Given the strange confluence of the new president’s first “presidential” speech and the growing scandal of Russian’s tampering with the election along with the help of one Trump advisee after another (Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation just today for his involvement (Or was it his lying about his involvement under oath? It’s all very strange here in Upside Down and Backwards World), it is equally bizarre that the country is still debating about who this man in the White House is.
While some persist in thinking he’s the salvation of working class white folks, others insist he’s just a figurehead, the president in name only doing the bidding of his billionaire strategists and fellow businessmen, particularly the guttersnipe Steve Bannon, erstwhile publisher of the rightwing alt-factoidal Breitbart News. Some still think he’s a carnival barker or perhaps a character in the Wizard of Oz: the scarecrow, say, who doesn’t have the brain to imagine a long-range view of what the country needs and wants; or maybe the tin woodsman who doesn’t have a heart, as he is totally without empathy and compassion. Or perhaps it’s the cowardly lion that he inhabits, because he doesn’t have the courage to fend for himself but has to hide behind his handlers when it comes to seriously talking about government policy or the impact of his executive orders and bully pulpit upon We the People, who depend on the Constitution for our personal liberties and limits on authoritarian power. Or perhaps he is the wizard himself, whose narcissistic power has been magnified by his occupation of the top post and his grand scheme of how to make a lot of money at taxpayers’ expense. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain of hair?
Maybe he is all those things if not the orchestrator in chief, but he is surely a lightning rod, and it is dangerous to underestimate his terrible mind’s ability to imagine dismantling every democratic component that remains in this republic. He’s a lightning rod for a corporatist regime that has been moving steadily in the direction of global corporate power and away from liberal democracy since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. And he is sending the shockwaves in every direction so we don’t look at the corruption at its center.
These are strong words for our conservative friends and family members who see him in the light of economic salvation, we know. Someone who will “make America great again” for some people. Whatever that means. Obviously, it means a return to unfettered white power; it’s the white man’s salvation, as many say right out loud. However, the fact that his long-range goals for the country remain an enigma might be what allows his image to serve as a Rorschach card whereby the portion of the public that recoils in horror see a plague beginning to spread and those that resonate with his campaign promises can read whatever they want to hear into what he says.
In other words, we can put an assessment of this president into two specific camps. Almost everyone is in either the “He’s Not My President” camp or the “He Cannot Do Anything Wrong” camp. There’s no wishy-washy response when it comes to viewing our president a certain way. He automatically falls into either one of these two polar opposite categories.
Members of the first camp tend to have a visceral dislike for how the president consistently behaves. To them, his cognitive style and the language he uses are extremely offensive and absolutely unpresidential. He is unequivocally “not their president.” Those in the other camp tend to get very angry at anyone who perceives their president in such pejorative terms. To them, it is unpatriotic and disrespectful to view him in that light. And they’re not all wrong: it does show disrespect. The first camp would respond, “How can I respect someone who is oblivious to our nation’s political realities when it comes to such behavior as he displays?
Yes, that’s the camp that resonates with me. I can’t help it; the blemishes on our country’s integrity are so apparent, and the stain on our country’s integrity grows broader each day this president exposes the country and the world to his obstreperous attitude and vulgar language and lifestyle. A strong and clear oppositional response must be made. And that’s exactly what more than half of the country and much of the world are doing via the ongoing demonstrations, petitions, and letters of outrage by the actions being taken by the Republican Administration and Republican-controlled Congress. There are serious objections to be made regarding massive deportations, outrageous environmental deregulations, forceful eviction of Native Americans from treaty lands in favor of the Dakota Access Pipe Line, public school deregulation of nutritional meals and removal of guaranteed services for kids with disabilities … and the list goes on.
If you like the president and find yourself in the “He Cannot Do Anything Wrong” camp, you owe it to yourself and the country’s integrity to explain what it is about this administration that makes you view it favorably. I urge you to go one step further and explain how you manage to overlook his inarguably aberrant and disgusting behavior. I would like you to be very specific about what you like about him and please address how you square your feelings with what others dislike about what is happening to massive numbers of vulnerable people and our rivers and streams. The reason you must do that is because it’s important to be as honest as you can be in addressing these objectionable and blatant qualities and actions with counter reasons for supporting his presidency. I would imagine it’s pretty difficult to counter the administration’s tactics of demeaning and humiliating others in an effort to promote the man on top in the public eyes. These actions are a practice of self-aggrandizement and engagement in acts undertaken to increase the president’s own finances, power, and influence at worst, or to draw attention to his own importance at someone else’s expense at best. Those practices are so frequent and hurtful that they alone would rule him out to be president of the United States in any other era that we’ve known.
Let’s address just one, nonpartisan example: when the president addressed the CIA community at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters on his first day in office. His presentation included some strong words of castigation bout the CIA, and then he blamed the press for his own demeaning CIA comments. Former CIA director John Brennan’s aide Nick Shapiro released a statement in response: “Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency Heroes. Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself.”
If he weren’t president of the United States, but rather just citizen Donald J. Trump, the real estate mogul, and you knew absolutely nothing more about him other than he’s very wealthy, would you feel he was a winner, just like citizen Trump felt about himself before and how President Trump feels about himself now? Perhaps you would, if making a lot of the green stuff, in and of itself, is your mark of success. Not to diminish such a belief, I must ask, do you really think that should be the end of the story?
To me, what’s more important by far is what you do with the money. Does grandiose prosperity merit simple selfish satisfaction? Or should you show magnanimity toward others with it by creating public institutions or helping those in need to be a true winner? In other words, is money a public good as an end in itself or only as a means to an end? Clearly, we have a president who sees money as an end in itself, which is more than a little troubling to me since he is the leader of a country of 350 million others.
Evidence suggests that he’s been this way all of his life—out for himself and himself alone. This perhaps helps explain why he has gone through four bankruptcies of some financial magnitude where the sum total of his bankruptcies reached close to $1 billion. It’s possible he might have been able to avoid those catastrophes if he had been more reflective about his impact and more introspective about his aims. This would lead to setting realistic goals that jibed with external reality, that is, profit‑loss, debt to others (in finances or gratitude), and economic impact. Realities that everyone is subject to. But that’s not characteristic of a man who truly believes no one equals his acumen in consistently and immediately, with minimal forethought, making good judgments for not only himself but a diverse nation as well. Remember, at one time, when discussing ISIS, he said, “I alone will defeat ISIS.”
Good luck with that.
On the January 29, 2017, episode of Meet the Press, Doris Kearns Goodwin quoted Abraham Lincoln saying, “You’ve got to know where you come from to know what to do next.” In other words, President Trump should start reflecting on his life in general and our country in particular and consider policies that would better the entire citizenry, rather than impulsively assuming—many times without any serious investigation whatsoever—that he knows best what’s good for America. That’s particularly true when his frame of reference has only been the rich and well heeled, largely at the expense of the middle class and the poor. If he realized that, perhaps he could learn something.
Instead of thinking that our country’s lives revolve around the acquisition of money and all the power that it buys, the current president—any president—should begin to empathize with people whose economic lives are dramatically different from his and recognize that many people, surely in his tiny percentage as well, value love and kindness over money and power. That’s the only way the people’s business will be accomplished, if the Executive Branch and both sides of the Congressional Branch aisle work together to respond to the middle class and the poor’s needs, which have been sadly neglected over many, many years. After all, those are the people who get the actual work done.