Dear Donald Trump: America is soooooooo done with you. Stone cold fact: the majority of us despise the man. He couldn’t win a popular vote if his bloated, orange life depended on it. Winning the Electoral College is like winning a lottery you fixed yourself. Literally everything Trump touches turns to shit. He corrupts everything he touches. And everyone who succumbs in any way, shape or form. America post-Trump is a wreck – still salvageable but profoundly damaged. Or, (maybe more exactly) America is a sick patient lying on an operating table, hoping to be cured. Our diagnosis: America needs a Trump-ectomy.
To be fair, Trump didn’t infect us with anything. He’s simply an opportunistic pathogen who seized on an opening and exploited it. Well… to be fair, Vladimir Putin seized the opportunity and used Trump-the-pathogen to infect us. But, America-the-patient was open to infection. There’s racism in our blood. Denying it won’t make it go away. Rather, it makes it easier for pathogens like Trump to get into our blood and make the racism that’s there boil.
Racism: America’s Birth Defect
America is a great idea that its founders executed poorly in large part because of racism. You can’t really claim “All men are created equal” and then legalize enslaving some of them. But then, America’s founders – white, land-owning, Christian men – didn’t mean “all men” (though they did mean the “men” part as in “only” men). They meant “white, Christian, land-owning men like us are equal and everyone else can go screw themselves”. Clearly, America’s founders screwed up at the start – their creation devolved into a brutal Civil War.
Thing is? We’re still fighting that war. The Confederacy may have lost on the battlefield, but it won in the history books. They must have because, somehow, we don’t see Confederate flags as treasonous. Robert E. Lee wasn’t a hero. He turned his back on being a hero and fought to defend slavery instead – his choice.
White Demographic Doom
As the “Reagan Revolution” faded, the Right Wing Money (the Kochs & Mercers) saw demographic doom ahead. America was diversifying far more quickly than expected. A dynamic GOP would have embraced diversity. Instead, a shrinking, white-centric Republican Party embraced its own whiteness. They’ve always regarded democracy suspiciously. While they could always count on white voters to vote a certain way, diverse voters were unpredictable. Worse, unreliable. Worse still? Potential Democratic voters.
The Republican Party set its course: end America as a democracy by making it impossible for Democratic voters to vote and for their votes to ever count. Imagine if Republicans devoted a fraction of that time and energy to solving America’s problems instead of their own electoral problems. Maybe more Americans would vote for them. It’s just a thought…
How Trumpism Spreads
While – in their defense – the GOP hated Trump at the start, they didn’t let that stop them from embracing Trump. Did they come around to Trump’s policy positions? Was Donald Trump, Statesman, too undeniable a leader of men? I bet Lindsey Graham knows the answer. I bet the answer was sitting inside Donald Trump’s office safe at Mar-A-Lago.
I’ll double down on Lindsey – and the contents of Trump’s safe. The Republican Party would have followed Trump out of pure cynical greed. The blackmail he holds over them? That’s icing.
The hard core Trumpists – the most fascistic part of the GOP base makes up just 15% of Americans. That’s not an insignificant number, but, compared to 85% – the rest of us? They can’t push us around. That doesn’t mean they won’t try. They’re fascists after all. The only way to dissuade them is to prosecute them. They’ll never stop being fascists but we’ll neuter their ability to spread fascism and openly be fascists.
The Diversity Cure
Democracy and fascism are mutually exclusive propositions. They cannot coexist. Democracy, while messy, beats the hell out of fascism. Diversity beats the hell out of uniformity. It problem-solves better, flies higher, digs deeper and will benefit more people more fully. Fascism – Trumpism – Republicanism – whatever we call it – it divides in order to conquer. Like an invading pathogen.
And, indeed, watching Trump continue to work our legal system is like watching a tumor metastasize. We’ve already seen the Trump-Virus turn the Republican Party into Trump. When he ran the government, he turned our government into him. If he ever gets the reins of power again, he’ll finish the job. He’ll fully Trumpify America.
Better we excise this tumor first. America needs a Trump-ectomy more than ever! And then we need a long-term dose of chemotherapy to mop up and prevent the disease from recurring.
This isn’t going to be fun. Or pleasurable. But, it’s a matter of life or death.
And, we know it in our bones that the instant America rids itself of this disease? We’ll start to feel a whole lot better.
Does America need a Trump-ectomy? Do the words “emergency surgery” mean anything?
One response to “America Needs A Trump-ectomy”
Those of us that grew up in New York already knew much of this about tRump. He has been a lying con artist right out of the cradle and his Dad loved it and nurtured it. Right up until he was rushing into the Taj Mahal with $2,000,000 in chips to keep the doors open and tRump was telling the press that the casino was “too busy. No one ever expected so many people to show up!” The truth was he cannabalized his own business by buying up the competition, increasing his costs and watering down revenues. Somehow America went right for this guy, lies and all, without so much as picking up a paper or a book to find out who he really is/was.
And therein lies the scariest part; our voters are still so obtuse that they could vote for anyone; completely ignorant of their past, criminal or otherwise and you couldn’t convinve them that they did the wrong thing. They simply wouldn’t believe it. Sigh.