Until Donald Trump, even the most self-serving of presidents of the United States, at the very least, partly had the interests of some of the people in mind. The current resident of the Oval Office, to the contrary, considers only what is best for him in his motives, words, and actions.
Other presidents, when swearing “to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United State,” have attempted, at least occasionally, to live up to their oath of office.
Related: Hillary Clinton trashes Donald Trump on LGBTQ rights
Mr. Trump from the very day he stood on the balcony of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. facing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court while raising his right hand and placing his left hand on the Bible had no intention of keeping that oath to the Constitution or to the people. Instead, in his inaugural speech addressing a half empty gallery of spectators foretold the “carnage” he would unleash upon his suspicious and anxious nation.
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This president’s first campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” in fact, was code for “Make Donald John Trump Richer and More Powerful Than Ever Before.” His current campaign slogan “Keep America Great” can be seen and heard as “Keep Donald John Trump in Power to Make Him Even Richer.”
His policy implications of “America First,” to this certifiable narcissistic sociopath translates as “Donald John Trump First and Only.”
Whenever it appears that he could not possibly devolve any deeper into the depth of debasement, hatred, self-serving deceit, and vindictive words and actions, he always manages to go ever lower into the seemingly infinitesimal bowels of a malevolent and toxic fog of evil as he tries to bring us down with him.
His seeming lack of voluntary control over what spews from his mouth added to his incontinent Twitter finger dumps forth the stench of toxic hypermasculinity, racism, misogyny, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and nativism in gushing streams of hyperbolic invective. In the infamous Nixonian and Reagan traditions, he proclaims he is the so-called “law and order president” while his tyrannical actions spark disorder and injury.
Too many good souls have not survived this presidency due to his lack of interest, concern and empathy, obstinacy, obstructionism, incompetence, and inability to concentrate on anything longer than a millisecond. Donald John Trump has committed genocide by omission and by commission.
He has jeopardized, at a minimum, and more likely has broken too many former solid international alliances, thus placing not only those countries but also the United States at greater risk in terms of national security and economic instability. Whether we can ever repair those broken ties has yet to be seen.
Eventually, either through the ballot or by term limits, Trump will be compelled to evacuate the White House, a structure built on the backs of enslaved Africans. Their descendants, whom this president disregards, insults, and slanders at every turn, have constructed a movement to lift their voices and remove the literal and figurative knees of oppression from their collective necks.
It is a movement at this great inflection point in the history of the United States that has been activated to make our country a more perfect union. It is a movement that has inspired the better impulses in us all if we take it upon ourselves to relinquish the willful ignorance that so many have held far too long.
Living and watching people dying under the current regime can teach us many invaluable lessons if we are willing to reflect, to consider, to understand fully and completely how we got here, and now how we need to move forward.
We have the potential to come to terms with the underbelly of our often tragic and inequitable past. We have the potential to raise the carpet under which we have swept the unsavory and diseased dust of history and finally clean our house. We have the potential to eliminate the circumstances, including the fear, the hatred, the suspicions, and the dangerous and tragic attacks on one another that have brought us to this point.
As Trump mercilessly placed hopeful immigrant children into tightly packed cages separated from their parents, replete throughout history since Europeans first landed on these shores, dominating groups have relegated those less powerful into tightly packed cages of the soul separated from their humanity and their dignity.
As we attempt to discover safe and reliable therapeutics and vaccines for a deadly viral pandemic, we must also search for and find equally safe and reliable therapeutics and vaccines to heal and inoculate our country from the virus of oppression on the body politic infecting our entire society.
In this era, as our delicate democracy faces assault from domestic and international quarters, Trump represents merely a symptom of an underlying diseased nation rife with systemic political, social, and economic inequities.
History will ultimately record whether we used this occasion to move forward in a progressive direction or remain mired in the swampy conditions that has established fertile ground from which Trump and other malevolent actors have grown.
Donald Trump will eventually leave the White House. What happens after?