Like tens of millions of you, America, I heard soon-to-be ex-President Obama give his final speech to the nation last night, and a little more than thirteen hours later I heard Donald Trump give his first press conference since becoming president-elect. And I must tell you that the virtual side-by-side comparison was frightening. After his rant about some putatively false news story about him, a diatribe that displayed his adolescent petulance and ad hominem tactics in their full glory, he never answered one of only two or three questions for which he stood at the podium. He came to the stage only after his press secretary shrieked essentially the same screed and vice-president-elect Mike Pence showed himself to be as unimpressive and sanctimoniously hackneyed as he has always been. Trump then took to the microphone and said almost nothing of significance, deferring to his Washington lawyer to limn his measures to avoid conflicts of interest, which was singularly unimpressive. But his press conference was notable for one thing; despite decrying the "fake news" that had calumniated him, he reiterated some of his hyperbolic criticisms of Hillary Clinton so as to deflect attention from his own contra tempts, and then never mentioned the fact that emeritus General Flynn, Trump's chosen national security advisor, eagerly passed on the scabrous, grim, fairy tale about Hillary Clinton that led to a man with a loaded assault rifle shooting up a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. while it was full of men, women and children. Flynn's re-tweeting of the "pizzagate" calumny was far more despicable than any false claims that have emerged against Trump himself, but Flynn is still on Trump's staff. And while ranting about fake news, Trump never mentioned the fact that he never once decried the pizzagate story.
On the other hand, President Obama did what I had hoped he would do; he gave one more state of the union address, which served the purpose I urged yesterday that we all serve in the future, that is, debunking any false claims that trends continuing from the Obama years are creditable to Trump's and his party's tenures. And in the course of delivering his last speech as president, Barrack Obama showed himself possessed of grace, intelligence, magnanimity and tact, in short, presidential timber, all of which has eluded Donald Trump. That speech was as notable for what The President didn't say as it was for what he did, for what was implied but never said. And if Trump had any grasp on reality...any sense at all, he would have been embarrassed by his performance today compared to Obama's last night, and so would have every American who voted for him. I have disagreed with our departing president's strategies and tactics many times, primarily for his lack of venom, but I see today that what I sometimes took for diffidence was actually aplomb and maturity. I see today that we are about to return to the era of unqualified leadership steering our ship of state into unknown and troubled waters, and as they used to write over the seas on maps before Christopher Columbus, there be dragons there. I know that there is a large constituency that takes Trump's inarticulate, self-laudation as plain talk, but I can't help thinking that even they...after watching both Obama and Trump in rapid succession...are daunted by the prospect of four years of Donald Trump as our president.
Well, what can we do about it. Not much now. I think that, as President Obama suggested last night, we have to keep on talking to others in order to elucidate the dangerous course we are on so that we get off it as soon as possible. I still hope, and sincerely believe, that an avaricious dolt like Donald Trump, guided by a young son-in-law who looks a lot like Trump as the whelp he was at the outset of his "career", will not be able to keep himself from taking bites too big to chew and thus relegating his presidency to history as the first to end in both impeachment and conviction. I wish I could follow the nobler path urged by President Obama last night, but I can't. I hate to admit it, but I look forward to that day.
Your friend,
Mike
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