Trump: unfit for office
Doubtless you can figure out what I figured out and what the GOP should have figured out, but for the record here it is: Donald Trump is unfit to be the President of the United States. He’s unfit to be a leader of any political party or really any movement in which the fortunes of others are at stake.
He may also be crazy.
Most of us likely figured it out after having seen just one episode of his loopy celebrity show ‘The Apprentice.’ Unchecked narcissism has not revealed itself to be a particularly sought-after trait in a leader. A dab of chutzpah, sure, a touch of hubris, yeah, but not full-blown, out-of-control narcissism.
But the GOP choose to support him, hoping he’d help steal a few acorns from a blind pig. Hoping the populism of the Donald would stop Hillary, who they’d been attacking for eight years, and hating much longer. Indeed, they have told so many lies about her that they came to believe she was evil when she is nothing more than a career politician who’s learned to play the game.
And who cares.
While she was honing her polititical skills and working for the people, Trump spent four decades as Mr. New York, a rich-kid in the big playground, chasing women and the big-city nightlife and stiffing his country, all the while giving hundreds of interviews (dozens to Howard Stern alone) in which he bragged about his conquests in business and in bed.
He once even boasted to Stern about routinely waltzing into the dressing rooms of Miss USA pageants, forcing naked teenage girls to endure his lecherous leering. To him being able to do so made him lucky, to the rest us his having done it makes him disgusting.
During all that time he showed himself to be the unsavory, petulant, pathological liar Ted Cruz said he is. It was there to see and hear, to read about and to cringe over. Republicans were aware what Donald Trump was and now that he’s losing so badly he’s jeopardizing the entirety of their party and they have only themselves to blame.
And so it is that they must now face the music. They have made their bed and must lie in it with one of the most infamous gropers of women in the history of humankind. They lived by the sword of destroy-the-Clintons-above-all-else and have now hoisted themselves upon it. There is a plethora of cliches one could invoke, each arriving at the same conclusion: while it normally ain’t over until it’s over — it’s over.
Trumped by Donald
Trump is no longer even trying to win the election. Deep down in the heart of whatever it is that caused the madness he long ago descended into, the madness that became him, he knows it’s over. But rather than help the party by saving as many down-ticket Republicans as he can, he’s speaking only to his basket of deplorables, those voters who would sooner abandon their sanity — and have — than abandon their messiah.
He’s telling them it’s not his fault. Staying true to his life-long mantra: never admit defeat. He is not a man, he is a disorder. All manner of nonsense is spewing out of his gap. The lewd tape is “locker-room talk” and the phalanx of women verifying that he does what he says he does are part of a cabal of global powers determined to destroy him.
That cabal he describes as an odd mixture of Trump-haters that includes the Clintons, the FBI, the pollsters, the New York Times (all media!), a Mexican billionaire, Euoropean leaders, the Federal Reserve and, yes, even elements of his own party. All of them, along with a faulty mic, are intent on taking him down.
Saturday he actually claimed, offering no proof, that Clinton was on drugs during the second presidential debate. Such a claim is being made despite a performance in which she articulated policy with alacrity while Trump blustered out hyperbole, all the while stalking her like Robert De Niro did Juliette Lewis in ‘Cape Fear” (an amusing video of his stalking was put to music by the famed composer, Danny Elfman).
American politics
So what comes next? Surely politics in America is changed but how will these changes be manifest? The Republican Party may not survive, not as is. There will be a reckoning and emerging on one side will be the standard GOP member, fiscal conservatives who are equally conservative morally, religious zealots but not religious fascists and not, for the most part, bigots, racists or homophobes.
On the other side is the basket of deplorables, many of whom come from the ranks of the Tea Party, others the gutter and the dark woods. Religious fascists. Government haters — they hate anything they can’t understand and understand nothing — who loathe modernity. The bigoted, racist and homophobic haters with narrow-hearts who despise immigrants, love Breitbart (and the Donald) and live to malign anyone that is not them.
In other words — the fearful.
They will split, these two, it’s as inevitable as if it were written in stone at the base of the Washington Monument. Paul Ryan, John McCain and Martha Roby on one side, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Jeff Sessions on the other, with lapdog Rudy Giuliani, and perhaps even Chris Christie, if he can find the courage, providing immoral support.
Should this happen it will be a long time before the Democrats are challenged. The rank and file membership of the GOP will not have the numbers to win after losing the deplorables and the same can be said for the deplorables once they break from the rank and file. Meanwhile, the electorate will get an injection of youth, of diversity and of reason, all of which benefits the Democrats.
The worry is whether all this could lead to violence in America. There are enough guns and gun-nuts who speak of taking their government “back” by force. Truly we might see this election usher in a period of civil violence in the U.S., see Donald Trump’s historic failure lead to a clumsy and pathetic armed insurrection.
The Republican Party did nothing about it back when he bragged about the size of his penis, mocked a reporter with a physical disability and hinted someone ought to take his opponent down. They should have but they did not and now it is too late.
Whatever happens — it’s on them.
