I Don't Want to Live in Donald Trump's America

 

I Don’t Want to Live in Donald Trump’s America

September 23, 2020

 

In November, 2016, American voters did the unthinkable. The inexcusable. The unconscionable. They made the New York hustler, TV personality, and wildly immoral human being Donald J. Trump President of the United States of America. No, he didn’t get a majority of the votes nationwide. His Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton did, but that’s not how we elect our presidents. Because we elect presidents through the Electoral College, which gives disproportionate power to small population states, it is not uncommon that the candidate who loses the popular national vote but wins a majority in enough small population states becomes president. Many of us believe the Electoral College to be a relic of a past very different from today’s reality and understand that perhaps it was even created to placate the slave owing states of the south. We should have gotten rid of it years ago. Sadly we haven’t gotten rid of it, and in 2016 it gave us the worse president in the history of our country, Donald J. Trump.

Donald Trump stands for and advocates all the things that are wrong with the United States of America and none of the things that are right with it. He took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, but like so many Americans he hasn’t even bothered to learn what’s in the Constitution because he doesn’t believe in it. He thinks of it just as an obstacle to his personal power. He is a racist. He calls white supremacists “very fine people.” He is a misogynist. He is grossly sexually immoral. He has been married three times and has been sexually unfaithful to all three of his wives. He has been accused several times of sexual assault. He has had sexual affairs with at least one porn star and one Playboy Playmate. He has bragged of grabbing women by the pussy (his word not mine) and having them let him do it because he’s famous.

He does not believe in American democracy. He wants to be a de facto autocrat like his buddy Vladimir Putin of Russia. He supports efforts across the country to reduce the number of voters in demographic groups, i.e., mostly Black people, among whom he has little support. He calls the 2020 presidential election rigged before it has even taken place, probably because he fears he’s going to lose it. He says the only way he can lose is if the election is rigged, which it certainly won’t be. He tries to govern more through executive orders than through constitutional processes.

He does not believe in the rule of law. He attacks the perfectly legitimate Mueller investigation into his 2016 campaign’s connections with Russian interference intended to support his candidacy and to discredit Secretary Clinton. He railed against and eventually fired his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, himself a good ole boy southern racist, for taking the perfectly appropriate step of recusing himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation because of a conflict of interest. He wants an Attorney General who will act as his personal lawyer not as head of the Department of Justice. He finally got one in Attorney General William Barr, who clearly should be impeached and removed from office for engaging in politically motivated interference in Department of Justice prosecutions of people close to Trump. Trump said he wants a Roy Cohen as Attorney General. Barr is as close as he’s going to get. And that of course is not what the Attorney General is supposed to be.

His politics are as bad as his personal morals. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, about which more below, he had ballooned the federal deficit to pay for unnecessary and economically unproductive tax cuts for the ultra-rich and big corporations. His administration jettisons environmental regulations at will. He pulls the US out of important international treaties. He has border patrol agents separate children from their parents, not keep records adequate to allow the government ever to reunite the families they have destroyed, and deport them without their parents. He allows unqualified doctors to perform unnecessary surgeries on detained women who have not consented to them. All in all Trump’s handling of immigrants is the best evidence we have that he is an American fascist. Immigrants function for Trump the way Jews functioned for Hitler. The only difference is that Trump hasn’t set up any Auschwitz—not yet.

He nominates unqualified right-wing zealots as federal judges from the Supreme Court on down, Justice Brett Kavanaugh being the latest example of his doing that at the Supreme Court level. His co-conspirator Mitch McConnell rams those nominations through the Senate in huge numbers. Now he’s going to ram through a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg though we’re less than two months away from the next presidential election. This after McConnell and his senatorial minions refused even to hold a hearing on a Supreme Court nomination President Obama made when there were around eight months until the next presidential election on the pretext that it was too close to the election and that, as McConnell said, the American people should have a voice in filling the vacant Supreme Court seat. The Constitution says nothing about the people having a direct role in that process, but never mind.

Donald Trump lies about everything. I saw one news report a while back about someone who is keeping running total of Trump’s lies. The report said that this source believed that Trump will have told twenty thousand lies by the time his first term ends. That’s nearly fourteen lies a day over all four years. Donald Trump simply does not operate within the categories true and false. He cares not at all whether something he says is true or not. He cares about only two things: Does a statement he makes massage his pathetically weak ego (for which he compensates by being a braggart and bully) and does it help him get reelected. The Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels perfected the art of the big lie. Trump has perfected the art of the constant lie. There isn’t a shred of a reason to believe a single thing the man says.

Then there’s the COVID-19 pandemic. By March, 2020, at the latest it was obvious that the United States was going to get hit hard by the deadly coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, better known by the name of the disease it produces, COVID-19. In the past nearly seven months that virus has killed over 200,000 Americans. That’s nearly sixty-seven times the number of Americans killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Experts expect that death toll to go up substantially before the pandemic is over. In March, 2020, or even in February, it was absolutely incumbent on the president and the entire federal government to put responding to the coronavirus threat at the top of everyone’s agenda. The president should have addressed the nation with serious words about what was coming, the impact it would have on jobs and healthcare, and what we all were going to have to do to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and their economic impact as much as possible. The president should have invoked the Defense Production Act and mobilized American industry to produce massive amounts of personal protective equipment and anything else healthcare providers were going to need to respond to the crisis as effectively as possible.

Donald Trump did nearly none of those things. He has recently admitted that he knew the threat the coronavirus presented in February, 2020. Instead of acting to reduce the scale and consequences of the coming pandemic he publicly denied there was any real threat. He said having COVID-19 was like having the flu. He said there were only a very, very small number of cases and that the number of cases would soon be down to zero. He did nothing or very little to increase the available supply of necessary medical equipment. He never told anyone to wear a mask and rarely wore one himself even though the scientists know that wearing masks is the most effective thing we can do to slow the spread of the virus. He demanded that the shut down economy and all schools reopen way too soon. Again and again and again he lied about the nature and extent of COVID-19 illness and death. He has admitted that he downplayed the extent of the danger from COVID-19.

If his response does not meet the statutory definition of criminally negligent homicide there must be some other law under which Trump could be prosecuted for his callous disregard of the COVID-19 threat and his selfish lies designed to lull the American people into not responding to the coronavirus pandemic adequately themselves. He told people to drink cleaning products to combat the disease. He pushed some unproven anti-malarial drug as a cure, which it isn’t. He has destroyed the reputation of the CDC, once the most respected public health agency in the world. If Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t criminal it just means that our criminal law did not foresee a president acting so wildly badly in the face of the greatest threat to public health in this country in over a century and therefore has no provision criminalizing it.

The list of Donald Trump horribles goes on and on. Yet perhaps the most outrageous fact of all is that something like 40% of the American electorate plans to vote to reelect him. Ignorant, fearful, bigoted voters elected him once. Ignorant, fearful, bigoted voters may elect him a second time. Most of the polling gives Joe Biden a slight edge over Trump both nationally and in several swing states. The polls could well be wrong. They told us Trump would lose to Clinton in 2016. They could be tragically wrong again. That so many Americans still support Trump is evidence of just how low our political culture has sunk in the eight decades of my life. I don’t know why we have sunk so low. I just know that we have.

I do not want to live in Donald Trump’s America. Yes, I am an American. I was born in this country, and except for four separate academic years in my youth and young adulthood I have lived my whole life in this country. I have been shaped in both good and bad ways by the dominant white American culture in which I grew up. I have been appalled by other presidents before Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were disasters for our nation. We haven’t recovered from Reagan yet. None of those other presidents however has made me want to leave the country as much as I do today. I don’t want to be associated with a country led by an international laughing stock. The unfortunate truth is that the only countries whose immigration requirements I could meet are places I can’t imagine living for linguistic and cultural reasons. So here I am, and here I’ll stay. I have no sense that I can do anything to help turn this country around. I have little hope that this country will turn itself around. I don’t want to be here, but I have no real choice. So good Lord help me. Good Lord help my country.