On Thursday afternoon July 30, 2020 former President Barak Obama spoke a eulogy for John Lewis. It has been far too long since Barak Obama addressed the American people. What he said and how he said it have been too long gone from our lives. This was a president. This was a man who led the American people, a man who brought us together, who understood what America really stands for and how it should act and react.
It has been less than four years since Barak Obama sat in the White House but it seems like a hundred. His departure signaled the death of hope. His return to public life at this stage of our nation’s demise is like turning on a light in a dank cellar.
There are currently five living presidents of the United States. Three of them came to John Lewis’ funeral to speak. A fourth, Jimmy Carter, sent a message of condolence but could not attend because of his advanced age. One was a no-show. That was Donald Trump, the man who is currently disgracing the office. What kept Trump away? Well, I’d like to say he was out playing golf because as trivial as that might be at least he would have been staying out of trouble. Instead he was busy trying to delay an election that he is destined to lose, in some wan hope that he can at least make a credible stand.
By today’s actions, Trump has so deeply disgraced himself, that even Republicans who thus far have been completely derelict in their duties to their constituents and their country, finally stepped forward and commented on his heinous actions.
Such steadfast and morally vacant GOP stalwarts as Moscow Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Grassley, Liz Cheney, John Barrasso and Lindsay Graham all rose in protest to Trump’s phony scam.
Let’s be clear. When this nation was attacked by a pandemic, Donald Trump did not lead, he stood aside and allowed that pandemic to run rampant and he did it for purely political reasons. He didn’t want to have to take any responsibility, which might have been negatively reflected at the polling places. In this he showed how little he understood the American people who would have backed him to the hilt, right or wrong, as long as he had acted.
Then when the pandemic collapsed our economy, instead of acting to control its spread, he acted to encourage that spread by opening areas of the nation that were still being ravaged by the virus, to further contamination. Now with the economy in the toilet and the virus laying waste to the southern half of our country; now as over 4.4 million people have contracted the disease and over 152,000 have died from it, we are accosted by a president who mocks the use of masks and tries to force the opening of schools even as the disease is running amok in many communities.
Trump fought against testing and now brags about some fictitious and completely inefficient testing process, calling it the best in the world when it isn’t even functional.
And despite all this and much, much more we are faced with about 35% of the population who will still vote for this depraved loser; who will follow him down the rabbit hole despite the crushed economy, the death rate and the countless policy failures and who still believe all his pandemic fantasies from injecting bleach into your body, to taking drugs that have already been proven false to supporting the ravings of a crazed doctor who opines on sex with demons and interaction with witches. These people, who accept any nonsense, as long as Trump vomits it out, are as much the problem as he is. They are being willfully stupid and gratuitously obtuse. They ignore reason or logic to encourage fantasies that are detrimental to them and more important, to the rest of the planet.
*****
Trump’s insane fishing expedition into delaying the elections appears to be a sign that he has seen the light and while refusing to accept the message, is trying desperately to fend off reality. The above named pack of GOP politicians that have refuted his desperate grab for power indicate that they too have seen the light and are not willing to attempt to destroy themselves or the country in order to curry favor with a maniacal would-be despot who is set on destroying our democratic system in a futile attempt to retain power.
So maybe it’s time for the rest of us to accept the concept that Trump has finally destroyed himself. He has finally gone beyond the point where he can sell the Kool Aid. Make no mistake, Joe Biden didn’t make this happen, nor did the rest of us. This is all the doing of Donald Trump. It is the final recognition by that huge middle ground of Americans that they have helped or enabled a criminal sociopath to grab hold of power in our country and that it is now time to put it to a stop.
Of course there will still be piles of pundits who guessed wrong last time and who refuse to allow themselves to dream a dream of reality; who persist in the notion that some event will happen, some cataclysmic force will occur that will move the earth and allow Trump a reprieve from the death sentence he has imposed upon himself.
But so what if it does? It will still be Trump, the dedicated loser, who somehow finds a way to fail, no matter how fraught with potential any set of circumstances appears.
He could have turned the pandemic into a triumph, just as Angela Merkel did in Germany but function is not his way. He is too self-involved to ever do anything that considers the nation first and too stupid to understand what is in his best interest even if it appears to be selfless. So given some new opportunity we can depend on Donald Trump doing the wrong thing and failing. It’s an out bet.