I have never been a super patriot, the kind of person who flies the American flag at home or on my car.
I was opposed to the war in Viet Nam, opposed to our government building ten times more nuclear weapons than we needed for deterrence, and while a college chaplain I joined an educational group called World Without War.
But I have always been proud to be an American, have always rooted for American athletes in international competition, and on the few occasions when I have travelled abroad I have always come home feeling glad that the United States is my home.
I have never believed we were the greatest nation on earth, never thought that was necessary for us to be a great nation in the things that matter. You don’t have to be perfect, or the best, or the greatest to be proud of who you are. It’s knowing you’re not the best or perfect that keeps you humble, that there is always someone who can do things better than you can.
I say all of this as background to explain why I hate the Trump presidency as much as I do. He is tarnishing who and what we are as a nation, embodying the worst instinct, traits, and actions we sometimes manifest as if they are what make us a great nation.
Donald Trump is the quintessential “ugly American,” an arrogant, self-centered, condescending of others, spoiled brat of a rich kid you’d like to slap in the face if you ever had the chance.
The simple truth is that Donald Trump is beneath who we are as a nation. He doesn’t measure up, he demeans the office he holds, he stains it with dishonesty and corruption, all the while deluding himself that he’s the greatest president in history.
His first term was bad enough, but in the first three months of his second presidency he has sullied the name of the United States in every way imaginable.
And we know why he is out of control, because the Supreme Court conservative majority gave him a get out of jail free card he interpreted to mean he can do anything he wants to do without any legal consequences. On top of that, with a spineless Republican majority in the House and Senate, he knows he won’t be impeached again.
I wonder how anyone who actually cares about the country can support this man. Pages can be filled with the childish, petty, incompetent, foolish, stupid, and mean-spirited things he has already done without even a line on a single page listing anything good he has accomplished.
This is the man who says he will make America great again when in truth he makes a mockery of what being a great nation actually means.
The only thing anyone needs to know about Donald Trump is that everything, absolutely everything, he accuses other people of doing or having done, especially Joe Biden (it was Barak Obama is his first term), he is doing himself.
It’s called “psychological projectionism,” a defense mechanism in which individuals attribute their own behaviors, impulses, and emotions to another person. Trump is the poster child for projectionism.
He’s not only bad at his job, he’s just a bad person who belongs in jail instead of the White House.
It hard to feel good about your country when it’s leader is as corrupt and incompetent as Donald Trump is, made worse by Republicans who lack sufficient self-respect to do what is right instead of what Trump tells them to do.
Trump shows no appreciation for just how amazing this nation of ours is. It truly has been for some 248 years a stunning, awe-inspiring grand experiment in self-governance where the the rule of law governs instead of the rule of tyrants.
America was founded on big, hairy, audacious goals, to borrow a phrase from the book, Built To Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, all of which were and are intended to strengthen both our freedoms and unity as a people.
Trump wants to replace this grand experiment with a cheap autocracy. He will fail. Trump is never going to be the king he sees himself as being, he is never going to be the beloved leader he wants to be, he will never be remembered as anything other than an incompetent, ego driven, little man who aways thought he was bigger and better than he ever was.
Here’s the reason he will fail. The American people have known only freedom from tyranny since 1776. We have never experienced even one minute of dictatorship and I don’t believe for one minute we are willing to start now.
That is what Trump is up against as the rebellion against his first hundred days in office is showing. He is going against America’s DNA, the spirit of freedom that gives us breath, the stuff of which we are made as a country, and all of it together will defeat him, and everyone helping him now will go down with him.
The courts the founders made a co-equal branch of government, even with all their faults, are proving their worth by telling Trump over and again that in this land he will not rule.
Just as important, we the people are telling him the same thing. There will be demonstrations the likes of which this nation has never seen if Trump foolishly tries to destroy the rule of law altogether by suspending habeas corpus or declaring marshal law.
The key for us lies in never taking the gift of being Americans for granted. We must always remember as we rightly criticize our government at all levels that we always have much for which to be thankful.
Trump wants us to believe government has betrayed us and that only he can fix it. That’s a double lie. Government hasn’t betrayed us (except for Trump’s administration) and he can’t fix anything. He only knows how to break things.
It is when we remember how precious American democracy is that we realize Trump can never embody the best about us, when we see plainly that his very presence sullies and betrays everything that actually does make America a great nation.
That is why I hate everything about the Trump presidency, and why I know I am not alone. It is ironic that the worse he becomes the more people realize he does not belong in the Oval Office.
He is beneath us as a country, as a people, beneath us as the world’s longest remaining democracy, beneath us as a refuge for the tired, poor, huddled masses longing to be free.
The truth is, Donald Trump is not America’s president, not the real America he doesn’t even know or care about, and he never will be.
Even better, one day sooner rather than later he will find that out.
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