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by Ken Kemp – Written June 13, 2020; Posted: July 18, 2020
Hear Ken read this blog post on this podcast episode.
Donald Trump must be defeated in 2020 Presidential Election
At first, it seemed a national joke. That descent down the glittering escalator accompanied by his trophy wife in the lobby of one more garish Trump hotel; the delivery of that xenophobic speech in which he declared his candidacy appeared to signal the embodiment of an impossible dream.
We laughed it off.
How wrong we were.
From that day until now, it’s been a daily avalanche of “can it possibly get any worse?”
“Any more outrageous?”
“Any more belligerent?”
“Any more divisive?”
“Any more scandalous?”
“Any more shameful?”
“Any more destructive?”
Yes, it can. And, it has.
By the day.
By the Tweet.
It’s no longer a matter of speculation. No, we never did hit bottom. His determination to dismantle commonly accepted civility knows no bounds. Yes, he’ll masterfully spin his offense into a “great victory” to the sheer delight of his adoring “base.”
Yes, those who profit from his bullying, his insensitivity, his name-calling, his discard of decency, his misogyny, his affection for despots and oligarchs, his contempt for justice, and his self-absorption – those who gain from all this not only refuse to challenge him, they add to and fill in the spin. They delight in conspiracies that have no basis in fact, they explain away, they justify, they rationalize – and they amplify his sorry narrative like a bugle call to battle.
I don’t need to repeat the so-called “accomplishments” of his crippling Executive Orders – his faux “leadership” – his administration’s shameless power grabs; we all now live with the misery he created. By attacking any progress toward a national health care system, we were left vulnerable to a pandemic that took the lives of thousands of Americans and then brought our economy to its knees. By tearing up long-held and carefully crafted international agreements, he’s left us vulnerable, isolated, and dismissed by our global partners. By pumping air into the economy with irresponsible tax breaks, near-zero interest rates, mountains of bail-out cash all while disabling the agencies that enforce collection and compliance with the law then buying off the justice system, pandering to the religious right, rewarding his wealthy friends and punishing those who seek equality, disparaging our democratic institutions, he has left us with irrepressible civil unrest and precipitously set back our economy for decades to come.
Check out the national debt.
He has disrupted any sense of national unity. He has divided families and places of worship. He has pitted business partners and educators and medical workers and law enforcement agents and religious leaders against one another. Everybody’s now talking “Us vs. Them” because that’s what we’ve become. Civil discourse is a thing of the past.
The Beached White Male must go on record.
This President must go.
This long national nightmare must end.
*George F. Will disagrees – The worst President, he said on Meet the Press, was Buchanan – but Trump, Will concedes, is tied with Andrew Jackson (Trump’s hero) for 2nd worst.
NOTE: This essay was written on June 13, 2020. Since that writing, Trump continues to sink ever lower, springing his crony, Roger Stone, from prison, firing prosecutors who open investigations to his business activities, banking millions into his hotel coffers with tax dollars, filing frivolous lawsuits to delay the release of his personal financial information the Supreme Court determined he must, threatening journalists with fines, banishment, and even prison; the Tulsa Rally and then the Rose Garden speeches (stream-of-consciousness meandering non-sense – poorly read Stephen Miller Alt-Right diatribes sourced in Q-Anon), promoting Confederate monuments and symbols, demonizing protesters, discouraging masks, hawking a can of beans from the resolute desk for a corporate exec who publically crowed about the President’s “greatness”… and that’s only a brief account of the month’s spurious, illicit actions.
There’s more.
Much more.
NOTE logged July 20, 2020
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One Response
The litany of woes and itemizing of destructive deeds is near complete, if not exhaustive. The daily dump of dismantling actions renders it impossible to catalogue all offenses. We are in dangerous territory. No one could imagine that the devastation to all dimensions of our lives, private and public, would reach this scale. The ruination is hard to fathom. The amount of work to repair is beyond daunting. If Trump, and his Republican wrecking crew are re-elected it most likely would end our very incomplete experiment in self-governing. The misery index for most will be intolerable. We simply cannot allow that scenario to happen. Lovers of liberty must join together to end DT/Trumpism’s reign of terror.