It’s time for straight talk about this election and about the real meaning of Donald Trump. He’s an egomaniac, a loudmouth, a braggart, a liar, a misogynist, a self-confessed sex addict, a narcissistic con artist, and a shameless self-contradicting, self-promoting reprobate with the moral integrity of a tapeworm, not to mention that goofy thing on his head. So what’s new?
If we can’t get past – or see through – Donald Trump the person, we’re toast as a society. a country, or, for that matter, as part of the known world. The media and much of the public treats Trump as a cuddly curiosity, an aberrant Teddy Bear, or, alternatively, as a bolt out of the blue: Wow, we sure didn’t see THAT coming.
He’s the best show in town, a source of endless amusement, entertainment, and quotable quotes. The media moguls love it and gleefully give him more free face time than other candidates can afford to buy at the rate of $35,000-$200,000 for 30 seconds of primetime air.
Trump doesn’t deal in facts; he deals strictly in self-serving distortions of reality. He’s not the only one who does it, but he’s better at it than all the others in the field – the field in this case being the current political arena. The ones who don’t’ play by Donald’s rules are either bullied and booed out of game or named Hillary Clinton.
The party that invented the no-compromise, take-no-prisoners, greed-is-good, gridlock-inducing, antediluvian, phony “family values” conservatism are the very ones who created the flop-haired Frankenstein they can’t control. Therein lies the real truth of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Barring some Divine intervention, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican candidate for president. It’s a done deal.
The question is: Are we going to stand by and watch the country self-destruct? Or are we going to do something before it’s too late? It’s not too late and won’t be until the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
But for sanity to triumph over all the lunacy in our politics, we have to see what the Trump phenomenon says about us – who we are as a people and our own complicity in allowing our politics to become so degraded and our politicians to become so corrupted that a bankruptcy-filing, failed casino capitalist with bad hair and a mouth the size of Moldova can become the Republican standard-bearer in the race for the White House.
What it says is that money and the media are what count, and that probity or decency or proven problem-solving political skills are irrelevant, old-fashioned, passé.
What it says is that we have become so inured to lying and cheating and posturing that we either don’t recognize it as such or have come to regard it as a qualification for holding high office.
What it says is that we no longer expect our political leaders to be reasonable or responsible or to demonstrate so much as a scintilla of humility or constraint or empathy.
What is says is that Donald Trump is NOT an aberration, but rather an integral part of a PROCESS that started long before he announced his intention to run for the presidency.
What it says is that Trumpery (look it up; it’s a real word) is the inevitable PRODUCT of the poisonous politics that is now so pervasive in our public life.
Either we recognize our own responsibility and demand better of ourselves AND our political leaders, or one day soon we will wake up and discover that the country we know and love is gone forever.
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