Before you continue reading please note that Trump’s spelling of ‘unpresidented’ above should be spelled ‘unprecedented’. That’s English and as an emigrant I am proud to say that I have more command of Donald Trump’s language than he ever will.
Now, here we go.
That Donald Trump’s America was going to be a downgrade was never the question.
It was always a terrifying prospect.
His campaign was an ominous forerunner, situating him within the broader arc of naked ambition and functional incompetence.
So, it wasn’t one of those sophisticated machines that plugged raw data into some matrix with the hope of extracting some mathematical formula to pursue votes. Instead, it was multiple rounds of name calling infused with the hard bigotry of white nationalism, brown immigrants, border walls and religious defamation – all smothered with a generous pouring of Christian syrup to give it that Godly authenticity the Alt Right uses as its default stance to persecute all who are of different hue and religious persuasion.
Trump’s combustible mix of arrogance and anti-intellectualism, his vulgarity and depravity, his disassociated affect, his compressed vocabulary (in which beautiful is one of the few multi syllable words) catapulted him all the way to the White House where he is good only at choreographing the signing of his executive orders…not to be confused with meaningful legislation which is typically approved by Congress.
With the Presidential gradient now locked on perpetual decline, many are taking a fresh look at the term ‘Washington Insider’ and are having a new level of respect for it. They are realizing that the term suggests the requisite level of political experience, presidential decorum, professional eloquence and a temperament /intelligence quotient combination that equips the President to make relatively sound decisions and to be capably representative of America.
Those who were mesmerized by the insinuation of words like ‘new world order’ were insecure enough to envision an America that would be free of all hints of dark pigment and non-Christian religion.
This Trump, insolent because he is vulnerable, cantankerous because he lacks substance, pompous because he is short on character, aggressive because he is weak, appealed to the smaller parts of these followers, who like him, felt running a country is a simplistic activity that requires a person to merely be combative, bellicose and boastful.
In two short weeks, Trump has assaulted diplomatic relations with key alliances, exacerbated tenuous relations with countries possessing nuclear arsenals, advocated then walked back support for Israel to continue Palestinian displacement and has given Vladimir Putin, America’s arch enemy, everything but a lap dance.
Experts have proffered all sorts of diagnoses of this man whose politics fall well short of his portfolio and whose antics suggest intellectual underdevelopment. But if anything over leaps his ego, it is his vaulting ambitions to be seen as the most powerful person….ever.
With a cunning one might reserve for a much brighter person, Trump bought in to the witch hunt for President Obama’s birth certificate, easing the immigrant founder of that movement, Orly Taitz, off her own racist platform.
You may recall Taitz, an immigrant/dentist/realtor/lawyer/professional time waster, began her march towards prominence on claims that Obama was a foreigner and her mission was to produce his birth certificate.
Taitz, like so many other con artists with political ambitions, understood that there was a movement fomenting in the sub cutaneous racial resentment that is America’s political climate; that there is real fear amongst blocks of whites who feel that they are being forced in to the minority because of immigration and thus have to battle to maintain their majority status in this land that was built under God for white men with white women. As proof, Taitz produced a photo shopped birth certificate allegedly from Kenya. It was summarily thrown out of court, along with her relevance.
Always the predator, Trump jumped on her platform. He knew that the Republicans tend to tap in to racism more overtly during an election season. He had kept up the ‘search for the birth certificate’ after Taitz failed, giving carefully choreographed updates to the media on what his “investigators were finding”. He had become a celebrity agitator in communities that prefer the doctrine of division. His coded message? Obama was not legitimate because he was black and he was willing to ‘spend millions to take the country back for real Americans’.
Now, it was time for the grass-roots persona.
That was easy. All he had to do was lace his limited vocabulary with expletives, invectives, pack it all in to a message of fear of those who wanted to harm America and the local police and the National Rifle Association and other bastions of White Culture and, by extrapolation, all America needed was white people.
They loved it. He became the darling of millions. He won the Electoral College.
But he lost the popular vote because more people than not thought that he was too academically challenged and emotionally suspect to be the President of the United States of America and all of the other agencies that are attached to that portfolio. They were distrustful of his dealings with Russia and remain curious about the Kompromat files of his alleged sexual indiscretions in a Russian hotel room, that Vladimir has in his vaults. They were mistrustful of his grovelling overtures to this Russian leader who is known to leak data on those whom he wants to take down. They were disturbed that before they cast their votes there was information in possession of the CIA about Russia’s skewing of the electoral process to favor Trump, an obvious Putin groupie.
Now, Trump’s ascension to the White House has gotten many in his ‘disaffected base’ thinking. The campaign promises were never really doable because, in as much as Trump likes to think that sitting in the Oval Office gives him totalitarian jurisdiction, as he likes to say, America is still a country of laws….but not to be interpreted by the man in the Oval Office, Trump, only by the judicial arm of government.
It’s been just two weeks and the infighting in the Trump White House is so cataclysmic that staff is leaking information to news media. One of their complaints is that staff is unfamiliar to the extent that they do not know where light switches are so they often sit in the dark to hold meetings and discuss matters of national proportion.
It would be a comedy of errors if it didn’t affect so many millions of people who voted for a President and not a……
It’s on record.
America’s President does not only have a multiplicity of short comings.
He is a multi dimensional dunce.
And of this, Putin is sure.
End of story.