Dear America,
This Trump tour of America after he has already won used to be puzzling, but now its significance is apparent to anyone who sees through the self-appointed great man. Trump is a character who revels in pronouncing his own success; he has done it all his life and the proof is on every building he can get his name on. Donald Trump is an ego with feet, and for him, his ascendancy to the presidency should have been his crowning glory, and I make reference to a crown advisedly. The inauguration in a couple of days could have been Trump's coming out party: notice to everyone in the world who didn't already know who he was, but there is this stubborn snag. He didn't win the election. He will win the electoral college vote, and under our constitution that is all you need to do to become president. But he didn't win the election. In fact, he lost by nearly three million votes; Clinton won 48% to 46%. That is a fact that he can color, characterize or diminish, but no matter what he says about it, he lost the election. Some of his supporters make reference to the fact that Clinton won California by more than that gross margin so somehow, her victory, and thus what should have been her mandate, are significant only there, but the same argument could be made about Trump. Put together three or four states like Tennessee and Missouri, states that Trump won big, and Trump gets the same parochial margin. That doesn't delegitimize them as disproportionately influential, and even if it did, so what. Trump did win the presidency, but that failure in the popular election is a taint on his victory that sticks in his craw. That is why he is gallivanting all over the country singing his own praises, tweeting about it incessantly and puling about the Democrats making excuses on television whenever anyone will let him. He touts himself as a winner, and a winner only...but he lost the election, and that stain on his success will never go away, but he never will admit it.
So, Trump has embarked on a vindication tour. His fans can call it a victory tour, but vindication is its real raison d'être, and it won't take long for everyone to realize it. Even if he wins a second term, he will never live this one down. In the biggest contest of his life, Donald Trump came in second. And then on top of that, he has put together a cabinet comprising nothing but billionaire Wall Streeters, burger moguls, and dolts like the former governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who was named to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which he vowed to dismantle when he was running for president himself. That threat wasn't credible even then since when asked about it at a national debate, he couldn't remember that had made the vow, and presumably, why he wanted to dissolve it. And all of the rest of the nominees conjured up by Trump's transition team have this in common too: a diabolical disdain for almost anyone who isn't one of them--in other words, anyone who isn't a sanctimonious plutocrat. So what is the Trump administration going to stand for? A president supported by fewer Americans than was his calumniated opponent and a group of self-righteous business people and fools who don't know enough to look in the mirror before defining virtue as the aggregate of the qualities they possess. We are looking at something ugly here, and at the head of the parade is a guy who thinks that prevailing on the basis of a constitutional anomaly is the same as winning. We have elected for our president an imp who is in the course of manifesting his cupidity with subordinate imps who are like and kindred spirits, and what we will get, America is rule by plutocracy. The rich will take still more, and we will get still less, and even worse, some of his nominations for high posts are both incomprehensible and dangerous. His nominee for ambassador to Israel, for example is an ardently and publicly avowed opponent of the two state solution that even Netanyahu endorses, even though one of Trump's self-avowed aspirations is the ultimate deal, peace between Israel and the Palestinians. His choice for Secretary of Education is a supporter of vouchers and charter schools and his choice for White House budget director is an avowed proponent of shutting down the government if budget cuts that he, an arch-conservative Tea Party member, wants passed, all of which is just a euphemism for social Darwinism. His choice for Secretary of State is a co-opted acolyte of Vladimir Putin's, which is tantamount to an alliance of convenience with the same Russian government that annexed Crimea and helped put Trump in the White House, and now Putin proposes an alliance with Trump's administration to fight terrorism, and that means doing it the Russian way. Remember the KGB? Until now, snarkyness was a sufficient way of expressing dissatisfaction with the results of the 2016 presidential election, but that is no longer the case. The Trump problem is now a serious, dangerous one. All kidding aside, we Americans had better start thinking about the survival of our democracy as we know it.
It is under siege. Let's just hope that impeachment comes sooner rather than later.
Your friend,
Mike
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