The meltdown
Donald Trump had it coming for a long time. Now the day of reckoning has arrived. I am not surprised. Very early on, I predicted his downfall. What I didn’t predict is that of all the cardinal sins of which Trump is guilty of—avarice, wrath, pride—lust would prove his downfall, or that a decade-old video showing the 59-year-old’s juvenile glee at his ability to exercise power to perpetrate with impunity the crime of sexual assault upon women would be the final nail in the coffin.
You didn’t have to be an oracle to intuit that at same point Trump would crash and burn, yet few pundits had the guts to say so. So, out of audacity or foolhardiness, I stepped out of the silent conspiracy of cowardice. In late March of this year, I wrote an opinion column published on March 24 in this Internet magazine discussing the chances that Donald Trump would be elected president.
The lead sentence states the thesis plainly: “Donald Trump will not be elected president of the United States.”
Moving from prediction to analysis, I wrote that Republican leaders were trying hard to deny Trump the nomination because they sensed that a “Trump candidacy would spell disaster for the GOP at virtually all levels.”
Finally, I ventured the opinion that “Donald Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democrats since Barack Obama.”
It would be foolish to pretend that I am not gratified that the events of the last few days strongly suggest the accuracy of insights arrived at more than seven months ago. But what really fills my heart with joy is that a party that richly deserves almost any misfortune that befalls it is facing a catastrophe. Just desserts: for its obscene preference for the interests of the very wealthy over those of the average person never mind those of the poor man or woman; for its blood-soaked imperial world view; for its punitive and authoritarian bent; for its racist, sexist and xenophobic core; and for too many other sins to list.
Immediately after the revelation of the offensive Trump tape, the rats began abandoning the ship in droves. But the Republicans cannot distance themselves from Trump so easily. For Donald Trump is a creature of their own making, a caricature that depicts who the Republicans are with more truth and depth than any photograph, the return of the Republican repressed, of those ugly secrets the GOP until now had been able to push back into their subconscious and that of the country.
When I think of what makes Donald Trump and the “regular” Republican party as made of the same cloth despite of all appearances to the contrary, a single word pops up. It’s the word mean, both in its meaning of cruel and ignoble and that of miserly.
The Republicans, with their false and condescending “compassion,” a compassion armed with talons to claw back any scrap the have-nots may have once had thrown their way by the Democrats; with their promotion of democracy through terror, illegal war, torture, and war crimes: mean, mean, mean.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his whole career are the textbook definition of mean. His most successful business venture was a reality television show in which he repeatedly got to do something which he visibly enjoys: firing people in front of a huge audience.
The meanness in the DNA of the Republican party is not so crass or easy to spot. But it is there and it is unmistakable. While Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House cuts a suave figure in contrast to Trump’s boorish demeanor, the budget he has been pushing Congress to adopt would be far meaner in its consequences than Trump’s verbal abuse. Trump practices personal meanness. The GOP goes in for institutional meanness.
After the video tape debacle and Trump’s laughable attempts to explain it away, the GOP candidate needed to hit a home run with the bases loaded at Sunday’s debate with Hillary Clinton to have the slightest chance at all of becoming president. Instead, he mostly hit foul balls. His ball struck farthest from fair territory when he said that if he were president Hillary Clinton would be in jail. The threat, so alien to the spirit of political contention in a society that prides itself on the rule of law, made the audience gasp and left veteran journalists dumbstruck.
Like a wildfire, the incineration which began with the release of the offending video last Friday, will not burn itself out any time soon. So I close where I began all those months ago.
Donald Trump will not be elected president of the United States.
