set foot in a medical school, you wouldn’t hire someone to design your house who has no knowledge of building and safety codes, you wouldn’t go to McDonald’s to purchase a gourmet meal, you wouldn’t ask your hair stylist to repair your car or your nail tech to fix your lawn mower, and you wouldn’t hire a five-year-old to take your wedding photos. But you’d hand the nuclear codes to an unhinged huckster who can’t put together a coherent sentence and has the temperament of a five-year-old. And about thirteen million people—more than have voted for any other single primary candidate in history—have seen this SAME information and said, “Wow! HE needs to be President!” And those people have gone to his rallies; they’ve listened to his word vomit; they’ve chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until they must be hoarse; they’ve accosted protesters; and they’ve cast their votes.
All of that being said, the fact that a crazy person thinks he should be president doesn’t really disturb me. Look at all the crazy people who have claimed to be Jesus! As I said at the beginning, Trump is not the cause; he’s the effect. Donald Trump would not be where he is without the 13,000,000 people who have so far voted for him. And therein lies the REAL tragedy! In the greatest and richest country on earth, 13,000,000 people feel so angry, so betrayed, so powerless, so disenfranchised, so cheated, and so dehumanized that the rantings of a crazy man are words of hope and promise! If I were drowning, I wouldn’t take time to vet the person who threw me a rope. I wouldn’t care how morally corrupt or mentally deranged the person might be; I’d grab that rope! The fact that 13,000,000 people have reached the level of desperation that a rope from Donald Trump looks like salvation is tragic.
It goes without saying at this point that we need to make sure this con man never sets foot anywhere near the Oval Office, but equally important is our need to fix the systemic problems that have allowed him to get this close to that sacred territory. Anti-intellectualism, failing schools, failing churches, hatred, prejudice of all sorts, political polarization—these are our real problems. And they’ve flourished in the fertile soil of standards grossly reduced by George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, spineless media, Republican lawmakers’ rejection of a black president, young black men murdered without consequence, mass murders becoming commonplace occurrences, schools so bound to teaching how to pass a test that they don’t have time to teach how to think and live, and so many more.
But what are we doing to fix these real causes? What can we do to fix them? How can we prevent a repeat of the 2016 campaign debacle? Donald Trump will go away, and as long as he’s never elected, we can recover from the damage done so far. But the systemic issues that allowed his rise will not go away on their own. They’re going to require serious soul-searching and hard work, and we can’t start soon enough!