Amid the many thoughts I have regarding Donald Trump being President, what has emerged clearer than most in recent days is that all of us bear responsibility for it.
That is a hard truth to consider, I fear one that will be met with such defensiveness that it will not receive the consideration its implications warrant.
Like many other Americans, I want to blame the people who voted for him, and, make no mistake, they are responsible for this terrible man being in the White House.
But any hope that our nation can survive his presidency, slight as it may be, lies in all of us realizing that when it comes to Trump, no one has clean hands.
That is because he is the mirror into which all of us can look to see what we have become as a society.
Put bluntly, to a degree most of us do not want to consider, especially those of us who are white, Donald Trump is us.
There are good reasons for saying this.
He is a man consumed by the pursuit of wealth, and so is our nation.
He is a man consumed by the pursuit of power and pleasure, and so is our nation.
He is a man consumed by latent racism, and with all the outward progress we have made, inwardly so is our nation.
He is a man consumed by signs of success that have no lasting substance to them, and so is our nation.
He is a man consumed by a vision of America that assumes might makes right, and so is our nation.
The truth about Donald Trump is that we see in him the vacuous values, priorities, and measures of what is good and bad and right and wrong, that we have embraced as a nation.
As I said, a hard truth to consider, but I submit truth nonetheless.
What we see in Trump is the worst about us as country, and his presidency is the price we are paying for ignoring too long that our country no longer works for everyone who tries hard and plays by the rules.
What is more, he didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
His election came on the heels of our nation tolerating a Republican member of Congress calling the first black president a liar as he delivered his first State of the Union address.
We tolerated Senate Republicans declaring before he was even inaugurated that their only goal was to make him a one term president.
But we did more than tolerate such racist behavior. A year later voters affirmed it by electing a majority of these same people to control the House and the Senate.
We then watched with stunning detachment as a Republican Senate refused to give the first black President’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing for an entire year, essentially saying by that inaction what they had been saying for seven years, that his tenure in the White House was illegitimate.
This was NOT politics as usual as many Americans tried to make themselves believe.
No, this was race based politics as none of this – none – had ever happened before to any white president. But it did happen to the first black president.
Given all that led up to Trump’s election, is anyone surprised that since taking office he has had one agenda and one agenda only, to erase the legacy of the Obama presidency?
These actions arise out of two obvious factors: (1) He doesn’t know anything else to do; and (2) his chosen course of action is to continue his efforts to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency as he did when he raised questions about where he was born.
What we know at this point in Trump’s presidency is that he is skilled in playing to his white supremacist Republican base, a fact that serves to indict every American who voted for him.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently observed, “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”
But the rest of us are not off the hook when it come to the perils we are facing as a country because of the Trump presidency.
Those Americans who chose not to vote in the last election and those who supported a third party candidate put Trump in office as much as those who voted for him.
There was no justification for them walking away from the election as almost half the country did or casting a vote for someone with no chance to win.
Either choice lent de facto support to a Trump victory.
But Democratic Party leaders who were determined to make Hillary Clinton their presidential nominee and tried to rig the scales in her favor also share responsibility for Trump being in the White House.
A better choice than Trump to be sure (the bar being seriously low), Hillary carried too much baggage by virtue of her family name and had aligned herself with corporate donors too much to credibly claim that she understood the views and struggles of ordinary Americans.
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders was proving that a Democrat could raise all the money needed for an effective campaign from the people whose struggles Democrats understood before they became corporate.
In the end, though, Hillary Democrats made the same fatal and fateful mistake apathetic Americans and voters supporting third party candidates made.
They failed to understand that the election of 2016 was unlike any election before, given the fact that the soul of the country was hanging in the balance.
So here we are in the fall of 2017 wondering what in the world has happened to us as a country and whether or not there is any hope for the country.
That, of course, remains to be seen, but the hard and difficult truth we must confront if we have any chance of saving our country is that when we look at Donald Trump, truly look at him, we see ourselves and what we have allowed ourselves to become as a people.
If enough of us are sufficiently dismayed and saddened by that truth to get involved in influencing where we go from here, we have a good chance of making better choices going forward that may give us the fortitude and wisdom to survive this thing called the Trump presidency we brought down on ourselves.
linnposts.com 